‘A Terrible Tragedy’: Uganda reels from deadly terrorist attack
The militants reached the private boarding school grounds just before midnight, as students went to bed, on a partly cloudy night in a small town in Uganda’s lush western fields.
First, they shot the school security guard in the head before heading to the students’ dormitories. When they were unable to enter the boys’ locked residence halls, they threw firebombs inside, setting mattresses on fire and igniting a fire that soon engulfed the building, according to witnesses, government officials and security agents. Petrified, the girls opened their dormitory doors and attempted to flee, only for the attackers to catch up and hack them to death with machetes.
When it was all over the Friday night attack in Mpondwea town near Uganda’s border with the Democratic Republic of Congo, 37 of the school’s 63 students lost their lives, according to Janet Museveni, the country’s first lady and minister of education and sports.
The attackers, members of an Islamist militant group, also set fire to the school’s library, looted a food store and kidnapped six students, using them to carry the looted goods, military officials said. As they fled the city into the dense forests of the Congo, they killed three other people, including a woman in her 60s, bringing the death toll to 41.
“The community is devastated and feels so bad,” said Mumbere Jackson, who attended a funeral for a number of students in the nearby town of Kajwenge on Sunday afternoon. “Many ask: where were the security forces? How did these people get here and commit this atrocity?”
The invasion of Mpondwe Lhubiriha Secondary School was Uganda’s deadliest act of terrorism in years, raising fears of resurgent militant activity in a region with a history of disruptive cross-border insurgencies.
The brutal attack demonstrated the reach and 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.
“Attacking a school is probably part of a desire to recruit,” said Richard Moncrieff, the project director for the Great Lakes region at the International Crisis Group, “but it also has shock value, which the wider jihadist public of the group.”
Friday’s attack, he added, “shows that despite nearly two years of concentrated joint operations against the group, it still has significant capability.”
It also highlighted the security challenges facing Uganda, even as the long-time president, Yoweri Museveni, deploys troops in conflicts across Africa and receives billions of dollars in development aid and military aid from Western countries, including the United States.
Formed in 1995 against the rule of Mr Museveni, Allied Democratic Forces have carried out multiple attacks across Uganda, including one on a university in 1998 that killed 80 students. The Allied Democratic Forces have that too communities in Eastern Congo attackeda verdant, mineral-rich region ravaged by decades of atrocities committed by dozens of armed groups.
In late 2021, the group caused explosions in the Ugandan capital of Kampala, killing three people. That attack prompted President Museveni launch a joint military campaign with Congo in an attempt to drive the group from their camps in eastern Congo. Still, the group has continued to recruit new soldiers for battle, including some children, and organize bloody attacks, such as in March. which killed 36 people in a village in North Kivu province in eastern Congo.
Observers have criticized the military approach of the Ugandan and Congolese governments in the region, saying that in order to provide lasting solutions, governments should focus on state-building and providing better economic opportunities.
“The attack demonstrates the need for a broader strategy than purely military,” Moncrieff said.
Mpondwe Lhubiriha Secondary School was built by a non-governmental organization led by a Canadian citizen named Peter Hunt, said Ms Museveni, the education minister.
She has not identified the agency, but research and a local resident both indicate that it is the Partnerships for Opportunity Development Association, a non-profit that works with local communities across Africa through projects such as beekeeping, sewing and gardening projects.
On its website, which was active but went offline after Ms Museveni’s speech, the organization said the Mpondwe high school had been built over a period of four and a half months from October 2010 by a Ugandan crew and Canadian volunteers. The school mainly served students from the area, who paid low fees and were provided with textbooks and computers through scholarships.
Ms Museveni said auditors sent by the aid group to look into the school’s finances had left on Thursday, a 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 wanted to take administrative control.
Several attempts to reach the school board and the support group were not immediately successful.
For now, the town of Mpondwe remains reeling from the tragedy. When officials raided the city on Saturday, security agents urged residents to remain calm and vowed to hold the perpetrators accountable. Major General Dick Olum, the commander of Uganda’s military operation in the Congo, said at a press conference that they were still searching for the six kidnapped students and that they had engaged some militants in combat late Saturday.
Selevest Mapoze, the mayor of Mpondwe, said many residents of the poor farming community were fleeing the town for fear of another attack. Others, he said, camped out in a morgue and waited for the bodies of their loved ones or took DNA tests to identify them.
“We’re trying to convince them to come back because we handle security,” he said in a telephone interview. “But it’s tough. The mood is heavy. A heavy silence has taken over the city.”