An elderly woman and two children died when their home was set ablaze by suspected Allied Democratic Forces (ADF) rebels linked to the Islamic State group in a village in western Uganda on Monday, local authorities learned on Tuesday .
• Also read: Democratic Republic of Congo: At least 20 dead in attack attributed to ADF
• Also read: Uganda: 41 dead, mostly students, in a jihadist attack on a school
The attack occurred in a remote village in Kamwenge district, which had already been the scene of an attack attributed to the ADF a week earlier in which ten villagers were killed and burned to death.
According to Kamwenge District Commissioner Isiah Byarugaba in an interview with AFP, the attackers set fire to a house where the victims were.
“ADF rebels killed three people, an elderly woman and two of her grandchildren. They were burnt in their house last night,” he said.
The army and police were pursuing the rebels, he added.
“We are on the ground, assessing the situation and mobilizing the local community to prevent such cowardly attacks by ADF terrorists on innocent civilians,” he said.
The originally mainly Muslim Ugandan rebels, the ADF, have been active in the east of the Democratic Republic of Congo since the mid-1990s and have killed thousands of civilians there. In 2019, they swore allegiance to IS, which now claims some of their actions and portrays them as its “Central African Province.”
Uganda and the Democratic Republic of Congo launched a joint offensive in 2021 to drive the ADF from its Congolese strongholds, but have so far failed to end the group's attacks.
In October, two tourists, a British man and a South African woman on their honeymoon, and their guide were killed in Queen Elizabeth Park (West) in an attack claimed by the Islamic State group.
In June, an attack at a high school in western Uganda, also attributed to the ADF, killed 42 people, including 37 students.