More than a dozen people have been killed in two attacks near Beni in eastern Democratic Republic of Congo that were blamed on the Islamist ADF group, local sources said Sunday.
Late Saturday, an initial assault killed seven people, territorial administrator Donat Kibwana told an AFP correspondent, adding that “the attack took place at 11 pm and it was the ADF,” which originated in the 1990s as a Ugandan Muslim rebel group.
Kibwana said the toll was still provisional and that the attack occurred at a town called Kisima.
A second assault took place early Sunday near Oicha, which is in the same region as Beni, where the local authority and other sources said six people had died.
The ADF is one of more than 100 militias that plague the eastern provinces of the vast DR Congo.
The group has killed more than 640 civilians since the army launched a crackdown on it last November, according to an unofficial count.
The ADF has never claimed responsibility for attacks. But since April 2019, several of its assaults have been claimed by the so-called Islamic State’s Central Africa Province, which has sometimes made factual errors in its statements.
A total of 2,127 people have died in eastern DRC since President Felix Tshisekedi‘s inauguration in January 2019, according to an estimate in late October by experts at the Kivu Security Tracker (KST).
That is more than during the 20 years his predecessor Joseph Kabila was in power, during which 1,553 civilians are believed to have been killed, the KST says.