At least 40 people, including Christians, have been killed in what Open Doors has described as a "killing spree" in the Democratic Republic of Congo.
Of the victims, 21 were attending a prayer vigil in a Catholic church at the time of the attack at around 1am on Sunday morning.
The attack was carried out in Komanda, Ituri province, in eastern DRC. It has been attributed to the Allied Democratic Forces (ADF), an affiliate of the so-called Islamic State.
In addition to the church, other deaths occurred in nearby houses and businesses that had been torched.
Christians have been speaking out about the situation in DRC amid protracted violence and a February massacre in which 70 people were found dead inside a church, many of them having been beheaded.
Illia Djadi, Open Doors’ sub-Saharan Africa expert, said, “The killings are very strategic.
"They are attacking defenceless rural farming communities, where there's no security presence. Most of the time they're using machetes, beheading people, in the dead of night not to attract attention.
"They are massacring village after village, community after community.”
Aid to the Church in Need (ACN) reports that children at a summer camp were among the victims.
Father Marcelo Oliveira, a Comboni missionary in North Kivu eastern province, told ACN that those killed were part of the Eucharistic Crusade movement and that the prayer vigil had been held as part of summer holiday activities.
He said: “The attack occurred at around 1am in the morning. The rebels entered the church and murdered a large number of children, both inside the church building and in the compound.
“We continue to pray for peace in this immense country and to ask for the grace of peace.”
Open Doors partner groups in the DRC have travelled to Komanda to provide aid, medicine and trauma counselling for survivors of Sunday’s attack.
According to Djadi, communities have been left vulnerable to attacks by the ADF as the international community focuses on a peace deal between the DRC and neighbouring Rwanda, with many of the DRC's security forces deployed in a struggle to control the Rwandan-backed paramilitary group M23.
This has left the ADF free to carry out killing sprees with impunity, says Djadi.
“There's no attention on the activity of ADF and the ongoing massacres," he said.
"This power vacuum has allowed them to continue the slaughter unchecked, and often unreported."
He warned that the ADF is pushing to turn parts of DRC into an Islamic caliphate similar to the "horrific" system imposed by the Islamic State in Iraq and Syria in 2014.
He is calling for more action from the DRC government and international community to bring an end to the attacks.
“We need to see a clear willingness and responsibility from the government to protect their citizens. And the international community also needs to wake up to what’s happening," he said.
"The name may be different, but this is Islamic State at work. Around six million people have been killed over 30 years in eastern DRC, and eight million internally displaced. We must use all the means used to defeat IS in Syria and Iraq to defeat them again in Eastern DRC.”
