The Islamic State has claimed responsibility for the Friday, October 30, 2020 attack on the village of Lisasa in Beni, North Kivu, of the Democratic Republic of Congo.
The attack left 21 persons dead, while 20 others were abducted.
The Islamic State made the claim through their propaganda agency Amaq without giving further details.
The group equally claimed responsibility for the October 20, 2020 attack on Kangbayi Central Prison in Beni, which led to the escape of over 1,000 inmates.
The same group in April 2019 claimed responsibility for an attack on the village of Bovata, near the DR Congo-Uganda border.
In all the attacks, the Ugandan Allied Democratic Front were fingered for being responsible.
There seems, however, to be links between the Allied Democratic Forces (ADF) and the Islamic State, and in June 2019, Democratic Republic of Congo President, Felix Tshisekedi, confirmed the links without giving further evidence.
Assertions of links between the Allied Democratic Forces could be plausible because the ADF originated in the 1990s in western Uganda with the aim of creating an Islamic state.
On October 27, 2020, the Congolese head of state had spoken strongly against terrorist activities in his country declaring that “The Democratic Republic of Congo is confronted by a blind terrorism carried out by armed gangs”, laying particular emphasis on women who are “violated or decapitated”.
He called for national solidarity saying “It is difficult for a country to fight alone. This fight necessitates our solidarity in order to eradicate this scourge of our century”.
Some schools of thought now think that cooperation between the ADF, which was formed to fight for an Islamic state and the Islamic State also called ISIL/ISIL which emerged from the remnants of al Qaeda in Iraq (AQI), a local offshoot of al Qaeda founded by Abu Musab al Zarqawi in 2004, would be very logical because the two groups have the same objectives.
“Those who may want to harbour doubts about cooperation between the ADF and ISIL would only be naïve because there is nothing more logical than for two groups fighting for the same purpose to collaborate and join forces, ” Islamic scholar Abdul Hakeem, told HumAngle in North Kivu.
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