Local sources said on Thursday, that more than 15 people in DR Congo’s troubled east have been killed by the Allied Democratic Forces (ADF), a militia blamed for hundreds of deaths this past year.

The administrator of Beni territory in North Kivu province said that the attack happened overnight in the remote village of Baeti.

“The ADF enemy killed between 15 and 20 people,” the official said, while Janvier Kasairio, a local representative for civil society, said, “18 died and homes (were) torched.”

The ADF, which originated in the 1990s as a Ugandan Muslim rebel group, is one of more than 100 militias that plague the eastern provinces of the vast Democratic Republic of Congo.

The group has killed nearly 600 civilians since the army launched a crackdown on it last November, according to an unofficial count.

The massacres are apparently reprisals for the army operation or designed to warn locals against collaborating with the authorities.

The ADF has never claimed any responsibility for attacks, although, since April 2019, several of its assaults have been claimed by the so-called Islamic State – Central Africa, sometimes with factual mistakes.

On October 21, hundreds of prisoners escaped from a jail in Beni in an attack by gunmen. Police blamed the ADF while the Islamic State took credit for it.

(AFP)