--- title: "The Congo's Hidden War: How the ADF Insurgency Threatens Kinshasa" description: "The Democratic Republic of the Congo is at war. Right now, a rebel insurgency has taken hold in the country's east, capturing villages, pushing back Congolese soldiers, and proving all but impossible to shake out from their centers of power. The Congo is fighting hard to contain them but is struggling to do so, as the rebels perpetrate unbelievable atrocities against civilians and soldiers alike. Even with the help of foreign guidance, the Congo is unable to gain the upper hand. As the rebels take more and more territory, the nation's incredibly lucrative natural resources fall under insurgent control. While this sounds like the well-known war fought between the government in Kinshasa and the Rwanda-backed rebel group M23, the other hidden war in the Congolese east promises to be even worse. The rebels are known as the Allied Democratic Forces (ADF), a ruthless extremist movement that swears loyalty to the Islamic State and trains thousands of disillusioned young men to plunder and pillage as they see fit. Neighboring Uganda already has boots on the ground, but it is not enough. As the ADF swells in power, it risks setting off a final cascade that could destroy the Congo as the world knows it, particularly through the insurgency currently raging in Ituri province.\n\n## Key Takeaways\n- The Allied Democratic Forces (ADF) operates as an official Islamic State affiliate in the Democratic Republic of the Congo, leveraging regional anarchy to expand.\n- Originally founded in the 1990s by Jamil Mukulu, the ADF initially sought to overthrow the Ugandan government before relocating its operations to the Congolese border.\n- M23, a larger Rwandan-backed rebel faction, has captured significant territory including Goma and Bukavu, severely straining the Congolese military's capacity.\n- In 2025, the ADF launched a brutal asymmetric campaign involving machete massacres in Ituri and North Kivu, leaving hundreds of civilians dead despite Ugandan troop surges.\n- Operation Shujaa, a joint Uganda-DRC military offensive, inadvertently pushed the ADF into conducting highly mobile, asymmetric warfare across a wider geographical area, while the group self-funds by smuggling gold, timber, and coltan through M23 and Rwandan black-market networks.\n\n## The Misleading Nomenclature and Origins of the ADF\n\nIn international relations, names for movements or nations rarely determine their actual destiny. The official name for the North Korean government is not the Kim Family Dynasty Regime or the Royal Dictatorship of Pyongyang; it is the Democratic People's Republic of Korea. Despite the title, the North Korean state is neither democratic, nor a republic, nor particularly concerned with its own people. It is perhaps unsurprising that the Islamic State affiliate currently running roughshod across the eastern Congo plays by North Korean rules of nomenclature. The ADF, officially speaking, are the Allied Democratic Forces. Much like the government in Pyongyang, the ADF has spent exactly none of its time as an allied democratic force. The ADF got its start in the 1990s as the brainchild of a Ugandan convert to Islam named Jamil Mukulu. Based in Uganda at the time he started organizing an armed insurgent group, Mukulu had spent time in Saudi Arabia, Afghanistan, and Pakistan. There, he learned Salafi-jihadist ideology, picked up military training, and associated with figures like Osama bin Laden. When Mukulu returned home to Uganda, he attempted to take an active role in local elections, but ultimately ended up leading about a thousand people in riots that left four police officers dead. Mukulu and about 430 of his followers were members of an Islamic sect called the Tablighi. Following the riots, Mukulu spent a couple of years in prison, during which time he and his associates decided to form a resistance movement aimed at eventually establishing a local Islamic caliphate. They organized into an insurgency, endured several brutal raids from the Ugandan government, and fled across the porous border into the Democratic Republic of the Congo—a place which is itself neither fully democratic nor a functioning republic. In 1995, Mukulu joined his resistance together with a number of other Ugandan rebel factions hiding out in the Congo, officially giving birth to the Allied Democratic Forces. In broad strokes, the ADF views itself as a religious uprising fighting back against discrimination regarding their specific brand of Islam within Uganda, seeking to establish a better nation to host their movement. A significant faction within the ADF movement wants to build a formalized caliphate. For decades, the group maintained a presence in Uganda's remote western mountains while utilizing the near-anarchy of the eastern DRC as a base of operations. They intermittently launched large attacks in both nations, spreading small cells across the DRC and Uganda before eventually aligning with the global Islamic State movement starting in 2017.\n\n## The Evolving M23 Crisis and the Congolese Vacuum\n\nWithin a couple of years of aligning with global jihadist networks, the ADF shed a small splinter group of loyalists tied to the original cause and became a full appendage of the Islamic State. They survived a subsequent offensive from the DRC and spread out in opposite directions, with the bulk of the ADF settling in the Congolese region where they have since rebuilt their forces: Ituri province. Fast forward to today, and the Congo is a very different place than what it was when the first bands of ADF fighters came streaming across the border from Uganda. Led by an iron-fisted autocrat named Felix Tshisekedi, the Congo is in the middle of a broader war that has only escalated since 2024. In that parallel war, a larger and more powerful rebel faction, M23, has managed to beat back the Congolese government and establish control across a large part of the country. M23 is supported financially, logistically, and militarily by the neighboring nation of Rwanda. With the help of several thousand uniformed Rwandan soldiers fighting on Congolese soil, M23 has taken over two provincial capital cities in the past year. Those cities, Goma and Bukavu, are located