An ISIL-Linked Group Is Torturing and Killing Children in the Democratic Republic of Congo. The World Has Looked Away. Here Is What Is Happening.

There is a story happening right now in the Democratic Republic of Congo that almost nobody is covering. Not because it is unimportant — it is happening to children, to families, to communities in one of the most resource-rich and chronically devastated nations on earth. But because the Iran war, the NATO fracture, the gas price crisis, and the Gujarat ceasefire drama have consumed every pixel of global news attention for months. Meanwhile, in eastern Congo, an ISIL-linked armed group has been carrying out systematic atrocities against civilians — including the torture, killing, and abduction of children — with near-total impunity and near-total international silence.

Al Jazeera reported on Tuesday, May 5, that the armed group — identified as Allied Democratic Forces (ADF), an eastern Congo insurgency that pledged allegiance to the Islamic State in 2019 and has since been designated by the United Nations as one of the most lethal armed groups on the African continent — has continued to carry out mass killings and abductions in North Kivu province. The ADF has been responsible for thousands of civilian deaths over the past several years, including through beheadings, the burning of villages, and the forced recruitment of children as fighters. Human rights monitors operating in the region describe patterns of violence that meet international legal definitions of war crimes and crimes against humanity.

"ISIL-linked group has tortured, killed and abducted civilians in the Democratic Republic of Congo, including children." — Al Jazeera, May 5, 2026

The ADF operates in the Beni region of North Kivu, a territory of extraordinary mineral wealth — coltan, gold, cassiterite, and other minerals critical to the global electronics supply chain, including the lithium-ion batteries that power the phones and laptops through which people are reading this article. The connection between eastern Congo's mineral wealth and the chronic instability of the region is one of the most morally uncomfortable facts in modern economic life: the devices through which the world learns about wars and crises in the Middle East are partially built with materials extracted from communities where other wars and crises are ignored.

The Congolese government — which has been dealing with a separate and equally devastating crisis involving the M23 rebel group and alleged Rwandan military support in eastern Congo — has limited capacity to address the ADF threat. The United Nations peacekeeping mission in Congo, MONUSCO, has been the subject of bitter criticism from Congolese citizens and government officials who argue it has failed to protect civilians despite decades of deployment and billions of dollars in expenditure. MONUSCO has been scaling down its presence under an agreement with the Congolese government, further reducing international presence in areas where the ADF operates.

The children caught in the ADF's path are not statistics. They are students who cannot attend school because their schools have been burned. They are orphans whose parents were killed for refusing to supply the group with food or information. They are abducted teenagers carrying weapons they were given no choice but to hold. They are the youngest and most invisible casualties of a conflict that has persisted for decades without resolution, without accountability, and without adequate international intervention.

The reason this story is not on the front page of every newspaper is not because it is less important than the Iran war or the Ukrainian conflict. It is because the people dying in eastern Congo do not sit atop an oil shipping lane. Their suffering does not raise the price of gasoline in Ohio. Their children's abductions do not trigger missile alerts in Dubai. The world has a deeply unequal geography of concern — and the people of eastern Congo have, for decades, been on the wrong side of that geography.

The ADF's atrocities are not new. The international community's failure to stop them is not new. What is new is the degree to which every available channel of global attention is occupied by other things. For the families of eastern Congo, this moment of invisibility is not a media problem. It is a survival problem. Their war continues whether or not the world is watching. It is time to watch.