From: lessgovt@gmail.com   
      
   â€˜A Terrible Tragedy’: Uganda Reels From Deadly Terrorist Attack   
   By Abdi Latif Dahir, June 18, 2023, NY Times   
   The militants reached the private boarding school compound just before   
   midnight, as students were going to bed, on a partly cloudy night in a small   
   town in the lush western fields of Uganda.   
      
   First, they shot the school’s guard in the head before they went to the   
   students’ dormitories. When they could not enter the boys’ locked   
   residential halls, they hurled firebombs inside, setting mattresses ablaze and   
   igniting a fire that soon    
   engulfed the building, according to witnesses, government officials and   
   security officers. Petrified, the girls unlocked their dormitory’s doors and   
   tried to flee, only for the assailants to catch up with them and hack them to   
   death with machetes.   
      
   When it was all over, the attack on Friday night in Mpondwe, a town near   
   Uganda’s border with the Democratic Republic of Congo, left 37 of the   
   school’s 63 students dead, according to Janet Museveni, the country’s   
   first lady and minister of    
   education and sports.   
      
   â€œThis is a difficult time for all of us as Ugandans,â€� Ms. Museveni said in   
   a speech that was carried late on Saturday night on the state broadcaster.   
   â€œIt’s a terrible tragedy.â€�   
      
   The assailants, members of an Islamist militant group, also burned the   
   school’s library, plundered a food store and kidnapped six students, whom   
   they used to carry the looted goods, military officials said. As they fled the   
   town into the dense forests    
   of Congo, they killed three other people, including a woman in her 60s —   
   bringing the death total to 41.   
      
   â€œThe community is devastated and feeling so bad,â€� said Mumbere Jackson,   
   who was attending a burial for some of the students on Sunday afternoon in the   
   nearby town of Kajwenge. “Many are asking: Where were the security forces?   
   How did these people    
   get here and commit this atrocity?â€�   
      
   The invasion of the Mpondwe Lhubiriha Secondary School was the deadliest   
   terrorist act in Uganda in years, raising fears of resurgent militant activity   
   in a region with a history of disruptive cross-border insurgencies.   
      
   The brutal attack made clear the reach and the continued strength of the   
   Allied Democratic Forces, an insurgent group that has pledged allegiance to   
   the Islamic State, and that the United States has designated a terrorist group.   
      
   â€œAttacking a school is likely part of a desire to recruit,â€� said Richard   
   Moncrieff, the project director for the Great Lakes region at the   
   International Crisis Group, “but also has a shock value, which appeals to   
   the group’s wider jihadist    
   audience.â€�   
      
   Friday’s attack, he added, “shows that despite nearly two years of   
   concentrated joint operations against the group, it still has significant   
   capacity.â€�   
      
   It also highlighted the security challenges facing Uganda, even as its   
   longtime president, Yoweri Museveni, deploys troops in conflicts across Africa   
   and receives billions of dollars in development and military assistance from   
   Western countries,    
   including the United States.   
      
   Formed in 1995 in opposition to the rule of Mr. Museveni, the Allied   
   Democratic Forces has carried out multiple attacks across Uganda, including   
   one on a college in 1998 that killed 80 students. The Allied Democratic Forces   
   has also assaulted communities    
   across eastern Congo, a verdant, mineral-wealthy region blighted by decades of   
   atrocities committed by dozens of armed groups.   
      
   In late 2021, the group set off explosions in the Ugandan capital, Kampala,   
   killing three people. That attack prompted President Museveni to launch a   
   joint military campaign with Congo in an effort to drive the group out of its   
   camps in eastern Congo.    
   Yet the group has continued to recruit new soldiers into combat, some of them   
   children, and to stage bloody raids, like one in March that killed 36 people   
   in a village in North Kivu Province in eastern Congo.   
      
   Observers have criticized the Ugandan and Congolese governments’ military   
   approach in the region, saying that to bring lasting solutions, the   
   governments need to focus on state-building and providing better economic   
   opportunities.   
      
   â€œThe attack shows that a wider strategy is needed than purely military,â€�   
   Mr. Moncrieff said.   
      
   The Mpondwe Lhubiriha Secondary School was built by a nongovernmental   
   organization led by a Canadian national named Peter Hunt, said Ms. Museveni,   
   the education minister.   
      
   She did not identify the agency, but research and a local resident both   
   indicate that it is the Partnerships for Opportunity Development Association,   
   a nonprofit that works with local communities across Africa through projects   
   including beekeeping,    
   sewing and gardening projects.   
      
   On its website, which had been active but went offline after Ms. Museveni’s   
   speech, the organization said that the secondary school in Mpondwe was built   
   over a period of four and a half months beginning in October 2010 by a Ugandan   
   crew and Canadian    
   volunteers. The school served students mostly from the surrounding area, who   
   were charged low fees and provided with textbooks and computers through grants.   
      
   Ms. Museveni said that auditors sent by the aid group to survey the school’s   
   finances had left on Thursday, one day before the attack. She added that there   
   had been conflict between the aid group that built the school and local groups   
   in the district    
   that had wanted to assume administrative control.   
      
   Multiple efforts to reach the school administration and the aid group were not   
   immediately successful.   
      
   For now, the town of Mpondwe continues to reel from the tragedy. As officials   
   descended on the town on Saturday, security officers urged residents to remain   
   calm and vowed to bring the perpetrators to account. Maj. Gen. Dick Olum, the   
   commander of Ugandaâ   
   €™s military operation in Congo, said in a news conference they were still   
   looking for the six abducted students and had engaged some of the militants in   
   a fight late on Saturday.   
      
   Selevest Mapoze, the mayor of Mpondwe, said many residents in the poor farming   
   community fled the town for fear of another attack. Others, he said, were   
   camped at a mortuary waiting for the bodies of their loved ones or taking DNA   
   tests to identify them.   
      
      
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