About 20 people have been killed in an attack perpetrated early Monday morning by suspected members of the Allied Democratic Forces (ADF) militia against the town of Makungwe, located in eastern Democratic Republic of Congo (DRC).
Saidi Balikwisha, deputy for the province of North Kivu, indicated that «there has been a massacre of civilians in Makungwe, in Bashu» and cited 23 dead, although he stressed that «this is a provisional balance».
The administrator of the Beni territory, Omeonga Charles, confirmed the incident in declarations to the Congolese news portal 7sur7, although he did not provide a death toll. «Our security services are on the ground to restore the authority of the state,» he said.
The ADF, a Ugandan group created in the 1990s and particularly active in eastern DRC and accused of killing hundreds of civilians in this part of the country, could be trying to return to operate in Uganda, from where it withdrew in 2003 after a series of military operations that drastically reduced its capacity to carry out attacks in the country.
The group underwent a split in 2019 after Musa Baluku–sanctioned by the United Nations and the United States–swore allegiance to the jihadist group Islamic State in Central Africa (ISCA), under whose banner it has been operating ever since. The increase in his attacks and the claim of an attack in the Ugandan capital, Kampala, led both countries to launch the aforementioned joint operations in eastern DRC.
Source: (EUROPA PRESS)
