ISIS Fighters Force Christians in Congo to Choose: Convert or Die – Dozens Massacred in Front of Families

KINSHASA, Democratic Republic of Congo — They came disguised as mourners.

In the village of Ntoyo, North Kivu, early September 2025, fighters from the Allied Democratic Forces slipped among grieving families at a funeral wake. Then the blades and hammers fell. At least 60 people — many of them Christians — were hacked, bludgeoned and shot to death in front of relatives. Homes were torched. Others were dragged into the bush.

It was not an isolated horror.

Just weeks ago, on April 1-2, 2026, the same group struck Bafwakoa village in Ituri province. Death toll estimates range from 43 to more than 70. Houses burned with residents inside. Bodies lay in the streets. Islamic State propagandists later boasted that the victims had rejected the group’s “generous offer” — convert to Islam or submit to dhimmi status and pay the jizya tax.

A sweeping new report released this week by Amnesty International labels the ADF’s campaign — which has claimed hundreds to over 1,000 civilian lives, predominantly Christian, since 2025 — as war crimes and crimes against humanity. Researchers documented systematic killings, abductions, forced labor, child recruitment, and sexual violence against women and girls.

The ADF, a Ugandan-origin Islamist insurgency that pledged allegiance to the Islamic State years ago and now operates as its Central Africa Province (ISCAP), has exploited the chaos of eastern Congo’s multiple overlapping conflicts. While global attention fixates on the M23 rebels and their alleged Rwandan backing, the ADF has carved out space for its own ideological terror.

Witnesses describe fighters mingling for hours at communal gatherings before unleashing coordinated slaughter. In Ntoyo, some victims were killed with farm tools in a grotesque parody of mourning. In Bafwakoa, entire families perished in flames.

Agnès Callamard, Amnesty’s secretary general, said the abuses represent “extensive brutality” that the world cannot continue to ignore. Congolese authorities and local civil society groups have repeatedly sounded alarms, but overstretched government forces and a fragmented international response have left remote Christian communities exposed.

The pattern is brutally consistent: target majority-Christian villages, strike at night or during religious and social events, maximize psychological terror, and broadcast victories through ISIS channels. Muslim civilians have also fallen victim when they resist or are caught in the crossfire, but the group’s propaganda explicitly frames Christians as primary enemies.

As eastern Congo fractures further, these massacres risk becoming mere footnotes in a larger, deadlier regional crisis. For the survivors — those who buried loved ones, fled burning homes, or still search for the abducted — the question is simpler and more urgent: Who will stop the killing?

(Sources: The Telegraph, Amnesty International, Reuters, Al Jazeera, Barnabas Aid, Long War Journal, International Christian Concern – May 2026).