Radical Islamic Militants Murder Over 100 Innocent Lives in Targeted Attacks Against Christians in Democratic Republic of Congo

The horror for Christians in Africa continues to increase, as they are being targeted for extermination by Islamic radicals. If the world does not take action to stop it NOW, it will soon be too late.

We’ve told you how we’ve been working at the United Nations and the U.S. State Department to urge protections for Christians in Nigeria, and to pressure the Nigerian government to hold violent Islamic terrorists accountable.

According to the latest reports, thousands of Nigerian Christians – innocent men, women, and children – were brutally slaughtered by Muslim extremists such as Boko Haram and Fulani herdsmen in 2020.

And as we’ve warned the U.N. Human Rights Council (UNHRC) time and time again that deadly violence will spread beyond Nigeria and across Africa if nothing is done to stop it, sadly, we were right.

According to the international persecution advocacy organization Open Doors, the jihadist group known as the Allied Democratic Forces “is a militant Islamic group with a clear mission of attacking, kidnapping and killing Christians, as well as training and sending jihadists to other countries in Africa.”

According to the report:

“[P]redominantly Christian communities are attacked by an Islamic extremist group with a clear Islamic expansionist agenda,” says Illia Djadi, an Open Doors spokesperson on freedom of religion or belief in sub-Saharan Africa. “It is a reminder of what is happening in other parts of the central Sahel region – groups like Boko Haram in northeast Nigeria, for example. The ideology, the agenda of establishing a 'caliphate' in the region, and the way they operate is the same, and we can see how they afflict terrible suffering on innocent people.”

In fact, in just the first month of 2021, over 100 people – mostly Christians – were murdered in the Democratic Republic of Congo (DRC). The report details the savagery of the attacks:

On Jan. 4, about 22 civilians were estimated to be killed with guns and machetes in an overnight attack on Mwenda village in the Beni region of neighboring North Kivu province. Militants from the Allied Democratic Forces, which is based in neighboring Uganda, killed 25 more people in Tingwe village in the same region the same day.

At least 17 nearby villagers had been murdered with machetes a week earlier in Mwenda village.

The majority of those killed in the three attacks in the Beni region were Christians.

These vicious attacks come close on the heels of multiple others in the final three months of 2020, when nearly 50 people, again, most of whom were Christians, were murdered, among other inhuman atrocities, by terrorists in the DRC.

Between Nov. 20 and Dec. 3 last year, men from the Allied Democratic Forces killed at least 30 Christians, raped 10 young women and girls, and abducted several others from churches in a string of attacks on five villages in North Kivu province, according to the Barnabas Fund.

Last October, militants believed to be from the Allied Democratic Forces killed at least 18 people, and burned down a church and several homes in an overnight attack in Baeti Village in the North Kivu province, Reuters reported at the time.

These reports are nothing short of sickening. But why shouldn’t these barbaric militias feel empowered to hunt down, abuse, and murder Christians when they see that other governments in the region, like that of Nigeria, continue to do little to stop such violence? Now you can add the DRC to that list.

Try to imagine, just for a moment, if your own family – your children – had to live under such an ominous shadow of existential terror every single day.

This is why we must continue to go directly to the international community at the UNHRC and demand action to save these dying Christians, as is their obligation under the Universal Declaration of Human Rights.

The ACLJ has delivered multiple written submissions and oral interventions directly to the UNHRC in Geneva, Switzerland, through our European affiliate, the European Centre for Law and Justice (ECLJ), urging immediate action to protect endangered Christians and other innocents throughout Africa and bring the violent Islamic perpetrators to justice for their crimes against humanity.

The violence only seems to be escalating. This is why the work of the ACLJ is needed, now more than ever. The bloodshed against our Christian brothers and sisters in Africa must be stopped NOW before Christianity is brutally erased from the continent.

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