ICC Note: Militants from eastern Congo (DRC) have murdered as many as 40 Christian villagers in the North Kivu region, displacing thousands in a pattern of attacks linked to ongoing forced conversions to Islam and terror towards Christian communities, World Watch Monitor reported. The DRC is an oft forgotten corner of Africa where persecution is concerned while most of the media attention in the region focuses on high-profile Islamist terror group al-Shabaab. Reportedly, the armed group Muslim Defense International (MDI) continues to target Christians in northeast DRC and carries the sponsor of the Islamist Sudan government with its different franchises linked all the way back to the late 1970s during the time of Ugandan dictator Idi Amin.

5/9/16 North Kivu, Democratic Republic of Congo (World Watch Monitor) – Islamist militants are suspected to have killed between 20 and 40 villagers in the eastern extremes of the Democratic Republic of the Congo, according to news reports and a World Watch Monitor source.

Attackers carried machetes and axes into a village in North Kivu province, in eastern DRC, late in the evening on 3 May.

“Between 20:00 and 22:00, the enemy managed to get past army positions and kill peaceful residents in their homes, slashing their throats,” local administrator Bernard Amisi Kalonda told Agence France-Presse. “The 16 bodies are in front of me, killed by machete or axe.”

One local source later told World Watch Monitor on 6 May that as many as 34 may have died; another source quoted 38, including, he said, two elders and their wives of the CECA 20 (Communaute Evangelique au Centre de l’Afrique) Church.

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