Very excited to announce that our new book "Islamic State in Africa: The Emergence, Evolution, and Future of the Next Jihadist Battlefront" by @warnjason with myself, @MENASTREAM and @Pol_Sec_Analyst is now available!

This is fake news. Wagner just wants to poach Erik Prince’s contract in DRC like they did in Mozambique.

In a particularly funny piece of nonsensical Russian propaganda, a member of a Wagner/Afrika Corps front group in CAR is accusing Ukraine of sending drones to ISCAP/ADF through their embassy in Kinshasa

Fiber-optic FPVs apparently now being used by “M23” in South Kivu. Implies that FARDC has electronic warfare equipment to jam regular FPVs, which would be a first for Congo’s military.

The sustainability of attracting recruits with one time payments of $20-30,000 - when recruits know they’re signing up to a meat grinder where they’re more likely to be killed or wounded than not - says a lot about the state of Russian society.

Of all the equipment that FARDC probably needs most, it's heavy lift aircraft. It's a massive country with limited infrastructure whose conflict zones are hundreds of kilometers from training facilities, depots, etc. For comparison, Angola has 7x Il-76s, 8x An-12s, 65x Mi-17s. .

Understanding how and why ADF continue their brutal campaign is crucial. We shouldn't conflate ADF’s tactical practices with those of other jihadists, and we shouldn’t confuse ADF’s unique internal characteristics with the dozens of other armed groups operating in eastern Congo.

Sadly, I don’t think this is the last time we will hear about a massacre carried out by this group, and the attention garnered by the massacre is almost certainly what the ADF’s leadership were hoping for.

Shujaa’s successes have been driven by persistent, consistent pressure that keeps ADF units off-balance and prevents them from establishing reliable sources of food and other supplies, rather than any particular decisive operations.

Until ADF’s combat power is almost entirely eroded, it will continue to attack communities when possible (for loot & hostages) or expedient (as retaliation for offensives). Commanders navigating the jungle with hand-held GPS devices can likely continue to elude security forces.

But the ADF is extremely mobile, and has repeatedly proven itself adept at establishing a presence in new areas far from its historical haunts. Shujaa’s successes have been won through hundreds of small engagements, and muddied by the ADF’s policy of retaliatory massacres.

Geographically, FARDC and UPDF operations have driven the ADF from areas like the Mwalika valley where the group had maintained a presence for nearly thirty years. Several parts of Beni, notably Ruwenzori secteur, are experiencing relative peace for the first time in decades.

Additionally, ruthless massacres like Komanda should not negate the real (if incomplete) successes of Operation Shujaa, which began nearly four years ago. Since then, the ADF has suffered severe losses in combatants and several key field commanders have been killed.

This was starkly demonstrated in Komanda itself in August 2023, when widespread rumors that the Congolese Hutu (aka Banyabwisha) community in Ituri were aligned with ADF led to brutal lynchings of innocent Banyabwisha civilians.

Commentary should therefore be careful. The ADF’s isolation from civilian communities has created fertile ground for bad or misinformed actors to conflate the ADF’s violence with other social conflicts in eastern Congo.

Understanding how ADF operates is crucial. While narratives about sleeper cells are not impossible given past suicide bombings and assassinations, there is scant evidence that this took place in Komanda. Collaborators are almost entirely used for procurement rather than violence.

And as Operation Shujaa attacks these camps, separate units operating elsewhere in North Kivu and Ituri are easily activated to attack softer targets that divert attention from the camps where its most important leaders reside.

This makes combating the group extremely difficult. Even its largest camps are highly mobile, and after 30 years in the Congolese bush, its commanders are extremely competent jungle guerillas who frequently evade operations against them.

ADF's forest camps serve as bases from which mobile units conduct raids & ambushes on villages or along major roads. It loots food, medicine & other supplies, as well as kidnapping (almost entirely Christian) Congolese who it forces to convert to Islam & join ADF on pain of death.

Instead, ADF's posture towards local civilian communities - at least until very recently - has almost entirely been hostile, which only deepened when they pledged allegiance to IS in 2017. We covered this posture and its evolution in our paper last year: