No fewer than 11 civilians have been reportedly killed in conflict-torn eastern DR Congo, the army disclosed on Tuesday, in an attack blamed on militants linked to the Islamic State group.
A spokesman for the army, Captain Antony Mualushayi claimed that the ‘jihadists’ had attacked the village of Kitsanga in the Watalinga area of North Kivu province on Sunday night.
Eleven civilians were killed, he said, before soldiers intervened and “neutralised” six militants. The death toll is provisional.
Odette Zawadi, a civil society leader in Watalinga, said that 22 people had been killed.
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“At the moment, the village is empty, most of the inhabitants found refuge on the Ugandan side,” she said.
The attack occurred near the border with neighbouring Uganda — in an area where the IS-linked Allied Democratic Forces group has been active for years.
Africa Today News, New York reports that militias have plagued eastern DRC for decades, a legacy of regional wars that flared in the 1990s and 2000s.
Originally composed of mainly Muslim Ugandan rebels, the ADF gained a foothold in the volatile region in the 1990s.
Since 2019, some ADF attacks have been claimed by the Islamic State group, which calls the fighters the Islamic State Central Africa Province.
Recall that the President of Democratic Republic of Congo, Félix Tshisekedi a fortnight ago called for a speedier withdrawal of the UN force in his country to begin this year.
Speaking to the UN General Assembly on Wednesday, he revealed that he had instructed his government to begin talks with the UN to bring forward ‘the start of this progressive withdrawal from December 2024 to December 2023’.
He said the mission – known by the acronym Monusco – had failed to bring peace in the country despite being there for about 25 years, adding that it was “illusory and counterproductive to continue to cling” to the force to maintain peace.