on the northern and southern ends, respectively, of a large body of water called Lake Kivu. Just as importantly, M23 has captured the entire Congolese border with Rwanda, enabling Rwanda to smuggle large amounts of a highly lucrative mineral known as coltan. Together, Rwanda and M23 have engaged in a cycle of territorial capture and self-enrichment, proving that the DRC government lacks the capacity to stop them. The Congolese military remains underequipped, underfunded, and undermotivated. It battles well over a hundred insurgencies in the Congo's east aside from M23 and the ADF. Furthermore, the nation's political leadership is incredibly corrupt, interested mostly in self-dealing and state graft. Technically, the Congo and Rwanda are bound by a peace agreement signed in the summer of 2025, while the Congo and M23 are engaged in their own separate peace process. In reality, however, the situation has barely improved. Intense violence is ongoing in and around areas that M23 controls, with Rwanda seeming to benefit tremendously from the territorial control that M23 provides. Millions are displaced, tens of millions across the DRC grapple with chronic food insecurity, and the death toll from the recent fighting is practically impossible to pin down accurately. It is precisely here, in the chaos and the anarchy of the eastern Congo, that a group like the Allied Democratic Forces can thrive. Rather than just minding their own affairs and living as they please in Ituri Province, the ADF has recently kicked off a wave of incredibly violent attacks.\n\n## A Metastasized Campaign of Terror and Massacres\n\nNeither civilians, nor local militias, nor even government troops are immune from ADF assaults, and outward indicators suggest the insurgency is not just carrying out massacres for massacres' sake. Someone within the shadowy inner circle of the ADF's leadership has decided that now is the time to build a caliphate. If anything is known for sure about the ADF, it is the group's undeniable taste for blood. Ever since its founding across Uganda and the DRC, the ADF has carried out mass attacks against the civilian population—sometimes using firearms, sometimes by bombings, sometimes by taking dozens of people captive at once, but most frequently by machete. Some of the attacks that the ADF has carried out over the broad span of the insurgency are among the most horrific acts of organized terror in the modern world. In 1998, they massacred eighty students at a technical school. In 1999, they broke well over three hundred terrorists out of prison. In December of 2013, they launched attacks on a Congolese city that saw twenty-one people beheaded and dozens more massacred. In 2014, they dressed up as Congolese soldiers and massacred up to eighty civilians, just days before hacking thirty-six to death with machetes in the same area. The violence continued in 2017 when they killed fifteen UN peacekeepers and five Congolese soldiers, while in 2020, forty civilians were hacked to death in the span of a single village assault. In 2023, according to the conflict tracking group ACLED, the ADF was responsible for over one thousand civilian deaths. Once the M23 rebellion around Lake Kivu started to heat up in early 2025, the ADF capitalized on the chaos with a new level of efficiency. In January 2025, days after locals uncovered the bodies of numerous combat veterans who the ADF appeared to have hunted down and killed, the insurgents began a new asymmetric campaign in the countryside. By January 15, the massacres had started again, with thirty-two civilians left dead on that day, killed by machete in the village of Muhangi. Another coordinated attack at the end of the month killed another fifteen people, while dozens more were killed or wounded in smaller attacks across the region. In early February, the ADF killed over a hundred people across several massacres in Ituri, and then abducted and beheaded at least seventy Christian civilians in North Kivu province. Uganda surged troops into the province and threatened to take a city by force if necessary, but the ADF did not slow down. Those massacres persist to this day, including at least forty-three civilians killed at a night vigil in mid-July, and at least fifty-two killed in a North Kivu attack in mid-August, alongside countless smaller attacks dotting the landscape.\n\n## The Unintended Consequences of Operation Shujaa\n\nMaking matters worse, the ADF was theoretically supposed to be on the back foot before this new wave of violence began. Since 2021, the Congo has partnered with Ugandan forces in Operation Shujaa, a joint military counteroffensive that was meant to stamp out the ADF and other smaller insurgencies in the Ituri and Kivu regions. Although the fighting has not been easy, the joint forces claim to have killed hundreds of ADF fighters over the course of the operation. Uganda reported that in late 2023, the number of ADF and Islamic State fighters killed had crested past five hundred. The joint force had taken credit for pushing the ADF out of long-protected strongholds, securing cities that had been the target of ADF violence for years, and killing highly ranked members of the group who had pillaged their way across the border region with impunity. But in a way, it is the achievements of Operation Shujaa that have destabilized the region even further. Instead of fighting hard to keep their bases and their prior center of power, the ADF committed to fully asymmetric warfare. They melted away into the dense jungle, splintered off into roving bands, and appeared to switch over to digital communications to coordinate further attacks. These smaller bands of fighters now spread over a much wider geographical area, moving unpredictably toward new communities that had not been at anywhere near as much risk before the offensive. Because they have to move around so often and cannot settle long enough to either establish supply lines or produce their own food, these bands are heavily incentivized to prey on local communities for subsistence. In turn, violent confrontation becomes ever more likely. When Uganda surged thousands of troops into the Congo to deal with the ADF's 2025 escalation, it succeeded in displacing these bands yet again, but for the insurgents, displacement hardly matters anymore. With the chaos coming from North and South Kivu, the ADF has proved adept at taking advantage of M23-related violence to perpetrate attacks of its own. On numerous occasions, the ADF has seemed to track and shadow M23 violence, attacking civilians in areas that M23 had only just hit, or taking advantage of M23 victories and corresponding DRC troop movements to attack newly exposed weak points. They have shifted away from the territory of the nation that can focus on them, Uganda, while moving their operational center toward the war zone in North Kivu. According to Ugandan military intelligence, the ADF has even agreed to new alliances with other insurgent groups, including a militant network called CODECO, which was itself implicated in massacres in 2025.