Suspected rebels attacked a high school Friday in Uganda, East Africa, killing 41 people, mostly students, the Associated Press (AP) reported.
BREAKING: At least 25 people have been killed in a suspected rebel attack on a school near the Congo border, Ugandan police say. Police say that the Allied Democratic Forces carried out the attack in the border town of Mpondwe. https://t.co/zmwPd48Z9z
— The Associated Press (@AP) June 17, 2023
The reported attack on the school in the remote western district of Kasese near the Congo border occurred at 11:30 p.m., according to the AP report. Thirty-eight students were burned beyond recognition, fatally shot or hacked to death in the dormitories and six others were abducted, according to a Ugandan military statement, the report said. A guard and two residents of the host town of Mpondwe-Lhubiriha were also killed in the attack, according to the report. A total of 54 individuals were in the school dormitories at the time of the attack; there could be others who escaped the attack, Sylvester Masereka, a Kasese district official, said in a video via the AP. (RELATED: Families Of Students Killed, Injured In School Shooting Reach Settlement With School District).
Allied Democratic Forces (ADF) rebel leader Jamil Mukulu reacts as he arrives on his first day of appearance at the Uganda High Court in Kampala on May 14, 2018. (Photo by ISAAC KASAMANI/AFP via Getty Images)
Rebels with the Allied Democratic Forces (ADF), a reported extremist group established in the early 1990s by some Ugandan Muslims who claimed to have been marginalized by the Ugandan government, are suspected to have carried out the attack, according to the AP news report. The ADF is suspected to have carried out a number of attacks on the Congolese side of the border but fewer attacks on the Ugandan side due to the presence of Ugandan forces there, the report said. The ADF established links with the Islamic State of Iraq and Syria (ISIS) in late 2018, according to the U.S. Department of State.
Schools in remote parts of African countries are soft targets for extremist groups, imperiling students hoping to get a decent education, according to UNICEF. Notoriously, the Islamist extremist group Boko Haram kidnapped about 300 schoolgirls from Government Secondary School, Chibok, Borno State, Nigeria in 2014 in an insurgency which disproportionately affected minority Christian populations, according to Deutsche Welle (DW) and a United States Commission on International Religious Freedom (USCIRF) report.