Where's the evidence?

Uganda: How close is the ADF to Islamic State?

By Musinguzi Blanshe

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Posted on November 9, 2021 09:52

Democratic Republic of Congo military personnel patrol against Allied Democratic Forces and the National Army for the Liberation of Uganda rebels near Beni in North-Kivu province
Democratic Republic of Congo military personnel (FARDC) patrol against the Allied Democratic Forces (ADF) and the National Army for the Liberation of Uganda (NALU) rebels near Beni in North-Kivu province, December 31, 2013. REUTERS/Kenny Katombe

For the first time, the Islamic State (IS) has claimed credit for a pair of attacks in Uganda last month, but experts interviewed by The Africa Report are skeptical of the group’s hyped links to local insurgents.

IS claims that it detonated a bomb on 8 October at a police station outside Kampala, where several officers were wounded, and again on 23 October at a restaurant, where a waitress got killed.

Three days later, one other person was killed in a third explosion on a bus. Ugandan security agencies say the 23-year-old man was a ‘suicide bomber’ who had been on their list of wanted persons. President Yoweri Museveni described him as a “terrorist”.

The spate of attacks is drawing new attention to purported ties between IS and the Allied Democratic Forces (ADF), a three-decade-old group of Ugandan insurgents operating across the border in the Democratic Republic of Congo. A faction of the group merged with the Islamic State’s Central African Province in 2019.

The Ugandan government has long attributed high-profile assassinations to the ADF.

In August, security agencies claimed to have foiled a

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