Islamic insurgents have killed at least 100 people  in eastern provinces of the Democratic Republic of Congo, just since the start of the year.

Senior analyst at Christian persecution watchdog Open Doors Illia Djadi warns that Christians, 95% of the population of the DRC, are being killed daily attacks by the Allied Democratic Forces — an Islamic insurgent group that also goes by Muslim Defence International.

“Christian communities are being attacked by an Islamist extremist group with a clear expansionist agenda,” he said.

Djadi, who works for Open Doors’s Freedom of Religion or Belief in Sub-Saharan Africa division, said the attacks are “remarkably similar to what groups like Boko Haram are doing in northeast Nigeria”.

“The ideology, the agenda of establishing a ‘caliphate’ in the region, and the way they operate is the same. We can see how they afflict terrible suffering on innocent people. This is deeply worrying; we really need to pay attention to these events,” he said.

“At Open Doors, we are urgently calling on the national government and the international community to do everything they can to protect innocent lives and to restore peace in this troubled region,” Djadi continued.

Attacks by ADF have increased in number and intensity since the Congolese army launched its large-scale offensive on the group in October 2019. Figures released by local civil society group Lucha (Lutte pour la changement – Fight for change) report that over 1200 civilians have been killed over the period.

In an interview with Paris-based broadcaster RFI, Director of the United Nations Joint Human Rights Office Abdoul Aziz Thioye noted: “it is also clear that there have been a number of kidnappings and  among the kidnapped, some are freed while others are never seen again.”

ADF, also known as Muslim Defence International, were founded in 1989 and committed their first major attack in 1995. Though they have no formal ties to Islamic State, IS has claimed responsibility for some of its attacks and called Congo the “Central Africa Province” of the “caliphate. UN Secretary General Antonio Guterres, in an interview with RFI, said that ADF is not a Congolese group.

“ADF,” he said, “is part, in my opinion, of a network which begins in Libya, which stretches to the Sahel and then to the region of Lake Chad, that is present in Mozambique.”

A wide-ranging report published by the UN last year found documented a “sharp increase in the number of human rights abuses” of nearly 69% on 2019.

“Four factors have contributed to this increase,” the report said, “in particular the expansion of the area affected by the deadly ADF attacks beyond National Route 4 (RN4)2 as a result, among other things, of the destruction of their bases during military operations; reprisals against the civilian population” and a low security presence “caused by the closure of certain MONUSCO military bases for budgetary reasons; and the lack of an FARDC presence in some areas.”

“The human rights abuses and violations of international humanitarian law by ADF combatants could,” it concluded, “constitute, by their nature and scope, crimes against humanity and war crimes.”

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