At least seven civilians killed in a new attack attributed to ADF militias in North Kivu

March 25 (EUROPA PRESS) –

At least seven civilians have been killed, including a woman, during a new attack attributed to the Allied Democratic Forces (ADF) militias in the Congolese province of North Kivu, in the northeast of the country.

The assault, which became known this Saturday, took place on the night of Thursday to Friday in the town of Vemba, northeast of the large city of Beni, as reported by the president of the Ngadi civil society group, Stéphane Mbajama, to the Congolese news portal Actualité.

The attack has specifically targeted farmers who were working on their crops — Vemba is known to be the “breadbasket” of the area, beginning with the city of Beni itself — and who have ended up shot and hacked to death.

Vemba is also a town of infamous memory for the Congolese population as it was the first place that ADF militias attacked at the beginning of their wave of massacres in and around Beni from 2014 to 2016, one of the heights of their terrorist activity.

The ADF, created in Uganda in the 1990s, suffered a split in 2019 after a prominent faction swore allegiance to the jihadist group Islamic State in Central Africa (ISCA), under whose banner it has operated since then.

It must be remembered that the United Nations has accused the group of executing around 1,200 civilians during 2021, according to a report published in January last year by the UN Joint Office for Human Rights in the DRC.