In April, 200 kidnapping victims were rescued by joint forces from the Uganda People’s Defence Force (UPDF) and the Armed Forces of the Democratic Republic of the Congo (FARDC) following a major offensive against an Allied Democratic Forces (ADF) camp along the Epulu River in eastern Democratic Republic of the Congo. Photo courtesy of the Uganda People’s Defence Force.
The Islamic State Central Africa Province (ISCAP), known locally as the Allied Democratic Forces (ADF), has killed more than 1,100 Christians in eastern Democratic Republic of the Congo since December 2024 and more than 6,500 since pledging allegiance to the Islamic State in 2017. Understanding how the group operates, its structure, theology, commanders, and targets, explains why more than three decades of military operations have failed to stop it and why the killing continues.
ISCAP does not hold fixed territory. It operates through highly mobile units of 30 to 50 combatants, accompanied by a similar number of dependents and hostages, equipped with GPS devices, Starlink terminals, and quadcopter drones for reconnaissance. These units can traverse 10 to 20 kilometers per day through dense forest, making them difficult for conventional military operations to pin down. Inside its camps, the group enforces its own interpretation of sharia law and conducts regular ideological instruction. Children as young as 10 are documented among attack participants; the UN lists ADF among the groups most responsible for child soldier recruitment in the DRC.
The group’s theology is explicit about its targets. Musa Baluku, the Ugandan militant who seized control of the ADF in 2015, transformed the organization into an ISIS affiliate. He secured funding from the Islamic State in exchange for a formal pledge of allegiance to the caliphate.
Baluku has publicly stated that non-Muslims are “equivalent to a dead body,” declaring that “whoever is not a Muslim is equivalent to a dead body.” A Hudson Institute report documents that ISCAP preachers frame attacks on civilians as a necessary component of global jihad rather than merely acts of retaliation or punishment. The report further notes that this theology is reinforced throughout the group’s camps, where commanders describe their war as part of the Islamic State’s worldwide campaign against the enemies of Islam.
An Amnesty International report released in May 2026 documents killings, abductions, forced labor, child recruitment, and sexual violence, concluding the violations amount to war crimes and crimes against humanity. The report states that the group systematically gives abducted women to fighters as a recruitment incentive, a practice Amnesty describes as systematic across the group’s camps. One camp chief told a 16-year-old abductee, “Here we give girls as young as 12 husbands. Either you accept a husband or we kill you.”
The commander most directly responsible for the wave of killings in Lubero Territory, North Kivu, the epicenter of the current surge, is Abuwakas, a Tanzanian Arab who helped connect the ADF to the Islamic State. He has led ISCAP’s primary offensive unit in Lubero since June 2024 and, according to data compiled by the Bridgeway Foundation, is likely responsible for the majority of the at least 952 civilians killed in the territory since then.
His unit is known for deploying child soldiers at a higher rate than other ISCAP camps and for a level of brutality that exceeds even the group’s already violent standards.
The scale of the killing in Lubero is reflected in a series of documented attacks. In February 2025, Abuwakas’s fighters abducted 70 Christians from the village of Mayba, marched them to a Protestant church in Kasanga, and executed them with machetes.
In June 2025, the group attacked mining areas along the Lubero River. A local leader told International Christian Concern that he could confirm the ADF “killed hundreds,” adding that others drowned while attempting to flee.
In November 2025, a week-long ISCAP rampage across Lubero killed 89 people, including 20 women and an unknown number of children.
According to ISCAP defectors, Abuwakas’s ideology centers on the obligation to wage jihad and the necessity of killing those who refuse conversion until the entire world is Muslim.
On March 11 and 12, 2026, his unit traveled more than 50 kilometers north from the group’s main Lubero camp, well beyond its established area of operations, to attack and destroy the Muchacha gold mine in Ituri Province. The mine was owned by China-based Kimia Mining and protected by the 311th Battalion of the Congolese army. ISCAP claimed that seven soldiers were killed in the raid.
ISCAP’s DRC wing is one of two branches of the Islamic State’s Central Africa Province. The other, locally known as al-Shabaab and unrelated to the Somali group of the same name, is formally known as Ansar al-Sunna Wa Jamma. It began operations in Mozambique’s Cabo Delgado Province in 2014 and was elevated to its own Islamic State Mozambique Province in May 2022.
The overarching regional command authority sits not in the DRC but in Somalia. According to a United Nations Security Council report, the Al-Karrar office in Puntland coordinates Islamic State operations across the DRC, Mozambique, and Somalia, serving as the financial and logistical hub for both African branches.
The DRC’s direct role is more specific. The UN Group of Experts documented that since late 2021, the ADF has held a series of high-level liaison meetings with Mozambique’s leadership in South Kivu. These meetings included a session in Shabunda territory in June 2022, during which the two branches coordinated operational strategy and tactics.
The DRC wing also conducts cross-border attacks in Uganda through both raids and clandestine cells. On June 3, 2025, Uganda’s Martyrs’ Day and a major Christian national holiday, ISCAP attempted a suicide bombing targeting worshippers at the Munyonyo Martyrs’ Shrine on the outskirts of Kampala. A female bomber and her accomplice were intercepted and killed by a Ugandan counter-terrorism unit before reaching the shrine, resulting in no civilian casualties.
The targeting of a Christian pilgrimage site on its holiest day was not coincidental. The Islamic State claimed three attacks in Uganda during the first half of 2025 alone. Across Africa, Islamic State provinces carried out 565 attacks in the first six months of 2025, according to the Jamestown Foundation, with ISCAP responsible for more than 100 of those attacks in the DRC and Uganda combined. By kill count, the DRC branch ranks among the most lethal Islamic State affiliates operating anywhere in the world.
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