Local officials are reporting that dozens of people were killed in an attack on a church in the city of Komanda, at the Democratic Republic of Congo on Sunday, July 27. Worshippers were at a night mass when members of the Allied Democratic Forces came in the church with guns and machetes, Reuters wrote.
According to Al-Jazeera and Reuters, at least 38 people were confirmed killed, although the United Nations-supported DRC’s Radio Okapi said the number of people who died could be as many as 43. Fifteen people were injured and several others are unaccounted for. Houses and shops were also burnt.
“The bodies of the victims are still at the scene of the tragedy, and volunteers are preparing how to bury them in a mass grave that we are preparing in a compound of the Catholic church,” Dieudonne Duranthabo, a civil society coordinator in Komanda, said to the Associated Press.
Added Duranthabo: “We demand military intervention as soon as possible, since we are told the enemy is still near our town.”
Another attack in the village of Machongani took five lives. A civil society leader in Ituri province told the AP that a search is ongoing for several people who were taken into the bush. The Allied Democratic Forces is also suspected to be responsible for this assault as well.
The Allied Democratic Forces were formed in 1995 in Uganda. Then, in 2002, military assaults by Ugandan forces caused the ADF to go to Congo. According to the U.S. State Department, it “established ties” with the Islamic State in 2018.
The ADF has committed serious violations of international law, the United Nations said, including recruiting child soldiers. It also committed acts of sexual violence and have killed women and children, the UN said.
Earlier in July, the ADF killed 66 people in the area of Irumu in eastern Congo. Jean-Tobie Okala, the spokesperson for the United Nations mission in Ituri, said this attack was a “bloodbath.”
