The villagers of Ngohi Vuyinga were at work in their fields when the gunmen arrived. By the end of Saturday at least nine of them were dead.
Rebels from the Allied Democratic Forces, which is linked to Islamic State, used guns and machetes, local civil society leader Samuel Kagheni told AP. The attack in Lubero territory, in North Kivu province, also displaced dozens of people and burned several houses. “Yesterday’s toll could rise because there were even some missing people,” Kagheni said on Sunday.
A second raid in the same area
The violence did not stop there. Radio Okapi, a Congolese outlet, reported another ADF assault on Ngohi village in the night from Sunday to Monday, March 10. Eleven civilians, four of them women, were killed with bladed weapons in their fields, according to civil society representatives in Vuhinga. The village sits about 40 kilometers from the city of Butembo. Soldiers of the Congolese army stationed in the nearby villages of Muhangi and Makoko stepped in and, the same sources said, kept the raid from getting worse.
Okapi’s reading of the pattern is that the ADF, squeezed by operations from the Congolese and Ugandan armies, is turning on unprotected people, often in the fields. Beni and Lubero territories, it said, are the ones suffering from these roaming rebels.
Anger at the army
Residents do not hide their frustration. “The peaceful population is still being killed, but there is no intervention on the government side,” said César Kambale, who leads youth in the nearby village of Vuyinga. He went further: “Is our army, the FARDC (Congolese armed forces) really leading offensives against this enemy?” he asked. Every day, he said, people are attacked and civilians killed “under the helpless eye of our FARDC.”
The attack came as eastern Congo was already reeling. AP noted that over 100 armed groups are competing for the region’s mineral wealth. One of them, backed by Rwanda, took two big cities elsewhere in the region not long ago. About 7 million people have been driven from their homes, a crisis AP ranked as the biggest humanitarian one anywhere.
Sources
- Islamic State-linked rebels in fresh attack in eastern Congo kill 9 villagers (AP)
- Lubero: au moins 11 personnes tuees lors d'une attaque des ADF dans le village Ngohi (Radio Okapi)
