Attacks by gunmen linked to the Islamic State group have left at least 44 civilians dead in the northeastern Democratic Republic of Congo this week, humanitarian and security sources told AFP on Friday.
The latest raids in the northeastern Ituri province by the Allied Democratic Forces come just days after the notoriously brutal group killed 66 people, including three health workers fighting the region’s spiralling Ebola epidemic, in an attack in neighbouring North Kivu.
Between Monday and Thursday, the ADF attacked several villages in the Mambasa territory of Ituri, a province long wracked by insecurity where the country’s latest outbreak of the deadly viral fever was first detected six months ago.
This week’s targets were roughly 100 kilometres as the crow flies from Cantine-Aloya in North Kivu province, where the group killed at least 66 civilians and burnt three healthcare facilities.
That attack prompted the World Health Organization’s chief Tedros Adhanom Ghebreyesus to warn that the region’s chronic instability represented “one of the greatest obstacles to the Ebola response in the DRC” half a year now into the latest outbreak.
• Ebola deaths near 5,500 –
Since being declared in May, the DRC’s latest Ebola outbreak, its 17th in all, has become the worst in the vast central African country, causing more than 5,000 deaths.
The virus has spread across swathes of the DRC’s east and northeast, which have been plagued by violence by a litany of armed groups for more than 30 years.
Militias, including the ADF, have carried out attacks on health workers working to fight the virus.
The latest violence, costing 110 lives, has only worsened the situation in the country’s northeast.
To date, 5,471 people have died out of a total registered 11,197 cases, according to latest health ministry data published Friday, meaning a mortality rate of close on 50 percent.
The country’s worst previous epidemic in terms of fatalities saw some 2,300 deaths for 3,500 cases between 2018 and 2020.
Ebola, transmitted through direct contact with bodily fluids and which causes a severe haemorrhagic fever, has so far killed more than 15,000 people in Africa over the past 50 years.
Ituri province remains at the epicentre of the crisis, but for some weeks now, cases and deaths have been rising rapidly in the neighbouring territory of Beni, located in North Kivu province.
• ‘Hacked to death’ –
Formed from former Ugandan rebels, the ADF is infamous for extreme brutality towards civilians and has regularly carried out massacres in both North Kivu and neighbouring Ituri.
A security source told AFP on Friday that at least 44 people had been killed this week in the Mambasa attacks, while a humanitarian source reported 47 bodies found.
“The ADF rebels are still in the bush and have set up ambushes,” the humanitarian source said on condition of anonymity.
Several local sources confirmed the attacks and mentioned death tolls of up to 49, adding that the search for bodies is ongoing.
“Some bodies are already in a state of decomposition. The victims were hacked to death with machetes, while others were shot,” said Gabriel Tonge, a local official.
In 2019, the group pledged allegiance to IS, which trumpets them as its so-called Islamic State Central Africa Province.
Both the Ugandan and Congolese armies have sent troops to the region to tackle the ADF, so far without significant success.
AFP
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