The group killing Christians across eastern Democratic Republic of the Congo began not as a jihadist organization but as a fragmented Ugandan insurgency with shifting aims and no coherent ideology. What it became, the Islamic State Central Africa Province (ISCAP), one of the most lethal terrorist organizations currently operating anywhere in the world, is the product of a calculated transformation financed from abroad and driven by a small number of individuals who saw opportunity in the group’s near-collapse.

The Allied Democratic Forces (ADF) emerged in 1996 from a merger of former military officers from the Idi Amin regime, organized under the National Army for the Liberation of Uganda (NALU), and Islamists from the Salaf Tabliq movement, along with fighters from the Democratic Republic of the Congo and Hutu militants from Rwanda.

NALU was founded in 1988 in opposition to President Yoweri Museveni. The ADF’s stated aim was to overthrow Museveni and replace his government with an Islamic fundamentalist state. Analysts at the time labeled it a “rebellion without a cause” because, while Islamism was part of its ideology, it was not always its primary driving force, and the group’s objectives often shifted depending on its audience.

The group relocated to the Rwenzori mountain region on the DRC-Uganda border in the late 1990s, funding operations through illegal mining and logging in the forests of eastern Congo. The Ugandan military destroyed several ADF camps during a 2000 offensive, but the group survived by embedding itself in local communities.

Fighters married local women and established a persistent presence in territory the Congolese state was unable to govern effectively. The United States designated the ADF a terrorist organization in December 2001.

For its first two decades, the ADF remained relatively contained, conducting periodic massacres in Beni Territory but attracting little sustained international attention. That changed in 2015 when founding leader Jamil Mukulu was arrested in Tanzania and extradited to Uganda.

The group was left leaderless and nearly broke, with Mukulu’s financing networks collapsed. There was a single recorded ADF-caused civilian death in the first eight months of 2017. The group was on the verge of dissolution.

Mukulu’s successor was Musa Baluku, born around 1977 in Uganda’s Kasese District, who had served as the ADF’s chief Islamic judge, handing down punishments under the group’s interpretation of sharia, and as its ideological commissar responsible for indoctrinating recruits. Unlike Mukulu, Baluku embraced social media recruitment and was open to external alliances. Facing the group’s near-collapse, he accepted Islamic State overtures over Mukulu’s explicit objections from prison, striking a deal that secured IS financing in exchange for a pledge of allegiance.

The first confirmed Islamic State financial transfer to the ADF came in late 2017 through Waleed Ahmed Zein, a Kenyan truck driver whose father and brother had joined IS in Syria. Zein built a hawala-based network spanning Europe, the Americas, the Middle East, and Africa, moving money to the group while disguising transfers through a family business account.

He was sanctioned by the U.S. Treasury in September 2018. IS financing to ISCAP now flows through a more resilient regional architecture overseen by the Islamic State’s Somalia Province and its Al-Karar Office, with financial cells in Somalia, Kenya, Uganda, Tanzania, and South Africa pooling resources and moving funds to ISCAP inside Congo through wireless transfers and physical hand-offs.

The ideological bridge between the ADF and the Islamic State was built in part by Ahmed Mahmood Hassan, known by his nom de guerre Abuwakas, a Tanzanian Arab who likely became radicalized while studying in South Africa. He connected with ADF member Meddie Nkalubo through social media before traveling to ADF camps and persuading the group to pledge allegiance to the Islamic State.

The Islamic State formally recognized ISCAP as a province in April 2019, the only province declared after the fall of Baghuz, the Islamic State’s last territorial stronghold in Syria, making ISCAP the newest branch of the global network. In September 2020, Baluku publicly declared that the ADF had ceased to exist and had been fully incorporated into ISCAP. The group split in 2019: Baluku’s faction merged into ISCAP; a Mukulu-loyalist faction of no more than 150 individuals broke away and has conducted no confirmed armed activity since.

The financial infusion transformed the group with brutal speed. In 2017, at its nadir, the ADF recorded a single civilian death in eight months. By 2021, ISCAP was responsible for at least 1,275 civilian deaths in the DRC, nearly three times the 2019 toll and more than 50 percent above 2020.

That year, the group carried out its first suicide bombings, detonating three bombs in downtown Kampala, Uganda. It attempted a similar plot in Rwanda. What had been a localized insurgency operating in a small corner of eastern Congo had become, in the space of four years and with Islamic State money, a regional terrorist network with ambitions and reach neither Mukulu nor any outside observer had anticipated.

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