Foreign Desk Report
NEW YORK: More than 200 people have been killed and an estimated 40,000 displaced in the Democratic Republic of the Congo since January in attacks attributed to armed groups affiliated to ISIL (ISIS), the United Nations has said.
The UN refugee agency reported on Friday an “alarming increase” in attacks by the Allied Democratic Forces (ADF) an historically Ugandan group present in eastern DRC since 1995.
Since the start of the year, attacks blamed on the ADF “have killed nearly 200 people, injured dozens of others, and displaced an estimated 40,000 people in DRC’s Beni Territory in North Kivu province as well as nearby villages in Ituri province,” UNHCR spokesman Babar Baloch said.
“In less than three months, the ADF has allegedly raided 25 villages, set fire to dozens of houses and kidnapped over 70 people,” he told reporters in Geneva.
The ADF has a reputation of being the bloodiest of the 122 militias that plague the eastern DRC. It killed an estimated 465 people last year.
