Shannon Sedgwick Davis and Tara Candland
On Aug. 26, as the United States was rushing to evacuate Americans and their allies following the Taliban’s rapid advance across Afghanistan, a suicide bomber attacked the crowds surrounding Kabul’s airport, killing 13 U.S. service members and as many as 170 Afghans. It was the deadliest day for U.S. troops in Afghanistan since 2011. Within hours, the Islamic State-Khorasan claimed the attack, a sobering reminder that despite the Islamic State’s territorial defeat in Iraq and Syria two years ago, the group has not disappeared.
In fact, its reach is spreading to new parts of the globe. Last month, the Islamic State claimed its first attacks in Uganda. And on Nov. 16, the Islamic State claimed two nearly simultaneous suicide bombings that rocked downtown Kampala, Uganda, and forced the closure of Uganda’s parliament.
The Uganda bombings were perpetrated by the Islamic State’s affiliate group in the Democratic Republic of the Congo, which calls itself the Islamic State Central Africa Province and is known locally as the Allied Democratic Forces (ADF). It is one of the deadliest armed groups operating in Congo. Yet there is a heated debate among Congo scholars and contemporary jihadism experts over whether or not the ADF is really tied to the Islamic State.
The ADF is a predatory armed group that has committed egregious crimes against humanity with impunity for decades. Continued disagreement dilutes coordinated Western efforts in Congo to assist in finding a durable solution for the group’s escalating violence.
Those skeptical of the link are concerned that acknowledging a relationship between the ADF and the Islamic State risks obscuring the region’s local drivers of violence, such as competition for illicit economies, and encouraging failed counterterrorism policies that could do more harm than good to Congo’s civilian population. While we at the Bridgeway Foundation agree with the need for effective, nuanced policy that does not rely solely on the use of force, recent events and our ongoing fieldwork and research indicate that denying the ADF’s link to the Islamic State is a greater threat to civilians.
The ADF began in 1995 as a militant Islamist movement in Uganda and has held bases in the forests of eastern Congo for nearly two decades. Four years ago, the ADF’s operations stalled, and according to reports from former members, the group faced severe funding shortages and was on the brink of collapse.
Then, in 2017, the group began receiving money from Islamic State financier Waleed Ahmed Zein, a Kenyan currently under arrest in his own country for alleged facilitation of terrorism. Since then, ADF leader Musa Baluku has pledged allegiance to the international caliphate, the Islamic State has claimed its first attacks in Congo and now Uganda, and the ADF has displayed unprecedented levels of violence and radicalism.
While there is consensus among Congo experts, analysts, and counterterrorism practitioners that the Islamic State has never had, nor does it currently hold, direct command and control over ADF operations, there is a significant relationship between the groups. And ignoring or minimizing this connection makes it much harder to protect civilians against the ADF as it now operates—as both a local violent group and an established player in a global extremist network.
Continued disagreement about the ADF’s links to the Islamic State dilutes Western efforts to assist in finding a durable solution for the group’s escalating violence.
A few years ago, the Bridgeway Foundation partnered with Human Rights Watch and New York University’s Congo Research Group to establish the Kivu Security Tracker, which employs a strict independent verification methodology to monitor and analyze violence in eastern Congo. Bridgeway Foundation data analysis shows that since April 2017, when incident tracking began, the ADF has been responsible for 69 percent of civilian deaths in Congo’s Beni Territory—and 85 percent in the past year. The total annual number of ADF attacks has increased 837 percent since the group’s first documented links with the Islamic State in 2017.
The group is also pushing into new territories, waging campaigns in Congo’s northern Ituri province. Baluku has framed these attacks as a “conquest war,” telling his fighters in a camp speech: “The Islamic State declared a few days ago that we were going to fight and conquer new areas. This is a war purposely to bring more new areas under our control.”
According to our analysis of tracker data, the ADF’s area of operation is now four times larger than it was in 2017. And the group’s attacks are not just more frequent and widespread; they are also deadlier. In 2020, the ADF committed 22 massacres that each killed more than 10 people. Violence is even worse this year: The group has committed 22 such massacres in just the first six months, and May was the deadliest month in the group’s history.
The ADF is also showing disturbing evidence of a new modus operandi. On June 5, the group released its first beheading video. Although the ADF has committed beheadings for years during violent attacks, the group has not previously been known to use brutality as propaganda to sow terror in the wider population. Violent, graphic video productions are a hallmark method of other Islamic State affiliates, and the fact that the ADF has adopted the practice emphasizes the degree to which the ADF’s ideology and communications strategy are being influenced by the Islamic State.
On June 18, the ADF released a second beheading video. Eight days later, a third video began to circulate showing three men and a woman in civilian clothes tied up in a forested setting. More than a dozen boys and men are gathered around them. A light-skinned man speaking Swahili with a Kenyan accent declares that, according to Allah, the only way to achieve victory is to cut off their enemies’ heads.
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