\n\n## Economic Exploitation and the Blueprint for a Caliphate\n\nAs of the time of writing, a fragile early ceasefire in the eastern Congo appears as if it is about to come apart, potentially sending the DRC and M23 back toward each other's throats. Meanwhile, ADF violence only continues, with the group seeming heavily emboldened now that it can operate in the grey space of a frozen conflict zone. Congolese forces cannot focus on it, Ugandan forces cannot catch it, and M23 outwardly does not seem to mind its presence. While the two insurgencies operate in close proximity, they avoid crossing paths whenever possible. Assuming that the war in the Congo either restarts relatively soon or remains in a frozen stalemate between M23 and Rwanda, the ADF is primed to take advantage. Their exact fighting strength remains difficult to pin down. While previously thought to possess only a few hundred fighters, their numbers could be swelling over time. The ADF is based in one of the most dangerous regions on Earth, making it exceptionally difficult for outside reporters or researchers to gain safe access. Local recruits are joining the ADF at alarming rates, and they are not the only ones. The anarchy of the eastern Congo has made it a favored link in the global Islamic State network, which sends experienced foreign fighters to swell the ADF's ranks. As the global Islamic State leadership comes under threat in the northern Somali region of Puntland, it is likely that a growing number of international leaders will find refuge in Ituri. The ADF has also become a key conduit for Islamic State financial operations. They are deeply integrated into local financial networks and black markets, self-funding their operations with impressive results. Long before the recent wave of violence, the ADF smuggled gold, lucrative timber, and critical minerals from the DRC into Uganda, where captured resources were sold at a premium to black-market middlemen. Now, with the ADF abandoning the Ugandan border, it will more frequently deal with M23, Rwanda, and other militias to sell resources. The ADF will capture, extract, or loot lucrative assets to finance recruitment, logistics, and further attacks. The ADF currently travels in mobile units known as camps, pitching tents and moving supplies across the landscape. Between fighters, civilians, and hostages, conflict monitors estimate the largest camp is made up of a thousand people or more. If they grow larger, they risk losing mobility and becoming vulnerable to Ugandan reprisals at scale. Yet the ADF is an insurgency accustomed to playing the long game. The Congo cannot muster the forces needed to hunt down the ADF, and Uganda cannot follow them too close to M23 territory without risking a proxy war with Rwanda. The ADF is safe as long as it stays mobile and keeps doing what it is doing.\n\n## The Final Threat to Kinshasa\n\nWhen contextualized against the M23 conflict, an ADF attempt to hold steady transforms into an opportunity for conquest. It was only a couple of months ago that the Congo was desperately trying to shore up its forces, worried that M23 was about to make a run on the capital city of Kinshasa—barreling down a major highway like Syrian rebels did toward Damascus in late 2024, or like Wagner Group mercenaries marched toward Moscow in 2023. It could take as little as a couple of months, or a handful of destabilizing incidents at the right time and place, to send the DRC back to that precipice again. In that situation, it would not take much from the ADF to send Congolese forces into a tailspin. An asymmetric raiding campaign against their back lines, the seizure of a nearby town as a distraction, or a wave of suicide bombings against military targets could easily force Congolese troops into disarray. By causing chaos, the ADF could clear the way for M23 and its Rwandan allies to deliver maximum damage. While the ADF cannot bring down the Congolese government in Kinshasa by itself, the insurgent group can create the conditions under which the incredibly fragile Congolese state would be at risk of complete collapse. If the ADF were to strike a back-room deal with M23, gain the consent of Rwanda, or orchestrate a situation where Uganda has to pull back, the group could rapidly find itself in a vastly improved position. Instead of being beaten with the hammer of Ugandan forces and backed up against the anvil of the Congolese military, the ADF could find itself in de-facto control of a decent chunk of land with few adversary forces to be found. They would secure lucrative mines and lumber forests, leaving local communities trapped entirely at their mercy. Most alarmingly, they would have a compelling case to present to the global Islamic State movement, requesting a surge of money and fighters to build a formalized caliphate. With a lot of luck, there is still hope that the deteriorating situation in the Congo can be stabilized, allowing the DRC, Uganda, Rwanda, and international partners to build toward a better situation. In that world, the ADF might find itself on the receiving end of a coordinated counterinsurgent campaign with the power to put a permanent end to the group's reign of terror. However, if there is any constant in the eastern Congo, it is the instability, the chaos, and the anarchy that has allowed the ADF insurgency to thrive. If the Congo cannot stop the ADF from lying in wait, it should not be surprised if, when all begins to collapse, it is the Allied Democratic Forces that deal Kinshasa its killing blow.