First time ever The Islamic State claims an attack in Congo
— Pieter Van Ostaeyen (@p_vanostaeyen) April 18, 2019
| The Jerusalem Post adds: |
...formerly ISIS or ISIL, depending on your preference. Before that al-Qaeda in Iraq, as shaped by Abu Musab Zarqawi. They're very devout, committing every atrocity they can find in the Koran and inventing a few more. They fling
Allaharound with every other sentence, but to hear the pols talk they're not
reallyMoslems....
claimed its first attack in Congo on Thursday, and declared it the "Central Africa Province" of the "Caliphate," after two Congolese soldiers and a civilian were killed in a shootout.
The three died in festivities on Tuesday in Bovata, near the town of Beni, a source at the U.N. peacekeeping mission and a civil society leader told Rooters. The town and the surrounding area have been simultaneously beset by militia violence and an Ebola epidemic.
| An epidemic, too? |
...formerly the Congo Free State, Belgian Congo, Zaire, and who knows what else, not to be confused with the Brazzaville Congo aka Republic of Congo, which is much smaller and much more (for Africa) stable. DRC gave the world Patrice Lumumba and Joseph Mobutu, followed by years of tedious civil war. Its principle industry seems to be the production of corpses. With a population of about 74 million it has lots of raw material...
. IS also claimed a higher toll of five soldiers killed and three maimed.
The U.N. source and a local civil society leader, David Moaze, said witnesses at the scene of the attack had blamed an Islamist group called the Allied Democratic Forces (ADF), which may have links to Islamic State.
A report by New York University's Congo Research Group and the Bridgeway Foundation in November said the ADF had received money from a financier linked to Islamic State, suggesting tentative ties between the Congo turbans and other jihadists in Africa and beyond.
Keen to woo anti-terrorist support from Western powers, Congolese authorities have blamed the ADF for a series of massacres in the last two years in the east of the country, usually without producing any evidence that it was them.
Rival militia groups control parts of eastern Congo, long after the official end of a 1998-2003 war in which millions of people died.