June 19 (EUROPA PRESS) –
The President of Uganda, Yoweri Museveni, has ruled on the attack perpetrated this weekend by the militias of the Allied Democratic Forces (ADF) against a school in Kasese, in the west of the African country, which left 41 dead, maintaining that the actions of these militias are “desperate and cowardly”.
Museveni, who conveyed his condolences to the victims of the attack on Sunday, declared that “this new atrocity by members of the ADF” is a “desperate, cowardly, terrorist act.” Likewise, he has promised that the Ugandan Army will continue to persecute the rebels in the neighboring Democratic Republic of the Congo.
The president has considered that this attack has taken place as a response to military operations against the militia, maintaining that in recent months the ADF has lost control of a large part of the territory. For Musevini, the soldiers have achieved that the members of the ADF have retreated and that “they can no longer concentrate in large groups”, since it is “safer for them to divide into small groups that hope they cannot be seen”.
He has also indicated that the Congolese government has given permission to Ugandan troops to operate in the DRC, so now “they have no excuse for not pursuing the ADF terrorists to extinction.” “We are bringing new forces to the Ugandan side while we continue the hunt on the DRC side,” he said.
The Ugandan leader has hinted at a failure in the country’s intelligence, according to the Chimp Reports portal, since he has indicated that “the criminal and cowardly scheme would not have been successful” if the forces in the area had been alert.
“Was an alarm sounded and by whom? How did close security people respond? Why didn’t our people on the Congo side have intelligence on this dissident group?”
The Ugandan Army has put the death toll at 41 – 37 students, three members of the community and a security guard – in the ADF attack on the Mpondwe Lhubiriha private secondary school in this town on the border with the DRC, the main scope of action of this militia, one of the most violent on the continent, which nevertheless had its origins on Ugandan soil.
The ADF, created in the 1990s and accused of the massacres of thousands of civilians, was subject to a split in 2019 after its leader swore allegiance to the jihadist group Islamic State in Central Africa (ISCA), under whose banner it operates. since then. The United Nations attributes more than 1,200 murders of civilians to them in 2021 alone.
