13 killed in DR Congo attacks, ADF blamed

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.