Bomb attacks on churches by jihadists from the Allied Democratic Forces (ADF) militia were foiled on Sunday October 15 in Uganda, about 50 km west of the capital Kampala, President Yoweri Museveni said.
Two explosive devices that the ADF, rebels having pledged allegiance to the Islamic State (IS) group, “planned to pose in the churches of Kibibi (…) were reported to the police and defused”wrote the Ugandan head of state on X (ex-Twitter).
Earlier on Sunday, Yoweri Museveni, 79, who has ruled the country with an iron fist since 1986, said that Ugandan forces had carried out airstrikes the day before against ADF positions in the Democratic Republic of Congo (DRC). ) neighbor. “It seems that many terrorists have been killed”, he wrote on X, without giving further details. ADF could “attempt to commit random terrorist acts” in Uganda following these airstrikes, the president warned.
In September, Ugandan police claimed to have foiled a bomb attack on a Kampala cathedral and arrested the man suspected of trying to activate the explosive device among the faithful.
“Province of Central Africa”
In June, members of the ADF killed 42 people, including 37 students, in a high school in western Uganda located very close to the border with the DRC. It was the deadliest attack in Uganda since the double attack in Kampala in 2010 which left 76 dead during a raid claimed by the Islamist group Chabab, based in Somalia.
In its latest report published in June, the United Nations group of experts on the DRC states that ISIS has “provided financial support to the ADF since at least 2019, through a complex financial system involving individuals in several countries on the continent, emanating from Somalia and passing through South Africa, Kenya and Uganda”.
At the origin of the mainly Muslim Ugandan rebels, established in the DRC since the 1990s, the ADF pledged allegiance in 2019 to IS, which claims certain of their actions and presents them as its “province of central Africa” (Iscap in English).
Uganda and the DRC launched a joint offensive in 2021 to drive the ADF from their Congolese strongholds, failing so far to end the group’s attacks.