Islam and political movements related to major western nations and economic competition have a disturbing history where they overlap. According to a recent story from the Christian Post, 57 Christian were murdered by Islamic terrorists in Congo.
At least 57 people were killed this week in attacks carried out by an Islamic rebel group in the northeast Democratic Republic of Congo as escalating violence near the Ugandan border has displaced hundreds of thousands of people so far this year.
The Centre for the Promotion of Peace, Democracy and Human Rights said in a statement that Islamic rebels attacked Samboko, Bandavilemba and Walese-Vukutu villages in Ituri province on Tuesday, killing 40, according to The Associated Press.
Attacks on villages have been attributed to members of the Allied Democratic Forces and a group known as MTM, which claims to be affiliated with the Islamic State terror faction. According to the news agency, the two groups have begun carrying out attacks together.
The latest attacks follow a separate attack on Monday that was attributed to ADF, an Islamist rebel group that was driven out of Uganda in the late 1990s but has operated in eastern DRC and resurged in recent years. A military offensive was launched against the group’s bases last year.
A source told Reuters that ADF launched an early morning attack on civilians in the village of Makutano in Ituri.
“They fired several shots in the air. When the population was fleeing, they captured some people and cut them up with machetes,” Gili Gotabo, a civil society leader in the Irumu territory, said of the Monday attack.
The Kivu Security Tracker, a research initiative that monitors violence in the region, reported that at least 17 were killed in Monday’s attack. However, Gotabo told Reuters that there are likely to be more deaths.
ADF has been blamed for killing hundreds of people since the offensive began last year.
After a sharp decline of violent deaths in March, the Kivu Security Tracker shows an uptick in attacks in the region over the last two months. (source)
As the article notes, the attack took place in a region known as Kivu. Conflicts are not unknown to happen in this area, as the area has been in a state of constant war since 1998 with the Second Congo War from 1998 to 2003, and the conflict that has continued since then called the Kivu Conflict.
Weapons have been coming into the area for a long time. The conflict between the government and the rebel groups in North Kivu is a conflict between a socialist government versus the various nationalist and tribalist groups, so it reflects the same paradigm in many of the conflicts around the world which have been used by “stay-behind” groups supported by the US as a part of Operation Gladio. The US has openly supported both the government and the rebels in the conflict:
Although the Clinton administration has been quick to criticize the governments involved in the Congo War, decades of U.S. weapons transfers and continued military training to both sides of the conflict have helped fuel the fighting. The U.S. has helped build the arsenals of eight of the nine governments directly involved in the war that has ravaged the DRC since Kabila’s coup. U.S. military transfers in the form of direct government-to-government weapons deliveries, commercial sales, and International Military Education and Training (IMET) to the states directly involved have totaled more than $125 million since the end of the Cold War. (source, source)
The first reason for supporting such a conflict would be for the benefit of the military and industrial complexes, as North Kivu is an area rich in natural resources, especially the rare-earth mineral Coltan, which contains Niobium and Tantalum. The former is used in heat-intensive metal alloys for infrastructure and electronics, the latter is used for high-quality capacitors in electronics, and both are considered critical to the functioning of modern technology and of which 50% of Coltan is mined in Rwanda, the direct neighbor to North Kivu.
But there is another more important reason for going into the DRC, and specifically that region: Oil.
Export.gov published a report in 2017 in which it said that after Angola, a former Portuguese colony, the second largest known concentrations of oil in sub-saharan Africa is in Congo, specifically in the North Kivu area and surrounding Kivu lake region, in addition to tremendous amounts of untapped energy under the ground:
Oil and gas discoveries in the east of the country give the DRC the second largest crude oil reserves in Central and Southern Africa after Angola. These reserves are primarily located in the four major lakes bordering Tanzania, Burundi, Rwanda, and Uganda.
