70 Christians were just found beheaded in a church in North Kivu in Congo. They were murdered by the Islamist terror group ADF.
- The Allied Democratic Forces (ADF), an Islamist terrorist group, originated in Uganda in the 1990s, opposing President Yoweri Museveni’s government over alleged Muslim persecution.
- After being defeated by the Ugandan army in 2001, the ADF relocated to North Kivu province in the Democratic Republic of the Congo (DRC), where it has operated since.
- Since the late 1990s, the ADF has been active in North Kivu, near the Ugandan border, engaging in attacks on civilians, military targets, and UN peacekeepers.
- The group radicalized further after 2015, under leader Musa Baluku, adopting a global jihadist ideology and aligning with the Islamic State, which claimed responsibility for some ADF attacks starting in 2019.
- The ADF has been blamed for thousands of civilian deaths in eastern DRC since 2013, including massacres, beheadings, and abductions, amid ongoing conflict with Congolese and Ugandan forces.
- Ugandan troops, deployed to eastern Congo since 2021 under a bilateral agreement, have targeted the ADF, with recent operations reported in North Kivu and Ituri amid broader regional instability involving groups like the M23 rebels.
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