According to the government, at least 42 students were killed in an attack on a school in Uganda on Saturday night. Eight other children were seriously injured in the border town of Mpondwe in the south-west of the country. A school dormitory was burned down and a food warehouse was looted, the police said, according to a report in the daily newspaper Daily Monitor.
The police blamed rebels from the Islamist militia ADF (Allied Democratic Forces) from neighboring Democratic Republic of the Congo. As a regional government official told the German Press Agency, 15 children were also kidnapped. The attackers are on the run, said a spokesman for the authorities. “Our troops are in pursuit of the enemy to rescue the kidnapped and destroy this group.” According to police, the attackers fled to Virunga National Park in the Democratic Republic of the Congo.
Bloody attacks for many years
For years there have been repeated bloody attacks by the ADF and other Congolese militias in the border areas between the two East African countries. The ADF is said to have ties to the Central African offshoot of the Islamist terrorist militia Islamic State. The group’s worst attack happened in 1998, when terrorists killed 80 students in a raid on a university in the border region.
The current attack on the school, which is less than two kilometers from the border with the Democratic Republic of the Congo, is the first such attack on a Ugandan school in many years. In 2021, suicide bombings in Uganda’s capital Kampala and other parts of the country were attributed to the ADF.
According to the group, it fights for the rights of the Muslim minority in Uganda, who are pushed to the fringes of society by the government. The aim of the group is to overthrow the government. The victims of the attacks, however, are mostly civilians.