The DRC contains three sedimentary basins; the Coastal Basin located in Kongo Central, extending offshore past the Congo River estuary, the Central Basin, and the Grabens Albertine and Tanganyika, extending from the Ugandan-DRC border to the southern tip of Lake Tanganyika on the Zambian-DRC border. The DRC has proven reserves of 180 million barrels, though estimates of total petroleum reserves exceed 5 billion barrels. Currently, Congolese oil production is limited to the Coast Basin, yielding 25,000 barrels per day of offshore production, all of which are exported.
Along with large recently identified oil fields, the DRC may hold as many as 30 billion cubic meters of methane and natural gas in the three major petroleum deposits. Lake Kivu, bordering Rwanda and Burundi, has nearly 60 billion cubic meters of dissolved methane in its waters. While the methane gas poses a threat to populations along its shores, this gas can be trapped and converted to electricity. Methane is already being extracted on the Rwandan side of the Lake, through a Rwandan built biogas power plant that is generating 30-40 megawatts of electricity. Beyond the estimated 60 billion cubic meters of methane in Lake Kivu, the lake generates as much as 250,000 cubic meters of methane annually. (source, source)
Yahoo News in a recent article (here, here) produced a map showing US military footprints throughout Africa:
There is one listed for the DRC, Camp Dungu, which was opened to allegedly help fight the Lord’s Resistance Army, another terrorist group that existed in the DRC during the late 1990s and early 2000s but since has disappeared and the US in May 2017 announced they would pull out of Congo.
Now it is a known fact that ISIS is a US creation, and the documentation can be found in the Shoebat archives. Building upon this thesis, it is interesting that in a nation where the US has to withdraw from that niobthat is critical to industrial processes, all of a sudden ISIS shows up and begins to attack.
This is an invitation for the US to return to the Congo in the name of “security”, which is exactly what the President of the Congo recently announced would happen (source, source).
Notice this speech was given on April 4th- the time when he cited a threat from ISIS. Coincidentally, two weeks later to the day, ISIS initiates the first ever terrorist attack by their group in the Congo in that exact same contested region.
One could say this is a co-incidence, but the circumstances are highly suspicious, and it would be unwise to eliminate the involvement of the US, who created ISIS, in doing this as a justification to return to that region.
There is also another reason that is very important. Take a look at that Yahoo News map above, and one will notice a prevalence of US military footprints surrounding but not within Nigeria, and also her involvement in Gabon on the western border by Congo.
Nigeria is an important nation to watch because she is the most pro-China nation outside of China, and she is a major powerhouse in West Africa, mostly from her oil exports. This is why Shoebat.com warned about terrorism in Nigeria rising, which it has continued to, as well as in her neighbors, as her alliance with China as well as the fact that she has a pipeline that goes from her to Algeria which brings oil to Europe. In the event of a war, Nigeria will likely shut off that pipeline and continue to supply China. The US and her ally in Germany, who has also been returning to her former African colonial territories, has been aggressively exploring West Africa over the potential of new oil fields, which AFRICOM noted in 2009 stretch likely from Senegal all the way to Congo.
The Chinese are working to capture already functioning oil fields. The US is working with those but also is working on securing brand new ones in the anticipation of a coming conflict, as well as areas with rare-earth minerals.
Now the US has announced that she will be increasing her presence in Gabon in response to the Congo situation. It is a known fact that the US military base in Entebbe, Uganda, east of Congo, is a critical base for US military intelligence operations in Africa. Gabon is likewise a center of military intelligence, but less so.
By building up the US military presence in Gabon in the West and now having a justification to assert not only a stronger military presence East of Congo but now in the Eastern regions of Congo, it provides a direct “line” from one base to the other. This “line” can press north towards Cameroon, CAR, and other nations, or south into Zambia and Angola, and effectively creates a buffer zone as well as a battering ram that divides and can be used to press other militaries out of the area, of which the biggest target would be the Chinese since they are the US’ greatest enemy and competitor in Africa at the moment.
This is about locking down as many resources as possible as it is about dividing and cutting out the Chinese presence in Africa through claims of “security”, and to that getting ready for another global conflict.