The ADF Is Slaughtering Ituri and Kinshasa Keeps Looking Away

Imagine a mother in Ituri who has to decide, before dawn, which of her children to carry when the men with machetes come. She cannot take them all. She picks up one, leaves the others in the dark, and runs. This is not a hypothetical. It is the daily arithmetic of a province that has been bleeding for years, and it is happening in a country whose capital is far enough away that its leaders can pretend it is someone else's problem.

In the first week of September 2026, thirteen community radio stations across Ituri opened their phone lines and their airwaves to ordinary people. Farmers, traders, displaced families, and village leaders called in. They spoke about what they fear, what they have lost, and what they want from the people who are supposed to protect them. Their voices were recorded, collected through community focal points, and shared. What they said should shame every government that claims to govern Ituri. We should listen to them before we talk about them.

Let us be precise about who is doing the killing, because vagueness is how the guilty escape. The Allied Democratic Forces, the ADF, is a Ugandan-origin armed group that pledged allegiance to the Islamic State in 2019 and now operates as its Central African branch, known as ISCAP. Its fighters have spent years hacking, shooting, and burning their way through Beni, Lubero, and the Ituri border zones. In July 2025, ADF gunmen attacked a church in Komanda, in Ituri, and killed more than forty worshippers during a Sunday service. Forty people. Praying. Murdered in their pews. The ADF has repeatedly raided villages at night, abducted children and women, and turned them into porters and sex slaves. Those are not abstractions. Those are names that somebody's mother still says at the dinner table.

Alongside the ADF stalks CODECO, a militia drawn largely from the Lendu community that has clashed with Hema communities in the Djugu territory for years. Every massacre sparks a counter-massacre, every village burned invites a reprisal, and the cycle feeds on the ethnic grievances that politicians have been stoking since the colonial era. Ituri's gold, coltan, and fertile land have made it a prize, and the men who fight for control of those resources do not need to be told how much money is at stake. Their victims are simply the cost of doing business.

And then there is the state. Kinshasa declared a state of siege in North Kivu and Ituri in May 2021, handing military officers control over civilian administration. Five years later, the state of siege has produced more checkpoints, more extortion, and more soldiers who sell their own ammunition to the militias they were deployed to fight. Ask any displaced family in Ituri whether the army has protected them, and listen to the silence before the answer. The Congolese state has the money to buy luxury vehicles for officials in Kinshasa. It cannot seem to find the money to keep a village safe for one night.

Here is the question no minister in Kinshasa wants to answer. How many displaced people in Ituri have to be counted before the government treats this as a national emergency rather than a regional inconvenience? Ituri has well over a million people uprooted from their homes, living in camps and host villages where clean water, schools, and medicine are scarce. Those camps are where the next generation of recruits comes from. A child who watches his father hacked to death and his home burned has very few reasons to trust a state that did nothing to stop it.

We Africans have heard this story before, and we have been told that it is too complicated to fix. It is not too complicated. It is just inconvenient for people who profit from disorder. Ituri does not lack brave citizens. It lacks institutions that work. It lacks courts that prosecute the warlords who order massacres and the officers who sell weapons to them. It lacks a police force that answers to the public rather than to the highest bidder. It lacks a government that treats a radio call from a frightened village as a duty rather than a nuisance.

Look at what works elsewhere on this continent. Botswana built one of Africa's most stable democracies by insisting on transparent public finance, an independent judiciary, and a civil service that answers to law rather than to a clan. Mauritius has shown that rule of law and open markets can turn a sugar island into an upper-middle-income economy with functioning courts and peaceful transitions of power. Senegal, after years of anxiety about its own institutions, proved in its recent elections that citizens can hold leaders to account through the ballot box. None of these countries is perfect. All of them prove that the failures in Ituri are not destiny. They are choices.

So what must happen? Kinshasa must end the state of siege in Ituri and replace it with a civilian security strategy that is funded, transparent, and measured by one standard: are people safer tonight than they were last night? The government should publish, every quarter, the number of attacks, the number of arrests, and the number of prosecutions, and it should be held accountable by the National Assembly for those numbers. Local radio stations, which have already shown they can reach the communities the state forgot, deserve protection and funding as an early-warning system. A village that can report an incoming raid by radio can save lives in a way that a distant command post never will.

The African Union cannot keep issuing statements of concern while the ADF and CODECO operate with impunity. The AU Peace and Security Council should press for a regional mechanism that tracks armed group financing, sanctions the networks that supply weapons and gold, and works with the UN mission on the ground to protect civilians. The private sector, especially mining companies that extract minerals from Ituri's soil, must be required to trace their supply chains and refuse any material linked to militias. Property rights and clean markets are not luxuries in a war zone. They are the foundations on which a peaceful economy is built, and they are the only way to starve the armed groups of the money that keeps them alive.

Above all, Congolese citizens must demand more from their leaders, and Africans across the continent must stand with them. Demand that your MP name the commanders responsible for the Komanda massacre and every other atrocity. Demand that your provincial governor publish the security budget. Demand that your government stop treating a province of more than six million people as a footnote. Share the voices from Ituri's radios. Make them impossible to ignore.

The mother with the dark road ahead of her did not choose this life. Her children did not choose to be born in a province where massacres are routine and the state is absent. We owe them more than sympathy. We owe them a government that protects them, courts that punish their killers, and a continent that refuses to look away. Ituri is calling. The question is whether Kinshasa, Addis, Abuja, and Pretoria will finally pick up the phone.

Based on reporting by RELIEFWEB