At least ten people were killed, and thirty-nine injured, Sunday, January 15, in a bomb attack in a church in the north-east of the Democratic Republic of Congo (DRC), attributed by the authorities to an armed group affiliated to the Islamic State.
Cet “purely terrorist act” occurred in a Pentecostal (evangelical Protestant) church in Kasindi, a border town with Uganda in the Congolese province of North Kivu, explained the spokesman for the DRC army, Antony Mwalushayi. He reported on Sunday afternoon the death of ten people, injuries to thirty-nine others, and the arrest of a suspect of Kenyan nationality, adding that investigations were underway. A civil society figure, Joel Kitausa, told him ten dead and fifty-eight injured.
The DRC government has condemned, in a tweet from the Ministry of Communication, “the bomb attack visibly perpetrated by ADF terrorists”, the Allied Democratic Forces. The ADF, a rebel group originating in Uganda, created by followers of the Tabligh Islamic preaching movement, is active in the north of North Kivu and in the south of Ituri, another Congolese province. They are among the deadliest of some 120 armed groups present in eastern DRC, many of which are the legacy of regional conflicts that erupted at the turn of the 21st century.e century. These groups seek to control territories for ethnic reasons and/or to extract rich resources from the soil, often encouraged and financed by neighboring countries.
North Kivu and Ituri placed under siege by Félix Tshisekedi
The ADF are accused of having massacred thousands of Congolese civilians and carrying out bomb attacks in Uganda. In 2021, the United States placed the ADFs in its list of “foreign terrorist organizations” linked to the Islamic State group. Since the same year, a joint Congolese-Ugandan military operation began targeting the ADF in Congolese territory, but the attacks continued.
ADFs “continued their geographic expansion” in the DRC, killing there since April 2022 “at least 370 civilians”, according to a report by the UN Security Council’s group of experts on the DRC on 16 December. According to this group of experts, they also “opted for more visible and deadly operations”using improvised explosive devices ” in an urban environment “.
Since May 2021, North Kivu and Ituri have been placed in ” state of siege “ by Congolese President Felix Tshisekedi in an attempt to stop the violence, with military officials replacing civilian administrators. However, this exceptional measure has also largely failed to stem the attacks.
For a week, at least sixty civilians have been killed in Ituri. Wednesday, “eight civilians” have been “murdered by ADF rebels” in the territory of Irumu, according to Dieudonné Lossa, civil society coordinator for Ituri. The other victims were after attacks attributed to Codeco (Cooperative for the Development of Congo), a militia of several thousand men who claim to protect the Lendu tribe, against the Hema tribe and the national army. .
Mr. Lossa regrets that the numbers of the DRC armed forces have recently been “reduced” in Ituri, for ” to bring back “ a part in North Kivu to fight another armed group, the M23, a group from a Tutsi rebellion, supported according to Kinshasa by Rwanda.