Many of the schools in Uganda, both public and private, have dormitories for boarding students. Photographs and videos from the school on Saturday showed the windows and corrugated roofs of the dormitories blackened with soot.
Maj. Gen. Dick Olum, the commander of Uganda’s military operation in Congo, said at a meeting with residents that rebel members had spent two nights in the town before attacking the school. He said that some of the students had been burned or hacked to death, and that government pathologists would carry out DNA tests to identify the charred bodies.
Ugandan officials said the army and the police were pursuing the attackers, who had fled toward the Virunga National Park, a thick forest in neighboring Congo that is home to endangered mountain gorillas. The militants used the abducted students to carry the looted food, the military said.
The government has deployed planes in the search, General Olum said. He also called on the town’s residents to remain vigilant and report anything suspicious.
The fact that this attack happened, the general said, “is a very shameful thing.”
Since 2021, the Ugandan government, in conjunction with the Congolese government, has launched an offensive against the Allied Democratic Forces, with the aim of rooting the group out from its bases in eastern Congo.
The two governments have provided few details about the military campaign, saying only that air and artillery strikes have weakened the group, which at one point pledged allegiance to the Islamic State.
But regional observers have remained doubtful about the success of the operation, code-named Shujaa, or “Bravery,” saying that the Allied Democratic Forces has continued to wreak havoc in eastern Congo, a lush, mineral-rich region where more than 100 rebel groups have overseen a wave of massacres and widespread destruction for decades.
