The Uganda People’s Defense Force, the Ugandan army, on Friday said it had launched attacks on a shadowy rebel group in the east of the Democratic Republic of the Congo (DR Congo), where the militants killed 14 UN peacekeepers earlier this month.
Army spokesman Richard Karemire said the air force and long-range artillery were used in the cross-border strike, but no ground troops were deployed in what was described as a “pre-emptive move.”
He said in a statement that intelligence sharing with the DR Congo revealed that the Allied Democratic Forces (ADF) rebel group was planning “hostile activities” against Uganda.
The ADF, a Ugandan Muslim rebel group whose basic motives and ideology remain unclear, was behind an attack that left 14 Tanzanian peacekeepers dead two weeks ago and scores wounded, according to the UN.
Both Uganda and the DR Congo insist on a jihadist motive to the group’s actions, but many observers and experts have said that there is no proven link with the global jihadist underground and this is a “simplistic” explanation for the group’s acts.
Karemire said the strike was the culmination of cooperation between Kinshasa and Kampala against “this growing terrorist menace in our neighborhood.”
“They have been recruiting, training and carrying out radicalization even of women and children while working with foreign jihadists,” he said.
The ADF started out in 1989 with the aim of overthrowing Ugandan President Yoweri Museveni, who was seen as hostile to Muslims, but it went on to absorb other rebel factions into its ranks and started carrying out attacks in 1995.
Forced westwards by the Ugandan army, the group relocated most of its activities to the DR Congo, finding a lucrative niche in its lawless, resource-rich east.
Its record of crimes includes mass killings and maiming using machetes, the use of child soldiers and rape, according to the UN.
The ADF was blamed for an ambush on UN peacekeepers in the eastern DR Congo in October, which killed two peacekeepers and wounded 12.
It has also been accused by Kinshasa and the MONUSCO UN peacekeeping mission of killing more than 700 people in the Beni region since October 2014.
The group purportedly has links to Somalia’s al-Shabaab and to al-Qaeda. Its founder and leader, Jamil Mukulu, was arrested in Tanzania in April 2015 and was extradited to the DR Congo, to await trial.
However, the Congo Research Group based at New York University, run by US researcher Jason Stearns, published a report last year based on interviews with hundreds of witnesses, claiming several distinct groups “appear to be involved in the massacres,” including soldiers from the regular army.
The government rejected the claims and Stearns was expelled from the DR Congo after the report’s release.
In explaining the violence, some have cited struggles for control of trafficking in various industries like timber, agricultural produce or minerals in a region with extremely rich potential.
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