Islamist militant groups are waging a campaign of wanton slaughter against Christians in the eastern Democratic Republic of Congo, according to a new report.
Amnesty International published a report this week documenting “war crimes and crimes against humanity” perpetrated by the Allied Democratic Forces, a Ugandan rebel group that has migrated into the DRC.
The report makes available 71 interviews with individuals affected by the violence unfolding in the Congo, 61 of which were conducted in-person and 45 of which are with direct witnesses of ADF violence.
“Civilians in the eastern DRC have suffered extensive brutality at the hands of ADF fighters,” Amnesty International Secretary General Agnès Callamard said. “They have been killed, abducted and tortured in a dehumanizing campaign of abuse.”
Among the most graphic and harrowing massacres documented in the report is the September 2025 attack on the village of Ntoyo. Militants with the ADF, dressed in civilian clothes, infiltrated a funeral gathering taking place overnight.
“They took part in the funeral ceremony,” a 30-year-old man who survived the attack recalled. “[At some point] they shot two shots. It was the signal to all other members in the quarter to start killing people. They were killing people with hammers. … They started telling us, ‘Don’t run! Get inside your house!’”
He said the rebels were trying to get them into their homes so that they could burn the structures down with them inside. From a hiding place, he was forced to watch as militants killed multiple members of his family — including his sister, who was hacked to death with an axe.
“I had a shop [with merchandise worth] U.S. $9,000 inside. They burned it,” he said. “I lost eight of my family members [and] they kidnapped two [more] relatives.”
A woman who had been asleep when the same massacre began recounted how she managed to escape the rebels by ducking into bushes but emerged afterward to find both her parents dead.
“I ran into the bush, but my father took the direction of the main road. He ran into the rebels and they killed him,” she recalled. “In the morning, when I came out of hiding, I saw many people were killed. At the place where the wake was taking place, there were so many bodies. I’d never seen so many bodies.”
That massacre in September resulted in the deaths of at least 60 people, countless injured, and an inestimable loss of resources.
ADF was founded in Uganda in the 1990s as a resistance group ostensibly fighting against the persecution of Muslim citizens. They were defeated by national forces and forced to flee across borders into surrounding regions.
Congolese Christians are considered the primary targets of the ADF’s marauding gangs, but the terrorist group has been known to attack other sects of Islam.
The total number of ADF militants in the DRC is unclear due to the organization’s loose and often disorganized nature. Members of the terrorist group typically operate in a roaming militia with few obvious goals outside self-enrichment and the terrorizing of non-Muslim populations.
It maintains an unclear relationship with the Islamic State group. The two groups are believed to have established ties around 2017 and the Islamic State group acknowledged the “Islamic State in the Congo” in 2018.
GUNMEN MASSACRE AT LEAST 12 IN NIGERIA ON PALM SUNDAY IN LATEST BOUT OF ATTACKS ON CHRISTIANS
“The debate should no longer concern whether the ADF has a formal relationship with the Islamic State [ISIS] but rather focus on the nature of that relationship,” according to a report from George Washington University.
ADF violence has not only resulted in the widespread murder of Congolese citizens, but also the displacement of those seeking to flee persecution.
It has been sanctioned by both the U.S. government and the United Nations Security Council.