Rebels allied to the Islamic State murdered at least 15 individuals in three villages in the eastern Democratic Republic of Congo in the Lubero territory on 2nd January, continuing the trend of deadly attacks on mostly civilians.
The Allied Democratic Forces started as an insurgent group in Uganda but has been positioned in the forests of adjacent Congo since the end of the 1990s and is identified by the Islamic State as an ally.
The army of Congo and the Ugandan troops have been on a mission to fight the ADF, which has continued to raid.
Its most recent attacks were conducted on Thursday night in Lubero, which is one of the provinces in North Kivu. Kilonge and Katanga each lost two civilians and two soldiers, and Maendeleo lost nine civilians, Macaire Sivikunula, the chief of the Bapere locality, the villages are in, claimed.
“The ADF rebels killed the majority of the victims using bladed weapons, but were also trading gunfire with the soldiers in Maendeleo,” he told Reuters.
At mid-afternoon on Friday, the military administrator of Lubero, Alain Kiwewa, stated that 16 individuals had been reported dead.
Congolese army spokesperson, Lieutenant Marc Elongo, said that army troops were in pursuit, but did not give further details.
According to Kakule Kagheni Samuel, who is the leader of civil society groups in Bapere, the militants also set houses ablaze.
In November, the U.N. peacekeeping mission in the Central African country called MONUSCO indicated that the ADF murdered 89 civilians in a series of attacks during a week.
In September, ADF ran an attack, allegedly, that killed over 60 civilians at a funeral in eastern Congo.
Sivikunula added that local authorities were awaiting the arrival of the soldiers to get the area secured before they could arrange the funerals of the victims of the overnight attacks because ADF are cunning (and) they can ambush people trying to arrange such an activity.
The ADF violence does not conflict with the war between Congo and Rwanda-supported M23 rebels that killed thousands of people and displaced hundreds of thousands last year, which the U.S. President Donald Trump administration and Qatar mediated.