\n\n## Frequently Asked Questions\n\n### Who founded the Allied Democratic Forces and what were their original goals?\n\nThe ADF was founded in 1995 by Ugandan convert to Islam Jamil Mukulu, who had trained in Saudi Arabia, Afghanistan, and Pakistan and associated with figures like Osama bin Laden. Mukulu's followers originally sought to establish a local Islamic caliphate and fight back against perceived discrimination against their branch of Islam within Uganda. After fleeing Ugandan crackdowns, Mukulu merged his movement with other Ugandan rebel factions hiding in the Congo, officially creating the ADF on Congolese soil.\n\n### How is M23 connected to the ADF insurgency?\n\nM23 is a separate, Rwanda-backed rebel faction that has captured major Congolese cities including Goma and Bukavu, overwhelming the Congolese military and creating a vast zone of chaos in the eastern DRC. The ADF has exploited this chaos by tracking and shadowing M23 violence, attacking civilians in areas M23 has just hit and targeting weak points exposed by Congolese troop movements. The two insurgencies operate in close proximity but generally avoid direct confrontation, and the ADF increasingly relies on M23 and Rwandan black-market networks to sell looted gold, timber, and minerals.\n\n### What is Operation Shujaa and why did it backfire?\n\nOperation Shujaa is a joint Uganda-DRC military offensive launched in 2021 to destroy the ADF and other insurgencies in the Ituri and Kivu regions. Although the joint force claimed to have killed over five hundred ADF fighters and pushed them out of longtime strongholds, the operation inadvertently drove the ADF to adopt fully asymmetric warfare. Instead of defending fixed bases, the ADF splintered into roving bands spread across a wider geographic area, making them harder to track while increasing their pressure on communities that had previously been relatively safe.\n\n### How does the ADF fund its operations?\n\nThe ADF self-funds by smuggling valuable resources extracted from the eastern Congo, including gold, lucrative timber, and critical minerals such as coltan. Having abandoned the Ugandan border, the group now deals increasingly with M23, Rwanda, and other armed militias to sell these looted assets to black-market middlemen. The global Islamic State network also uses the ADF as a key conduit for financial operations, and international fighters sent from elsewhere in the IS network bring additional resources with them.\n\n### Why does the ADF pose a threat to the Congolese government in Kinshasa?\n\nWhile the ADF cannot overthrow the Kinshasa government on its own, it can create the conditions for a complete Congolese state collapse. If M23 resumes its offensive toward the capital, the ADF could strike Congolese back lines, seize towns as distractions, or carry out suicide bombings against military targets, pushing already-overstretched Congolese forces into disarray. That kind of chaos could clear the way for M23 and its Rwandan allies to deliver a decisive blow, and would give the ADF a compelling case to the global Islamic State movement to surge fighters and funds to build a formal caliphate on Congolese soil.\n\n## Related Coverage\n- [M23’s Lightning Capture of Goma and Bukavu Sparks Humanitarian Crisis](https://warfronts-prod.fulcrum-labs.workers.dev/conflicts/m23-lightning-capture-goma-bukavu-crisis)\n- [The Emergence of a New Nation: The Rise of the Southern Transitional Council in Yemen](https://warfronts-prod.fulcrum-labs.workers.dev/conflicts/the-emergence-of-a-new-nation-the-rise-of-the-southern-transitional-council-in-yemen)\n- [Sudan's Forgotten War: Why the World Looks Away](https://warfronts.pub/conflicts/sudans-forgotten-war)\n- [Bloodshed in Syria. Here's What We Know.](https://warfronts.pub/conflicts/bloodshed-in-syria-heres-what-we-know)\n- [Cameroon’s Anglophone Crisis: From Colonial Divide to a Burning Conflict](https://warfronts-prod.fulcrum-labs.workers.dev/conflicts/cameroon-anglophone-crisis-burning-conflict)\n\n## Sources\n1. \n2. \n3. \n4. \n5. \n6. \n7. \n8. \n9. \n10. \n11. \n12. \n13. \n14. \n15. \n16. \n17. \n18. \n\n[1]: https://www.csis.org/blogs/examining-extremism/examining-extremism-allied-democratic-forces#:~:text=The%20Allied%20Democratic%20Forces%20\n[2]: https://acleddata.com/report/m23-rebels-take-hold-eastern-congo-islamic-state-capitalizing-chaos\n[3]: https://thesoufancenter.org/intelbrief-2025-january-28/\n[4]: https://thesoufancenter.org/intelbrief-2023-june-23/\n[5]: https://news.un.org/en/story/2025/08/1165586\n[6]: https://www.aljazeera.com/news/2025/7/30/is-isil-a-growing-threat-in-the-dr-congo-and-east-africa\n[7]: https://www.aljazeera.com/news/2025/8/18/isil-backed-rebels-killed-at-least-52-people-in-eastern-dr-congo-un-says#:~:text=The%20ADF%2C%20an%20armed%20group,take%20refuge%20in%20its%20base\n[8]: https://reliefweb.int/report/democratic-republic-congo/m23-rebels-take-hold-eastern-congo-islamic-state-capitalizing-chaos\n[9]: https://www.reuters.com/world/africa/rebels-armed-with-machetes-kill-least-52-eastern-congo-2025-08-18/\n[10]: https://www.bbc.com/news/articles/c3ezjg34lw4o\n[11]: https://www.crisisgroup.org/africa/central-africa/democratic-republic-congo/eastern-congo-adf-nalu-s-lost-rebellion\n[12]: https://www.iiss.org/online-analysis/online-analysis/2019/01/adf-jihadist-group-drc/\n[13]: https://www.bbc.com/news/world-africa-68603701\n[14]: https://apnews.com/article/congo-islamic-rebel-attack-adf-kivu-makoko-faae44fe327d54ca619acd7c3fb30104\n[15]: https://reliefweb.int/report/democratic-republic-congo/drc-monitoring-brief-allied-democratic-forces-adf-data-april-2025\n[16]: https://www.hrw.org/news/2025/08/06/dr-congo-armed-group-massacres-dozens-in-church\n[17]: https://understandingwar.org/backgrounder/africa-file-special-edition-uganda-drc%E2%80%99s-m23-conflict%E2%80%94friend-all-enemy-none\n[18]: https://abcnews.go.com/International/wireStory/islamic-state-backed-rebels-killed-52-people-eastern-124756546\n\n" url: https://warfronts.pub/article/congos-hidden-war-adf-insurgency-threatens-kinshasa.md canonical: https://warfronts.pub/article/congos-hidden-war-adf-insurgency-threatens-kinshasa datePublished: 2026-03-04 dateModified: 2026-03-04 author: - name: Simon Whistler url: https://warfronts.pub/author/simon-whistler publisher: Warfronts image: "https://media.warfronts.pub/cdn-cgi/image/width=1600,height=900,fit=cover,quality=80,format=auto/articles/3AyDDwOXMys/hero.jpg" type: NewsArticle contentHash: be794cf9ccc1aac528813996b5f55a4dcf4cafa2208a55297423b4032e018d82 tokens: 6653 summaryUrl: https://warfronts.pub/article/congos-hidden-war-adf-insurgency-threatens-kinshasa.md.summary.md --- The Democratic Republic of the Congo is at war. Right now, a rebel insurgency has taken hold in the country's east, capturing villages, pushing back Congolese soldiers, and proving all but impossible to shake out from their centers of power. The Congo is fighting hard to contain them but is struggling to do so, as the rebels perpetrate unbelievable atrocities against civilians and soldiers alike. Even with the help of foreign guidance, the Congo is unable to gain the upper hand. As the rebels take more and more territory, the nation's incredibly lucrative natural resources fall under insurgent control. While this sounds like the well-known war fought between the government in Kinshasa and the Rwanda-backed rebel group M23, the other hidden war in the Congolese east promises to be even worse. The rebels are known as the Allied Democratic Forces (ADF), a ruthless extremist movement that swears loyalty to the Islamic State and trains thousands of disillusioned young men to plunder and pillage as they see fit. Neighboring Uganda already has boots on the ground, but it is not enough. As the ADF swells in power, it risks setting off a final cascade that could destroy the Congo as the world knows it, particularly through the insurgency currently raging in Ituri province. ## Key Takeaways - The Allied Democratic Forces (ADF) operates as an official Islamic State affiliate in the Democratic Republic of the Congo, leveraging regional anarchy to expand. - Originally founded in the 1990s by Jamil Mukulu, the ADF initially sought to overthrow the Ugandan government before relocating its operations to the Congolese border. - M23, a larger Rwandan-backed rebel faction, has captured significant territory including Goma and Bukavu, severely straining the Congolese military's capacity. - In 2025, the ADF launched a brutal asymmetric campaign involving machete massacres in Ituri and North Kivu, leaving hundreds of civilians dead despite Ugandan troop surges. - Operation Shujaa, a joint Uganda-DRC military offensive, inadvertently pushed the ADF into conducting highly mobile, asymmetric warfare across a wider geographical area, while the group self-funds by smuggling gold, timber, and coltan through M23 and Rwandan black-market networks. ## The Misleading Nomenclature and Origins of the ADF In international relations, names for movements or nations rarely determine their actual destiny. The official name for the North Korean government is not the Kim Family Dynasty Regime or the Royal Dictatorship of Pyongyang; it is the Democratic People's Republic of Korea. Despite the title, the North Korean state is neither democratic, nor a republic, nor particularly concerned with its own people. It is perhaps unsurprising that the Islamic State affiliate currently running roughshod across the eastern Congo plays by North Korean rules of nomenclature. The ADF, officially speaking, are the Allied Democratic Forces. Much like the government in Pyongyang, the ADF has spent exactly none of its time as an allied democratic force. The ADF got its start in the 1990s as the brainchild of a Ugandan convert to Islam named Jamil Mukulu. Based in Uganda at the time he started organizing an armed insurgent group, Mukulu had spent time in Saudi Arabia, Afghanistan, and Pakistan. There, he learned Salafi-jihadist ideology, picked up military training, and associated with figures like Osama bin Laden. When Mukulu returned home to Uganda, he attempted to take an active role in local elections, but ultimately ended up leading about a thousand people in riots that left four police officers dead. Mukulu and about 430 of his followers were members of an Islamic sect called the Tablighi. Following the riots, Mukulu spent a couple of years in prison, during which time he and his associates decided to form a resistance movement aimed at eventually establishing a local Islamic caliphate. They organized into an insurgency, endured several brutal raids from the Ugandan government, and fled across the porous border into the Democratic Republic of the Congo—a place which is itself neither fully democratic nor a functioning republic. In 1995, Mukulu joined his resistance together with a number of other Ugandan rebel factions hiding out in the Congo, officially giving birth to the Allied Democratic Forces. In broad strokes, the ADF views itself as a religious uprising fighting back against discrimination regarding their specific brand of Islam within Uganda, seeking to establish a better nation to host their movement. A significant faction within the ADF movement wants to build a formalized caliphate. For decades, the group maintained a presence in Uganda's remote western mountains while utilizing the near-anarchy of the eastern DRC as a base of operations. They intermittently launched large attacks in both nations, spreading small cells across the DRC and Uganda before eventually aligning with the global Islamic State movement starting in 2017. ## The Evolving M23 Crisis and the Congolese Vacuum Within a couple of years of aligning with global jihadist networks, the ADF shed a small splinter group of loyalists tied to the original cause and became a full appendage of the Islamic State. They survived a subsequent offensive from the DRC and spread out in opposite directions, with the bulk of the ADF settling in the Congolese region where they have since rebuilt their forces: Ituri province. Fast forward to today, and the Congo is a very different place than what it was when the first bands of ADF fighters came streaming across the border from Uganda. Led by an iron-fisted autocrat named Felix Tshisekedi, the Congo is in the middle of a broader war that has only escalated since 2024. In that parallel war, a larger and more powerful rebel faction, M23, has managed to beat back the Congolese government and establish