Reports quoting local sources indicate that at least 23 civilians were killed on Sunday night, January 22, in an attack attributed to the Allied Democratic Forces (ADF) militia in a village in the Democratic Republic of Congo's volatile east.

"Twenty-four people, including six women, were killed in this incursion of the ADF" in the village of Makugwe, in the territory of Beni in North Kivu, said Roger Wangeve, president of the local civil society.

According to Wangeve, the victims included 17 people who were "in a small bar where they were drinking beer. The ADF "executed them all," he said. At least seven residential houses were burned, three drugstores and 11 stores looted, while the number of "civilians taken into the bush is not yet known," added Wangeve.

"We lament and wonder: how can it be possible to kill the population a few meters from the military camp?"

Col Charles Omeonga, the administrator of the territory of Beni, said the armed forces were "in pursuit of the enemy" who, according to him, had "hidden in the population".

The ADF, which began as an uprising in Uganda but has been based in the DR Congo since the late 1990s pledged allegiance to ISIL (ISIS). They are active in northern parts of North Kivu province and southern parts of Ituri province bordering Uganda.

Their last major action was on January 15, when at least 14 people were killed and 63 wounded in a bomb attack on a Pentecostal (Evangelical Protestant) church.

In March 2021, the United States blacklisted two Islamist extremist groups in the DR Congo and Mozambique as foreign terrorist organizations over accusations of links to Islamic State (ISIS). The ADF and its leader Seka Musa Baluku and Mozambique’s Ahlu Sunnah Wa-Jama and its leader Abu Yasir Hassan were named "specially designated global terrorists.”