Last Sunday (27 July) as a church in the Democratic Republic of the Congo (DRC) were holding a late-night vigil, machete-armed jihadists linked to Islamic State stormed the church building and began a killing spree.

It was the most deadly attack on a worshipping congregation by ADF jihadists, who now claim links to Islamic State (IS). The UN report 49 people killed, including 19 women and 9 children, and described the church attack as “a serious violation of international humanitarian law”. The UN has also verified a video showing the victims being buried in a mass grave shortly after the massacre.

So why did it happen?

The DRC is in chaos, particularly the East of the country, where this attack happened, which is rich in minerals such as coltan –  used in the manufacture of mobile phones and computers. There are now more than 100 armed groups fighting the government there and seeking to control its mineral wealth. The West has largely focused on the so called “M23 Rebels” who are an ethnic Tutsi group which began a campaign of violence after large numbers of Rwandan Hutus fled there when the Tutsi’s gained control of Rwanda after the 1994 Rwandan Genocide.

However, the group which the West should really be concerned about are those who carried last Sunday’s attack on the church at Komanda, in the DRC’s Ituri'i province bordering Uganda. This is the ADF, or as they now call themselves, Islamic State Central African Province (ISCAP).

Who are the ADF/Islamic State Central African Province?

The ADF was begun in the 1990s by Jamil Mukulu, who had previously been an Islamic cleric in London. It began as an Islamist insurgency in northern Uganda and subsequently moved over the border into the DRC, where they established  strongholds from which they launch attacks on other areas, including sending parcel bombs to churches in Uganda.

They are virulently anti-Christian and although only a minority of their targets are churches, they regard the whole of the DRC as Christian and therefore a legitimate target for their attacks. They are also extremely brutal – with their typical modus operandi being beheading. In February, the group abducted 70 people, took them to a church and beheaded them there. Had that happened in almost any other country, it would have sent shock waves around the world. But as the Spectator commented at the time, it barely made headlines in the West.

Why western governments should wake up to the threat of ADF/ISCAP

There are two major reasons why western governments really need to wake up to the dangers posed by ADF/ISCAP. First their aims, which are the creation of a global caliphate with the enforcement of shari’a across both the DRC and Uganda; Second, the DRC’s population is around 93% Christian and less than 2% Muslim. In other words, this is a sub-Saharan nation with a tiny Muslim minority, which a jihadist group is seeking to take over.

If western governments needed any more convincing, an expert report was prepared for the UN Security Council in January. This indicated that the M23 Rebels who now control a significant part of Eastern DRC have sought a non-aggression pact with ADF/ISCAP – effectively recognising them as a powerful force they would not wish to fight.

What the UN peacekeeping mission in the DRC – which is the UN’s largest mission anywhere in the world – are now saying is that the repeated attacks on churches are “a serious violation of international humanitarian law”. In laymen’s language, they are the sort of war crimes which the International Criminal Court was set up to investigate.

So, why did last Sunday’s attack happen?

When ADF first pledged allegiance to Islamic State in 2019, it carried out a series of major prison breaks – releasing hundreds of jihadist and other Muslim prisoners who they then sought to recruit. But since 2024 it has been carrying out many smaller attacks, which don’t require lots of planning. Christians have been a particular target, with villages attacked and Christians beheaded.

What is also important to understand is that over the last decade or so, jihadist organisations have become far more media savvy. Like many similar regional jihadist groups, ADF wants to impress what is regards as the global Islamic caliphate. So, it quickly claims credit for attacks on its own social media channels and hopes Islamic State will reproduce it on theirs.

That is why the question has to be raised as to whether the catalyst for this attack was the widespread global media coverage of last month’s attack on a church in Damascus. As the Lindisfarne Centre reported last month, this appears to have been carried out by a small jihadist group, which had split off from Syria’s new HTS government, although the government itself blamed Islamic State.

What is clear however, is that a brutal and virulently anti-Christian jihadist group is now able to operate with relative impunity from the ungoverned space of eastern DRC and is committing what the UN have described as war crimes against Christians.

The DRC is now part of a whole swathe of Sub Saharan Africa – from Burkina Faso and Nigeria in the West, to Kenya in the East – which is now the frontline in Africa for jihadist attacks on Christians.

Pray for Christians in the DRC