An Islamic State-backed militia killed at least 17 people during a nighttime attack on a hospital in eastern Congo, authorities said Saturday, marking one of the region’s deadliest assaults in recent months. The attack, carried out by the Allied Democratic Forces in the village of Byambwe in North Kivu province, targeted patients inside the facility late Friday, according to Col. Alain Kiwewa, the area’s local administrator.
Kiwewa said the victims included 11 women and six men, describing scenes of extreme brutality inside the hospital. He said women who were breastfeeding were found in their beds with their throats slit, underscoring the ADF’s pattern of violence against civilians.
Samuel Kakule Kagheni, a civil society leader in the Manzya area that includes Byambwe, said the rebels also struck other nearby villages, though casualty information from those areas remained unclear.
Armed groups have carried out repeated and deadly attacks across eastern Congo, including the ADF and the Rwanda-backed M23 rebels. The ADF, which pledged allegiance to the Islamic State group in 2019, operates along the Uganda border and frequently targets civilians in both rural and populated regions.
The group has been blamed for a series of mass killings this year. In August, ADF fighters killed at least 52 people during multiple attacks over the course of a week, according to the U.N. peacekeeping mission in Congo. In July, nearly 40 people were killed in Ituri province when ADF members stormed a Catholic church during a vigil and opened fire on worshippers, many of them women and children.
Originally formed in Uganda in the late 1990s by small groups dissatisfied with President Yoweri Museveni, the ADF moved into Congo in 2002 after Ugandan military strikes and has since been accused of killing thousands of civilians.
Associated Press
