At the border between Uganda and the Democratic Republic of the Congo, near Kasindi, June 12, 2019. AL-HADJI KUDRA MALIRO/AP
At least ten people were killed and thirty-nine injured in a bomb attack on a church in north-eastern Democratic Republic of the Congo (DRC) on Sunday January 15, which authorities attributed to an armed group affiliated with the Islamic State.
This “purely terrorist act” took place in a Pentecostal (Evangelical Protestant) church in Kasindi, a border town with Uganda in the Congolese province of North Kivu, according to DRC Army spokesman Anthony Mwalushayi. He reported the deaths of ten people, injuries to thirty-nine others and the arrest of a suspect of Kenyan nationality on Sunday afternoon, adding that an investigation was ongoing. A civil society figure, Joel Kitausa, told him ten were killed and fifty-eight injured.
The government of the Democratic Republic of the Congo has condemned in a tweet from the Ministry of Communications, “the bombing visibly perpetrated by ADF terrorists”, the Allied Democratic Forces. The ADF, a Ugandan-based rebel group founded by supporters of the Tabligh Islamic preaching movement, is active in northern North Kivu and southern Ituri, another Congolese province. They are among the deadliest of around 120 armed groups in eastern DRC, many of which are the legacy of regional conflicts that erupted at the turn of the 21st century. These groups attempt to control areas on ethnic grounds and/or deprive the soil of rich resources, often encouraged and funded by neighboring countries.
North Kivu and Ituri are besieged by Félix Tshisekedi
The ADF is accused of massacring thousands of Congolese civilians and carrying out bombings in Uganda. In 2021, the United States added the ADF to its list of “foreign terrorist organizations” associated with the “Islamic State” group. Since the same year, a joint Congolese-Uganda military operation against the ADF on Congolese territory began, but the attacks continued.
The ADF “continued its geographic expansion” in the DRC, killing “at least 370 civilians” since April 2022, according to a Dec. 16 report by the UN Security Council Group of Experts on the DRC. According to this expert group, they have also “opted for more visible and lethal operations” by using improvised explosive devices “in an urban setting.”
Since May 2021, North Kivu and Ituri have been placed under a “state of siege” by Congolese President Felix Tshisekedi to stop the violence, with military officials replacing civilian administration officials. But even this extraordinary measure was largely unable to contain the attacks.
At least sixty civilians have been killed in Ituri for the past week. According to Dieudonné Lossa, civil society coordinator for Ituri, “eight civilians” were “murdered by ADF rebels” in Irumu territory on Wednesday. The other victims were attributed to Codeco (Cooperative for the Development of Congo), a militia of several thousand men claiming to protect the Lendu tribe, against the Hema tribe and the national army after attacks.
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Mr Lossa regretted that the DRC’s armed forces were recently “reduced” in Ituri in order to “bring” some of them back to North Kivu to fight against another armed group, the M23, a group which emerged from a Tutsi rebellion, backed to Kinshasa by Rwanda.