Suspected Islamic State Allies Kill at Least 37 High-School Students in Uganda
Security forces on Saturday passed crowds outside a Ugandan school where dozens of students were killed the previous night. Photo: Associated Press By Nicholas Bariyo June 17, 2023 9:39 am ET KAMPALA, Uganda—Suspected members of an Islamic State-affiliated terror group killed at least 37 high-school students in western Uganda in the country’s worst attack in more than a decade, the Ugandan military and local officials said Saturday. Around five gunmen entered a private boarding school close to the Ugandan border with the Democratic Republic of Congo late Friday, when students were sleeping in their dormitories, said Gen. Dick Olum, the commander of the military in western Uganda. The assailants, believed to be fighters from the Allied Democratic Forces terror group, locked dozens
Security forces on Saturday passed crowds outside a Ugandan school where dozens of students were killed the previous night.
Photo: Associated Press
KAMPALA, Uganda—Suspected members of an Islamic State-affiliated terror group killed at least 37 high-school students in western Uganda in the country’s worst attack in more than a decade, the Ugandan military and local officials said Saturday.
Around five gunmen entered a private boarding school close to the Ugandan border with the Democratic Republic of Congo late Friday, when students were sleeping in their dormitories, said Gen. Dick Olum, the commander of the military in western Uganda.
The assailants, believed to be fighters from the Allied Democratic Forces terror group, locked dozens of students, most of them boys, in one dormitory before setting it on fire, Olum said. They then combed through other buildings of the Lhubiriha Secondary School for hours, hacking students to death, before taking dozens others captive so they could help carry looted food across the Congolese border.
Olum said 62 students, most of them between the ages of 14 and 17, were at the boarding school at the time of the attack. Eight students injured during the attack were taken to a local hospital, he said.
The school sits around two kilometers from the thick jungles of Congo, where the , an insurgent group founded in Uganda but now based in eastern Congo, has been waging a vicious war.
“We are now conducting a search-and-rescue mission for the students who were abducted,” Olum told reporters in Uganda’s Kasese district. “We have called in reinforcements from the air force. We are in hot pursuit.”
The school is located across the Congolese border from where a longstanding terror group usually operates.
Photo: Associated Press
It is the militants’ second attack in Uganda in six months and the deadliest by any terror group in Uganda since militants from the al Qaeda-affiliated al-Shabaab group planted bombs among crowds watching the 2010 World Cup final in the capital, Kampala, killing 76 people.
Friday’s attack on the boarding school brought back painful memories of a 1998 assault by the ADF, in which the militants killed more than 80 students at a college in western Uganda, about 40 miles from the Lhubiriha Secondary School.
Over the past four years, ADF rebels have blown up churches and burned down villages across eastern Congo, killing more than 4,000 civilians, according to Texas-based nonprofit group Bridgeway Foundation.
The group was founded in the early 1990s in Uganda as an armed Islamist group to fight the regime of President Yoweri Museveni. In the late 1990s, the Ugandan military forced it to retreat into the jungles of eastern Congo, where the ADF usually operates.
Islamic State formally recognized the ADF as one of its affiliates in July 2019. In recent years, funding and technical assistance from Islamic State’s central leadership have emboldened the group to launch high-profile attacks in Uganda and neighboring Rwanda.
In March, the U.S. government added the ADF’s leader, Musa Baluku, to its Rewards for Justice program, offering a $5 million reward for information leading to his capture and underscoring the rising threat from the Islamic State franchise.
In November 2021, the ADF orchestrated deadly twin bombings in Kampala that killed six people, prompting Uganda to send troops into Congo to battle the insurgents. Museveni told parliament last week that the military has so far killed more than 500 ADF fighters in Congo.
According to Museveni, more troops from the East African Community Regional Force are needed to restore order in eastern Congo. “More troops and diplomatic efforts from the regional states will help address the security challenges posed by these instabilities,” he said.
Write to Nicholas Bariyo at [email protected]
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