DRC: At Least 15 Killed In An Overnight Raid By Armed Men On Bulongo Village

At least 15 people have been killed in an overnight raid on a village in the eastern Democratic Republic of the Congo (DRC), a monitoring group said, reported Africa News.

Men armed with machetes attacked the Bulongo village, located some 30km (18 miles) east of the city of Beni, in the early hours of Monday.

 “At least 15 civilians were killed last night in Bulongo (Beni territory, North Kivu),” the Kivu Security Tracker (KST) group wrote on Twitter on Monday.

The KST, which is a joint project of the Congo Research Group and Human Rights Watch, said the attack is suspected to have been carried out by the Allied Democratic Forces (ADF). The ADF is historically a Ugandan Islamist group that has holed up in the eastern Democratic Republic of Congo since 1995.

The militant group is the bloodiest of the 122 militias which the eastern DRC, many of them a legacy of the Congo Wars of the 1990s.

The group has never claimed responsibility for attacks. It has been accused of carrying out dozens of brutal attacks on civilians since the DRC army began operations against it in late 2019.

Last year, the ADF is suspected of killing about 850 people, according to the United Nations. The Ugandan militant group has killed at least 1,219 civilians in the Beni area since 2017.

The United States designated the ADF as a “foreign terrorist organization” on Wednesday, accusing it of links to ISIL (ISIS). UN experts, however, have not found evidence of any direct relationship between the two groups.

Kasali bin Kapepela, head of an association of local NGOs in the region, said an “ADF raid’ occurred around midnight. He added that twelve bodies were found, at least four of whom were women, and some had been beheaded.

Last month, suspected ADF fighters decapitated at least eight people in DRC’s Boyo village, in the northeast Ituri province, while two others were shot dead in Kainama village.