In an attack attributed to terrorists affiliated with the Islamic State group, the army reported on Monday that at least 11 people had died in the conflict-torn eastern Democratic Republic of the Congo.According to army spokesman Captain Antony Mualushayi, "jihadists" invaded Kitsanga hamlet on Sunday night in the Watalinga district of North Kivu province.
He said that before military intervened and "neutralized" six militants, eleven civilians had been slain. The number of deaths is an estimate.
AFP was not able to independently verify the attack's specifics.
Twenty-two individuals had died, according to Watalinga civil society activist Odette Zawadi.
"The village is empty right now; the majority of the residents sought safety on the Ugandan side," she stated.
The attack took place close to the border with neighboring Uganda, in a region long frequented by the Allied Democratic Forces, a group affiliated with the Islamic State.
Eastern DRC has been plagued by militias for many years as a result of regional conflicts that erupted in the 1990s and 2000s.
The ADF, which was first primarily made up of Muslim rebels from Uganda, established themselves in the unstable area in the 1990s.
The Islamic State organization has been claiming certain ADF assaults since 2019. It refers to the militants as the Islamic State Central Africa Province.