BENI, DR Congo
Thirteen people have died in attacks in the eastern DR Congo region of Beni, local officials and experts said on Wednesday, blaming a notorious militia called the Allied Democratic Forces (ADF).
“ADF
men attacked the village of Kisima late Tuesday, leaving 11 dead,” said Bozi
Sindiwako, the chief official for the Rwenzori area in North Kivu province.
That
toll was confirmed by the US-based monitoring group, the Kivu Security Tracker
(KST).
The
army also said there was an attack, without giving the number of casualties.
“Clean-up
operations continue in the area,” Beni army spokesman Antony Mwalushayi said.
“We
have just launched a new operation in the Rwenzori sector in a bid to drive the
ADF enemy out of the Congolese territory,” Mwalushayi said. “The problem is
that we have an enemy that attacks the defenseless.”
In
a separate attack overnight, two people — a civilian and a soldier — were
killed in the North Kivu city of Oicha, its mayor Nicolas Kikuku said. He added
that an ADF fighter was also killed.
The
new deaths bring the number of civilians killed by armed groups in Beni since
November 2019 to at least 1,013, KST told AFP.
The
army has been carrying out a military offensive against the group since October
2019.
President
Felix Tshisekedi has said he wants to end decades of unrest in the mineral-rich
east, but killings there have more than doubled in the last year, according to
the United Nations.
The
Democratic Republic of Congo, a central African country the size of
continental Western Europe, has been plagued by militia violence in its east
for more than a quarter of a century.
In
a report published on Monday, KST said 122 armed groups are active in the
country’s four eastern provinces — North and South Kivu as well as Ituri and
Tanganyika.
The
most notorious group in North Kivu is the ADF, whose stronghold lies in the
Beni area, near the Ugandan border.
In
late 2019 the Congo army began a campaign to eliminate the Allied Democratic
Forces (ADF), a Ugandan militia that has been operating in the vast country
since the 1990s. The ADF responded with a series of retaliatory massacres of
civilians.
The
military offensive has scattered the group, which now operates in small, mobile
groups, according to a recent report by UN experts.
After
a brief lull in activity, ADF attacks have been ramping up since the start of
February.
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