An elderly woman and two children died when their house was burnt down on Monday by suspected Allied Democratic Forces (ADF) rebels affiliated with the Islamic State group, in a village in western Uganda, local authorities said on Tuesday.
The attack took place in a remote village in the Kamwenge district, already the scene of an attack a week earlier attributed to the ADF in which ten villagers were killed and burnt.
According to the Kamwenge district commissioner, Isiah Byarugaba, interviewed by AFP, the attackers set fire to a house in which the victims were staying.
“The ADF rebels killed three people, an elderly woman and two of her grandchildren. They were burnt to death in their house last night”, he said.
He added that the army and police were in pursuit of the rebels.
“We are on the ground to assess the situation and we are mobilising the local community to prevent such cowardly attacks by ADF terrorists against innocent civilians”, he added.
Originally Ugandan rebels with a Muslim majority, the ADF have been active since the mid-1990s in the eastern DRC, where they have killed thousands of civilians. In 2019, they pledged allegiance to the EI, which now claims some of their actions and presents them as its “central African province”.
Uganda and the DRC launched a joint offensive in 2021 to drive the ADF out of their Congolese strongholds, but have so far failed to put an end to the group’s attacks.
In October, two tourists, a British man and a South African woman on their honeymoon, as well as their guide, were killed in Queen Elizabeth Park (west) in an attack claimed by the Islamic State group. In June, 42 people, including 37 pupils, were killed in a secondary school in western Uganda in an attack also attributed to the ADF.
