Why is the beheading of Christians not making headlines?

The Congolese chapter of Islamic State has a ruthless way of stopping outsiders reporting their presence to the authorities. Under the edicts of their founder, Jamil Mukulu, who once lived as a cleric in London, anyone who strays across them in their forest hideouts should be killed on sight. “Slaughter him or her, behead them immediately,” Mukulu once commanded. “Never give it a second thought, do not hesitate.”

His acolytes take him at his word, even when it’s not just one hapless villager who runs into them, but dozens. Last month, they beheaded seventy Christians in Mayba in the eastern Congo, according to the Catholic charity Aid to the Church in Need, which campaigns on behalf of persecuted Christians worldwide. The charity said the corpses of the victims, including women, children and elderly, were dumped in a nearby evangelical church.

Even in a world accustomed to IS horrors, such atrocities would normally make headlines, as they used to in IS’s old killing fields in Syria and Iraq. Not so when they happen in the Congo, where violence has long been the norm. There are so many different armed groups that even the most diligent foreign editor struggles to make sense of it. A three-sided civil war is hard enough to explain. A 120-sided one? Forget it.

The only attention the murdered Christians have had in Britain is via the Catholic peer Lord Alton of Liverpool. “What are we doing to confirm those reports?” he asked the Upper House. “Have we raised this with the International Criminal Court and the African Union to ensure that those responsible for this terrible atrocity are brought to justice?”

His questions are unlikely to get satisfactory answers. While another Christian charity, Open Doors UK, is “100 percent confident” that the incident occurred, Monusco, the Congo’s UN peacekeeping force, is still trying to confirm it a month later. The alleged culprits, who act under the banner of Islamic State’s Central Africa Province, have vanished into the bush. And even if Monusco knew where they were, it has bigger threats to worry about. In January, the Rwandan-backed M23 rebel group launched a brazen offensive in the eastern DRC, capturing the regional capital, Goma, and sparking fighting that has killed 3,000 civilians and thirteen UN peacekeepers, and forced nearly half a million to flee their homes.

The black IS flag flutters over trouble­spots across the region, from Somalia and Mozambique to Mali and Niger

It is in such anarchy that groups such as IS, which have failed to regain their strongholds in the Middle East, now see a future. A decade ago, the group’s only significant presence in sub-Saharan Africa was in Nigeria, where Boko Haram pledged fealty. Now the black IS flag flutters over trouble spots across the region, from Somalia and gas-rich northern Mozambique to the coup-ridden Sahel nations of Mali, Burkina Faso and Niger.

Ever since the beginning of the War on Terror, security officials have warned that Africa’s impoverished central belt – home to nearly a dozen failed states and much of the “bottom billion” of the world’s population, many of them Muslim – could become jihadism’s last redoubt. With Donald Trump abandoning America’s role as world policeman, and Europe pre-occupied with its own security challenges, that seems more probable than ever.

Congo’s jihadists started life as a militant Islamist sect in neighboring Uganda in the 1990s, operating under the innocuous name of Allied Democratic Forces (ADF). They were funded by the Congolese dictator Mobutu Sese Seko and Sudan’s Omar al-Bashir, to be pawns in regional mischief-making. Clashes with Ugandan troops then forced the ADF over the border into eastern Congo, where it embraced full-blown jihadism and is now – despite stiff competition – the most violent of the region’s armed groups.

Its founder, Mukulu, was born a Christian, David Steven, but converted to radical Islam and traveled to Sudan, where he is thought to have met Osama bin Laden. In 2010, the foreign office launched an investigation into UN claims that he was raising funds for the group while working in London. Since 2015, he has been in jail in Uganda, awaiting trial on terrorism charges, but his group has gone from strength to strength, with up to 2,000 followers. Like Boko Haram, it recruits and kidnaps child soldiers and sees schools as targets for headline-grabbing atrocities.

Despite the hopes of Lord Alton, it is unlikely that the ADF’s henchmen will ever face justice. In Nigeria and Somalia, Islamist militants are chased – with limited effectiveness – by western-backed government forces. In the Sahel, they have to contend with Russian-backed Wagner mercenaries. But in the eastern Congo, UN and Congolese government forces have their hands full dealing with the chaos caused by the M23 incursion. The M23 – widely seen as a proxy force for Rwandan leader Paul Kagame – claims to be chasing Hutu genocidaires who fled into eastern Congo after slaughtering half a million Tutsis in 1994. Most analysts, though, think that Kagame is using this as cover for a land-grab on the eastern Congo’s mineral assets, which include rare earth deposits.

Will Brown, a senior policy fellow at the European Council on Foreign Relations, likens M23 to Vladimir Putin’s “Little Green Men” who took Crimea in 2014. There, though, the comparison ends. For much as the West disapproves of M23, there is a limit to how much they want to alienate Kagame. While activists criticize his human rights record, Rwanda has prospered under his rule. In contrast to many of its neighbors, aid has been spent well, corruption tamed and governance improved. Rwanda’s battle-hardened army is also highly capable and has been helping with counter-insurgency operations in the Central African Republic, Benin and Mozambique, to name but a few. Kagame is increasingly seen as the region’s policeman, for better or worse.

All of this means the West has little leverage over Rwanda as it stirs chaos in the eastern DRC, beyond a few threats of sanctions – most of which will seem even weaker given America’s growing rift with Europe. A new war in the Congo may be just the first of many across Africa – and for every strongman like Kagame flexing his muscles, there will be an IS franchise wielding their machetes.