A fatal attack that occurred during a Protestant church service on Sunday in the Democratic Republic of the Congo has been blamed on the Islamic State.
The Associated Press reported that on January 15, a terrorist assault on a church in the eastern Congolese town of Kasindi, which is bordered by Uganda, resulted in at least 10 fatalities and more than three dozen injuries.
Officials from the Congolese government said that the assault was carried out by the Allied Democratic Forces, an Islamic State branch in the eastern Congo.
The strike was carried out using an IED, and the ADF is suspected to be responsible, according to Bilal Katamba, a spokesperson for the Ugandan military operation.
Later, the Islamic State claimed ownership of the incident through its Telegram channel.
Just a few weeks before Pope Francis is scheduled to visit the Democratic Republic of the Congo at the end of this month, there was a church attack.
The pope will meet with victims of violence from the eastern part of the nation during his stay in Kinshasa, the capital of the Democratic Republic of the Congo, from January 31 to February 3.
Nobel Peace Prize recipient Denis Mukwege has expressed the hope that the pope’s arrival in January would bring attention to the “crimes against humanity” taking place in the eastern DRC.
In a raid in October on a Catholic mission hospital in the North Kivu region of the nation, the Allied Democratic Forces murdered six patients as well as Catholic Sister Marie-Sylvie Kavuke Vakatsuraki.
The U.N. announced on December 8 that the M23, another armed rebel group, had murdered 131 people “as part of a campaign of killings, rapes, kidnappings, and looting against two communities.”
More than 5.5 million people have been forced from their homes as a result of the violence in eastern Congo, making it the third-largest internal displaced population in the world.
»Church bombing in the Congo is attributed on Islamic State«