On Friday evening in Mpondwe, a Ugandan city near the border with the Democratic Republic of Congo, a group of people attacked a school, killed at least 41 people, set fire to a dormitory and looted the canteen. There are also some wounded, eight of them in critical condition, and some people were kidnapped, it is not clear how many. The school where the attack was carried out was a secondary school: of the 41 people killed, 38 were students.
The local police have attributed the attack on the Allied Democratic Forces (ADF), an Islamist terrorist group born in the 1990s, active in both Uganda and the Democratic Republic of the Congo and which in recent years has carried out several attacks against civilians especially in eastern Congo, killing hundreds of people . After the attack, the attackers fled to the Virunga National Park, the oldest and largest national park in Africa, which covers over 7 thousand square kilometers and is often used as a hideout by various armed militias, including the ADF.
It has been a long time since the ADF attacked a school in Uganda: one of the most serious attacks was carried out in June 1998, when 80 students were killed by a fire set in the dormitory where they were staying. In that case the attack was carried out in a technical institute of Kichwamba, also near the border with the Democratic Republic of the Congo, and over 100 students were kidnapped.
The ADF, which also has ties to the Islamic State, were born in the Democratic Republic of Congo in 1995, in opposition to the authoritarian president of Uganda Yoweri Museveni, in power since 1986 and still in office. Over the years, the ADF has also strengthened thanks to the support of some governments, including that of Sudan and the Democratic Republic of the Congo, which has exploited them to counter the presence of Ugandan and Rwandan soldiers in Congolese territory. Over the years the ADFs have grown stronger and richer: the size of the group has varied over the years but one of the latest estimates, from 2016, was of 200-300 members.