control across a large part of the country. M23 is supported financially, logistically, and militarily by the neighboring nation of Rwanda. With the help of several thousand uniformed Rwandan soldiers fighting on Congolese soil, M23 has taken over two provincial capital cities in the past year. Those cities, Goma and Bukavu, are located on the northern and southern ends, respectively, of a large body of water called Lake Kivu. Just as importantly, M23 has captured the entire Congolese border with Rwanda, enabling Rwanda to smuggle large amounts of a highly lucrative mineral known as coltan. Together, Rwanda and M23 have engaged in a cycle of territorial capture and self-enrichment, proving that the DRC government lacks the capacity to stop them. The Congolese military remains underequipped, underfunded, and undermotivated. It battles well over a hundred insurgencies in the Congo's east aside from M23 and the ADF. Furthermore, the nation's political leadership is incredibly corrupt, interested mostly in self-dealing and state graft. Technically, the Congo and Rwanda are bound by a peace agreement signed in the summer of 2025, while the Congo and M23 are engaged in their own separate peace process. In reality, however, the situation has barely improved. Intense violence is ongoing in and around areas that M23 controls, with Rwanda seeming to benefit tremendously from the territorial control that M23 provides. Millions are displaced, tens of millions across the DRC grapple with chronic food insecurity, and the death toll from the recent fighting is practically impossible to pin down accurately. It is precisely here, in the chaos and the anarchy of the eastern Congo, that a group like the Allied Democratic Forces can thrive. Rather than just minding their own affairs and living as they please in Ituri Province, the ADF has recently kicked off a wave of incredibly violent attacks. ## A Metastasized Campaign of Terror and Massacres Neither civilians, nor local militias, nor even government troops are immune from ADF assaults, and outward indicators suggest the insurgency is not just carrying out massacres for massacres' sake. Someone within the shadowy inner circle of the ADF's leadership has decided that now is the time to build a caliphate. If anything is known for sure about the ADF, it is the group's undeniable taste for blood. Ever since its founding across Uganda and the DRC, the ADF has carried out mass attacks against the civilian population—sometimes using firearms, sometimes by bombings, sometimes by taking dozens of people captive at once, but most frequently by machete. Some of the attacks that the ADF has carried out over the broad span of the insurgency are among the most horrific acts of organized terror in the modern world. In 1998, they massacred eighty students at a technical school. In 1999, they broke well over three hundred terrorists out of prison. In December of 2013, they launched attacks on a Congolese city that saw twenty-one people beheaded and dozens more massacred. In 2014, they dressed up as Congolese soldiers and massacred up to eighty civilians, just days before hacking thirty-six to death with machetes in the same area. The violence continued in 2017 when they killed fifteen UN peacekeepers and five Congolese soldiers, while in 2020, forty civilians were hacked to death in the span of a single village assault. In 2023, according to the conflict tracking group ACLED, the ADF was responsible for over one thousand civilian deaths. Once the M23 rebellion around Lake Kivu started to heat up in early 2025, the ADF capitalized on the chaos with a new level of efficiency. In January 2025, days after locals uncovered the bodies of numerous combat veterans who the ADF appeared to have hunted down and killed, the insurgents began a new asymmetric campaign in the countryside. By January 15, the massacres had started again, with thirty-two civilians left dead on that day, killed by machete in the village of Muhangi. Another coordinated attack at the end of the month killed another fifteen people, while dozens more were killed or wounded in smaller attacks across the region. In early February, the ADF killed over a hundred people across several massacres in Ituri, and then abducted and beheaded at least seventy Christian civilians in North Kivu province. Uganda surged troops into the province and threatened to take a city by force if necessary, but the ADF did not slow down. Those massacres persist to this day, including at least forty-three civilians killed at a night vigil in mid-July, and at least fifty-two killed in a North Kivu attack in mid-August, alongside countless smaller attacks dotting the landscape. ## The Unintended Consequences of Operation Shujaa Making matters worse, the ADF was theoretically supposed to be on the back foot before this new wave of violence began. Since 2021, the Congo has partnered with Ugandan forces in Operation Shujaa, a joint military counteroffensive that was meant to stamp out the ADF and other smaller insurgencies in the Ituri and Kivu regions. Although the fighting has not been easy, the joint forces claim to have killed hundreds of ADF fighters over the course of the operation. Uganda reported that in late 2023, the number of ADF and Islamic State fighters killed had crested past five hundred. The joint force had taken credit for pushing the ADF out of long-protected strongholds, securing cities that had been the target of ADF violence for years, and killing highly ranked members of the group who had pillaged their way across the border region with impunity. But in a way, it is the achievements of Operation Shujaa that have destabilized the region even further. Instead of fighting hard to keep their bases and their prior center of power, the ADF committed to fully asymmetric warfare. They melted away into the dense jungle, splintered off into roving bands, and appeared to switch over to digital communications to coordinate further attacks. These smaller bands of fighters now spread over a much wider geographical area, moving unpredictably toward new communities that had not been at anywhere near as much risk before the offensive. Because they have to move around so often and cannot settle long enough to either establish supply lines or