Mick Hartley

I posted the other day on the 70 Christians found decapitated in a church in the Democratic Republic of the Congo, and wondered why such a gruesome massacre never made the news. Colin Freeman at the Spectator has similar concerns, and provides some useful background:

Ever since the beginning of the War on Terror, security officials have warned that Africa’s impoverished central belt – home to nearly a dozen failed states and much of the ‘bottom billion’ of the world’s population, many of them Muslim – could become jihadism’s last redoubt. With Donald Trump abandoning America’s role as world policeman, and Europe pre-occupied with its own security challenges, that seems more probable than ever.

Congo’s jihadists started life as a militant Islamist sect in neighbouring Uganda in the 1990s, operating under the innocuous name of Allied Democratic Forces (ADF). They were funded by the Congolese dictator Mobutu Sese Seko and Sudan’s Omar al-Bashir, to be pawns in regional mischief-making. Clashes with Ugandan troops then forced the ADF over the border into eastern Congo, where it embraced full-blown jihadism and is now – despite stiff competition – the most violent of the region’s armed groups.

Its founder, Mukulu, was born a Christian, David Steven, but converted to radical Islam and travelled to Sudan, where he is thought to have met Osama bin Laden. In 2010, the Foreign Office launched an investigation into UN claims that he was raising funds for the group while working in London. Since 2015, he has been in jail in Uganda, awaiting trial on terrorism charges, but his group has gone from strength to strength, with up to 2,000 followers. Like Boko Haram, it recruits and kidnaps child soldiers, and sees schools as targets for headline-grabbing atrocities.

Remember the Lord's Resistance Army? They were an ultra-violent Christian group – from Uganda originally, like the Muslim ADF – responsible for countless atrocities during the 1990s and 2000s. They too, like the ADF, kidnapped schoolchildren as slaves/recruits. They disappeared into the forests of the eastern Congo and are now little more than a reduced remnant of outlaws. It's the turn of the Muslims now…