DR Congo Army Arrests Wanted Jihadist, Salim Mohammed Rachid
Rachid was declared wanted by the Kenyan Gov’t and was arrested by the DR Congo military, FARDC on Monday.
The DR Congo national army, FARDC, on Monday, Jan. 31, announced that its troops have arrested Salim Mohammad Rashid, a jihadist wanted by the Kenyan government.
Rachid, a Kenyan jihadist of Omani origin was arrested on Friday, Jan. 28, Brig.-Gen. Sylvain Ekenge, spokesperson of the military Governor of North Kivu said.
“His arrest adds to the list of foreign jihadists neutralised in the region of Beni who include Jordanian Hytham S.A. Alfar, alias Abou Omar, arrested on Oct. 18, 2021 and Egyptian Abdel Fatal El Sayed arrested on Nov. 17, 2021. Others were equally neutralised in combat,” the North Kivu Governor said.
Rachid studied in Turkey where “he was expelled by the country for being a member of the Islamic State. He also fought in Syria and collaborated with Al Shabaab in Somalia as well as in Mozambique.”
He was arrested several times and tried in Kenya before he disappeared.
In at least one propaganda video of the Allied Democratic Forces (ADF), he can be seen supervising the execution by machete of a Congolese soldier explaining that the objective of the ADF was to install a caliphate in the Beni region.
The FARDC disclosed that Rachid’s arrest was one of the consequences of the joint military operations that started in Nov. 30, 2021 by Ugandan and Congolese forces against the fiefs of the ADF in the region.
In September last year, a foreigner presented by the DR Congo authorities as a Jordanian who has been training ADF rebels was arrested on the dangerous Beni highway.
The ADF is the most murderous armed group in DR Congo and is touted by the Islamic State as its Central African Province (Islamic State Central African Province ISCAP). Its actual leader, Moussa Baluku, made a declaration of alliance to the Islamic State in 2019.
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