produce their own food, these bands are heavily incentivized to prey on local communities for subsistence. In turn, violent confrontation becomes ever more likely. When Uganda surged thousands of troops into the Congo to deal with the ADF's 2025 escalation, it succeeded in displacing these bands yet again, but for the insurgents, displacement hardly matters anymore. With the chaos coming from North and South Kivu, the ADF has proved adept at taking advantage of M23-related violence to perpetrate attacks of its own. On numerous occasions, the ADF has seemed to track and shadow M23 violence, attacking civilians in areas that M23 had only just hit, or taking advantage of M23 victories and corresponding DRC troop movements to attack newly exposed weak points. They have shifted away from the territory of the nation that can focus on them, Uganda, while moving their operational center toward the war zone in North Kivu. According to Ugandan military intelligence, the ADF has even agreed to new alliances with other insurgent groups, including a militant network called CODECO, which was itself implicated in massacres in 2025. ## Economic Exploitation and the Blueprint for a Caliphate As of the time of writing, a fragile early ceasefire in the eastern Congo appears as if it is about to come apart, potentially sending the DRC and M23 back toward each other's throats. Meanwhile, ADF violence only continues, with the group seeming heavily emboldened now that it can operate in the grey space of a frozen conflict zone. Congolese forces cannot focus on it, Ugandan forces cannot catch it, and M23 outwardly does not seem to mind its presence. While the two insurgencies operate in close proximity, they avoid crossing paths whenever possible. Assuming that the war in the Congo either restarts relatively soon or remains in a frozen stalemate between M23 and Rwanda, the ADF is primed to take advantage. Their exact fighting strength remains difficult to pin down. While previously thought to possess only a few hundred fighters, their numbers could be swelling over time. The ADF is based in one of the most dangerous regions on Earth, making it exceptionally difficult for outside reporters or researchers to gain safe access. Local recruits are joining the ADF at alarming rates, and they are not the only ones. The anarchy of the eastern Congo has made it a favored link in the global Islamic State network, which sends experienced foreign fighters to swell the ADF's ranks. As the global Islamic State leadership comes under threat in the northern Somali region of Puntland, it is likely that a growing number of international leaders will find refuge in Ituri. The ADF has also become a key conduit for Islamic State financial operations. They are deeply integrated into local financial networks and black markets, self-funding their operations with impressive results. Long before the recent wave of violence, the ADF smuggled gold, lucrative timber, and critical minerals from the DRC into Uganda, where captured resources were sold at a premium to black-market middlemen. Now, with the ADF abandoning the Ugandan border, it will more frequently deal with M23, Rwanda, and other militias to sell resources. The ADF will capture, extract, or loot lucrative assets to finance recruitment, logistics, and further attacks. The ADF currently travels in mobile units known as camps, pitching tents and moving supplies across the landscape. Between fighters, civilians, and hostages, conflict monitors estimate the largest camp is made up of a thousand people or more. If they grow larger, they risk losing mobility and becoming vulnerable to Ugandan reprisals at scale. Yet the ADF is an insurgency accustomed to playing the long game. The Congo cannot muster the forces needed to hunt down the ADF, and Uganda cannot follow them too close to M23 territory without risking a proxy war with Rwanda. The ADF is safe as long as it stays mobile and keeps doing what it is doing. ## The Final Threat to Kinshasa When contextualized against the M23 conflict, an ADF attempt to hold steady transforms into an opportunity for conquest. It was only a couple of months ago that the Congo was desperately trying to shore up its forces, worried that M23 was about to make a run on the capital city of Kinshasa—barreling down a major highway like Syrian rebels did toward Damascus in late 2024, or like Wagner Group mercenaries marched toward Moscow in 2023. It could take as little as a couple of months, or a handful of destabilizing incidents at the right time and place, to send the DRC back to that precipice again. In that situation, it would not take much from the ADF to send Congolese forces into a tailspin. An asymmetric raiding campaign against their back lines, the seizure of a nearby town as a distraction, or a wave of suicide bombings against military targets could easily force Congolese troops into disarray. By causing chaos, the ADF could clear the way for M23 and its Rwandan allies to deliver maximum damage. While the ADF cannot bring down the Congolese government in Kinshasa by itself, the insurgent group can create the conditions under which the incredibly fragile Congolese state would be at risk of complete collapse. If the ADF were to strike a back-room deal with M23, gain the consent of Rwanda, or orchestrate a situation where Uganda has to pull back, the group could rapidly find itself in a vastly improved position. Instead of being beaten with the hammer of Ugandan forces and backed up against the anvil of the Congolese military, the ADF could find itself in de-facto control of a decent chunk of land with few adversary forces to be found. They would secure lucrative mines and lumber forests, leaving local communities trapped entirely at their mercy. Most alarmingly, they would have a compelling case to present to the global Islamic State movement, requesting a surge of money and fighters to build a formalized caliphate. With a lot of luck, there is still hope that the deteriorating situation in the Congo can be stabilized, allowing the DRC, Uganda, Rwanda, and international partners to build toward a better situation. In that world, the ADF might find itself on the receiving end of a coordinated counterinsurgent campaign with the power to put a permanent end