By Staff Writer, NORTH KIVU DR Congo
Suspected ADF militia fighters have killed 25 people in a new massacre in eastern Democratic Republic of Congo (DRC), a senior local official said Wednesday.
Fighters attacked Beu
Manyama-Moliso village in the restive Beni region late on Tuesday night, North
Kivu provincial governor Carly
Nzanzu Kasivita told AFP. The army
intervened, killing two assailants, he said.
“We are in mourning,
the ADF carried out a raid and killed more than 20 people,” said Noella Katongerwaki Muliwavyo, president of an
association of grassroots groups in Beni.
Beu Manyama-Moliso is a
small village located in remote forests in the Beni region, close to the
boundary with Ituri province.
“When I heard cries and
tears, I fled into the bush, I continued the path at night to Mamove”, a
neighboring village, local farmer January
Maneno, told AFP. “All the other
farmers who stayed there are dead,” he said by telephone.
A historically Ugandan
Islamist group, the Allied Democratic Forces (ADF) is the bloodiest of scores
of armed militias that roam eastern DRC, many of them a legacy of two regional
wars in the 1990s.
The ADF is linked to the so-called
Islamic State (IS) group, the United States said earlier this month.
According to
the Kivu Security Tracker, an NGO that monitors violence in the DRC’s
troubled east, the group has killed more than 1,200 civilians in the Beni area
alone since 2017.
On March 19, the UN
said a surge of ADF attacks since the start of the year had claimed nearly 200
lives and forced 40,000 people to flee their homes.
At least 17 were killed in
separate attacks on March 23.
Separately, the DR
Congo’s army said it had reached out to the militaries of neighboring countries
to help “neutralize” armed groups in the troubled east.
The armed forces “have
undertaken contacts with all the armies in neighboring countries for drawing up
appropriate strategies for permanently resolving the thorny question of
insecurity” in the Great Lakes region, it said on Tuesday.
Its statement, signed
by army spokesman General Leon-Richard Kasonga,
said the DRC was in favor of “strengthening military cooperation, regular
consultation between armies in the region… (and) pooling efforts and
intelligence.”
According to the Congo
Research Group, a monitoring project with New York University, a Rwandan
military delegation led by armed forces chief of staff Jean-Bosco Kazura discreetly
flew to Kinshasa on March 15 for talks on military cooperation.
Relations between the
DRC and its neighbors, especially Rwanda, have been stormy.
The DRC has accused
Rwanda of seeking to destabilize it, while Rwanda has charged the DRC with
being a rear base for armed opposition groups, including the Democratic Forces
for the Liberation of Rwanda.
Past cooperative
missions to wipe out armed groups have failed and run into hostility among the
DRC’s public.
An estimated 122 armed
groups operate in eastern DRC, according to the KST. - AFP
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