A funeral convoy travels on the road from Beni to the Ugandan border, 80 kilometers to the east, in northeastern Democratic Republic of Congo on May 23, 2021. ALEXIS HUGUET / AFP
A new attack attributed to ADF rebels, affiliated with the Islamic State group, killed more than 40 people overnight from Wednesday to Thursday in the east of the Democratic Republic of Congo according to local authorities, in a province also plagued by M23 rebellion.
“The toll, still provisional, is 38 people killed in Mukondi and eight in Mausa“, two villages close to each other in the territory of Beni, in the northern part of the province of North Kivu, told AFP Kalunga Meso, the leader of the group (group of villages) local. This notable adds that “the ADF rounded up the people and then executed them“.
Charred bodies
The human toll is confirmed by Arsène Mumbere, president of the local civil society, who specifies that the assailants “entered Mukondi village quietly“and killed most of the victims”with edged weapons“. According to him, in Mausa the bodies of the victims were found “charred in burnt houses“. The excavation is still in progress because the dwellings are far from each other, he added. “On the night of March 8 to 9, militiamen from the Mwalika Valley set fire to the village of Mukondi” And “killed at least 36 people with knives“, published Thursday morning on its Twitter account the Security Barometer of Kivu (KST), a network of analysts based in the east of the DRC. The provincial authorities have not yet communicated on this attack.
The ADF (Allied Democratic Forces) are originally mainly Muslim Ugandan rebels, who have been rooting since the mid-1990s in eastern DRC where they are accused of having massacred thousands of civilians. In 2021, attacks on Ugandan soil were also attributed to them and a joint military operation between the Congolese and Ugandan armies was launched to hunt them down in North Kivu and in the neighboring province of Ituri.
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The United States last week offered a reward of up to $5 million for information that could lead to its leader, a Ugandan in his 40s named Musa Baluku.
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Failure of the ceasefire
According to the KST, the ADF, presented by the jihadist group Islamic State as its branch in central Africa, have killed nearly 150 people since the beginning of the year, including this latest attack. Further south, the province of North Kivu has also been the scene of fighting for more than a year between the Congolese army and the M23 rebels, supported by Rwanda according to Kinshasa and UN experts.
After several announcements of cessation of hostilities remained without effect in recent months, a ceasefire was supposed to come into force on Tuesday. But the guns did not stop and the M23 continued to expand its territory.
A Security Council delegation is expected Thursday evening in Kinshasa, for a three-day working visit which should also take it to Goma, the capital of North Kivu, a city of more than a million inhabitants wedged between Rwanda to the east, Lake Kivu to the south and the M23 rebels to the north and west. Council representatives count “assess the security and humanitarian situation in North Kivu“, indicated in a press release the UN Mission in the country (Monusco), and “assess the context in whichthis strength.
Present in the DRC for 23 years and still strong today with more than 16,000 men, Monusco is increasingly criticized in the country for its inability to put an end to the violence that has been going on in the East for nearly 30 years. Dozens of armed groups operate in the region, many of which are a legacy of regional wars that erupted in the 1990s-2000s.
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