to the group's reign of terror. However, if there is any constant in the eastern Congo, it is the instability, the chaos, and the anarchy that has allowed the ADF insurgency to thrive. If the Congo cannot stop the ADF from lying in wait, it should not be surprised if, when all begins to collapse, it is the Allied Democratic Forces that deal Kinshasa its killing blow. ## Frequently Asked Questions ### Who founded the Allied Democratic Forces and what were their original goals? The ADF was founded in 1995 by Ugandan convert to Islam Jamil Mukulu, who had trained in Saudi Arabia, Afghanistan, and Pakistan and associated with figures like Osama bin Laden. Mukulu's followers originally sought to establish a local Islamic caliphate and fight back against perceived discrimination against their branch of Islam within Uganda. After fleeing Ugandan crackdowns, Mukulu merged his movement with other Ugandan rebel factions hiding in the Congo, officially creating the ADF on Congolese soil. ### How is M23 connected to the ADF insurgency? M23 is a separate, Rwanda-backed rebel faction that has captured major Congolese cities including Goma and Bukavu, overwhelming the Congolese military and creating a vast zone of chaos in the eastern DRC. The ADF has exploited this chaos by tracking and shadowing M23 violence, attacking civilians in areas M23 has just hit and targeting weak points exposed by Congolese troop movements. The two insurgencies operate in close proximity but generally avoid direct confrontation, and the ADF increasingly relies on M23 and Rwandan black-market networks to sell looted gold, timber, and minerals. ### What is Operation Shujaa and why did it backfire? Operation Shujaa is a joint Uganda-DRC military offensive launched in 2021 to destroy the ADF and other insurgencies in the Ituri and Kivu regions. Although the joint force claimed to have killed over five hundred ADF fighters and pushed them out of longtime strongholds, the operation inadvertently drove the ADF to adopt fully asymmetric warfare. Instead of defending fixed bases, the ADF splintered into roving bands spread across a wider geographic area, making them harder to track while increasing their pressure on communities that had previously been relatively safe. ### How does the ADF fund its operations? The ADF self-funds by smuggling valuable resources extracted from the eastern Congo, including gold, lucrative timber, and critical minerals such as coltan. Having abandoned the Ugandan border, the group now deals increasingly with M23, Rwanda, and other armed militias to sell these looted assets to black-market middlemen. The global Islamic State network also uses the ADF as a key conduit for financial operations, and international fighters sent from elsewhere in the IS network bring additional resources with them. ### Why does the ADF pose a threat to the Congolese government in Kinshasa? While the ADF cannot overthrow the Kinshasa government on its own, it can create the conditions for a complete Congolese state collapse. If M23 resumes its offensive toward the capital, the ADF could strike Congolese back lines, seize towns as distractions, or carry out suicide bombings against military targets, pushing already-overstretched Congolese forces into disarray. That kind of chaos could clear the way for M23 and its Rwandan allies to deliver a decisive blow, and would give the ADF a compelling case to the global Islamic State movement to surge fighters and funds to build a formal caliphate on Congolese soil. ## Related Coverage - [M23’s Lightning Capture of Goma and Bukavu Sparks Humanitarian Crisis](https://warfronts-prod.fulcrum-labs.workers.dev/conflicts/m23-lightning-capture-goma-bukavu-crisis) - [The Emergence of a New Nation: The Rise of the Southern Transitional Council in Yemen](https://warfronts-prod.fulcrum-labs.workers.dev/conflicts/the-emergence-of-a-new-nation-the-rise-of-the-southern-transitional-council-in-yemen) - [Sudan's Forgotten War: Why the World Looks Away](https://warfronts.pub/conflicts/sudans-forgotten-war) - [Bloodshed in Syria. Here's What We Know.](https://warfronts.pub/conflicts/bloodshed-in-syria-heres-what-we-know) - [Cameroon’s Anglophone Crisis: From Colonial Divide to a Burning Conflict](https://warfronts-prod.fulcrum-labs.workers.dev/conflicts/cameroon-anglophone-crisis-burning-conflict) ## Sources 1. 2. 3. 4. 5. 6. 7. 8. 9. 10. 11. 12. 13. 14. 15. 16. 17. 18. [1]: https://www.csis.org/blogs/examining-extremism/examining-extremism-allied-democratic-forces#:~:text=The%20Allied%20Democratic%20Forces%20 [2]: https://acleddata.com/report/m23-rebels-take-hold-eastern-congo-islamic-state-capitalizing-chaos [3]: https://thesoufancenter.org/intelbrief-2025-january-28/ [4]: https://thesoufancenter.org/intelbrief-2023-june-23/ [5]: https://news.un.org/en/story/2025/08/1165586 [6]: https://www.aljazeera.com/news/2025/7/30/is-isil-a-growing-threat-in-the-dr-congo-and-east-africa [7]: https://www.aljazeera.com/news/2025/8/18/isil-backed-rebels-killed-at-least-52-people-in-eastern-dr-congo-un-says#:~:text=The%20ADF%2C%20an%20armed%20group,take%20refuge%20in%20its%20base [8]: https://reliefweb.int/report/democratic-republic-congo/m23-rebels-take-hold-eastern-congo-islamic-state-capitalizing-chaos [9]: https://www.reuters.com/world/africa/rebels-armed-with-machetes-kill-least-52-eastern-congo-2025-08-18/ [10]: https://www.bbc.com/news/articles/c3ezjg34lw4o [11]: https://www.crisisgroup.org/africa/central-africa/democratic-republic-congo/eastern-congo-adf-nalu-s-lost-rebellion [12]: https://www.iiss.org/online-analysis/online-analysis/2019/01/adf-jihadist-group-drc/ [13]: https://www.bbc.com/news/world-africa-68603701 [14]: https://apnews.com/article/congo-islamic-rebel-attack-adf-kivu-makoko-faae44fe327d54ca619acd7c3fb30104 [15]: https://reliefweb.int/report/democratic-republic-congo/drc-monitoring-brief-allied-democratic-forces-adf-data-april-2025 [16]: https://www.hrw.org/news/2025/08/06/dr-congo-armed-group-massacres-dozens-in-church [17]: https://understandingwar.org/backgrounder/africa-file-special-edition-uganda-drc%E2%80%99s-m23-conflict%E2%80%94friend-all-enemy-none [18]: https://abcnews.go.com/International/wireStory/islamic-state-backed-rebels-killed-52-people-eastern-124756546 <!-- youtube:3AyDDwOXMys -->