ADF rebels in northeast DR Congo kill 36

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BUNIA — Islamic State-linked ADF rebels have killed at least 36 people in two days of attacks in the northeastern Democratic Republic of Congo, local and security sources said Thursday.

At least 21 people have been killed since Tuesday in isolated villages on the border between the provinces of Ituri and North Kivu, and at least 15 people in an attack in Biakato town, in Ituri, the sources told AFP.

The Allied Democratic Forces (ADF) is a group formed by former Ugandan rebels, which has pledged allegiance to the Islamic State group (IS).

It operates in North Kivu in the east and Ituri in the northeast, near the borders with Uganda and Rwanda.

In a report published on Tuesday, Amnesty International accused the ADF of war crimes and crimes against humanity.

Overnight on Tuesday to Wednesday, ADF fighters attacked four isolated villages near Beni Mau in North Kivu, locals and security officials said.

Security sources, speaking on condition of anonymity, said at least 21 people were killed.

One local official gave a higher toll, saying "at least 24" people had died and several were missing, most of them farmers.

'War crimes'

On Thursday, ADF fighters "surprised people in their homes" in Biakato, about 70 kilometres (40 miles) away," and started killing them with bullets and machetes", the head of the local civil society organisation said.

"We have already recovered 15 bodies, three women, 11 men and a child," Mendela Musa said.

The toll was confirmed by security officials.

Both attacks occurred in areas covered by dense forest, where the ADF is accused of numerous abuses in recent years, many in response to offensives by the army.

The mineral-rich eastern DRC has been plagued for three decades by conflict involving various armed groups, militia and army troops.

Since 2021, the Ugandan army has been deployed in the northern part of North Kivu and in Ituri to fight the ADF, alongside the Congolese military.

Amnesty's new report, published Tuesday, accused the ADF of kidnappings, keeping forced labourers, recruiting child soldiers and "crimes against women and girls, including forced marriage, forced pregnancy and various other forms of sexual violence.

"These abuses constitute war crimes which the world must not continue to ignore," Amnesty added.

"As part of widespread and systematic attack against the civilian population, they also amount to crimes against humanity," the rights group's secretary-general Agnes Callamard said.