The news that came out of Uganda on Saturday was shocking. According to the Associated Press, authorities recovered 41 bodies including 38 students. They were burned, shot, or hacked up by suspected rebels who attacked a secondary school near the Congo border. The rebels are an Islamic group with ties to ISIS that wants to establish a caliphate in Central and East Africa. The global terror that most Americans consider to be a relic from 2001 has recently been revived in Africa.
According to AP, the massacre occurred in the town of Mpondwe close to the border of Uganda and the Democratic Republic of the Congo. Selevest Mapoze, the mayor of Mpondwe-Lhubiriha, said that some of the students suffered fatal burns when the rebels set fire to a dormitory and others were shot or hacked with machetes.” By the time soldiers arrived on the scene, the entire school was ablaze and there were “dead bodies of students lying in the compound,” according to Ugandan military spokesman Brig. Gen. Felix Kulayigye.
Mumbere Bright, one of three survivors, was reported by Uganda’s New Vision on Saturday. The rebels, he said, shot the student as soon as they entered his dormitory. They then used knives, pangas, and other sharp objects to slaughter all the students they could see.
The fact that the rebels hoped to separate Muslims from the other students before beginning their massacre is noteworthy. The Qur’an forbids Muslims to kill fellow Muslims (4:92); regarding non-Muslims, however, it repeats the injunction to “kill them wherever you find them” (2:191, 4:89, cf. 9:5), although subjugating them under Islamic rule is also offered as an option (9:29). There have been many instances in which jihadis separated Muslims from a crowd before killing the non-Muslims. Even in the U.S., a jihad terrorist in Minnesota in 2016 asked mall shoppers if they were Muslim and then stabbed non-Muslims.
In April 2022 jihadis stormed a Nigerian brothel, forcing people to recite the Qur’an. In Nigeria in January 2022, a man claimed that Fulani jihadis stopped him and started beating him. The beating increased when he said he was Christian.
In July 2016, jihadis only spared those who knew the Qur’an.
Many of these incidents took place in Africa. Christians, and non-Muslims, will experience a humiliating inferiority, as well as institutionalized discrimination. According to Islamic law, second-class status is similar to Blind Justice.
Now we see the same phenomenon of Islamic supremacism and jihad violence in Uganda. Meanwhile, jihadis strike virtually every day in Nigeria and are active in Somalia, Mozambique, and elsewhere in Africa as well. The governments of the various states in which the jihadis operate seem unable (or, in Nigeria’s case, unwilling) to stop them. It could be that a distracted world could someday soon find to its horror that ISIS, a group that most people thought had been stamped out years ago, has established a new caliphate comprising much of Africa. This would give a whole new piquancy to the mass migration of young African men into Europe and have far-reaching geopolitical implications. But hey, let’s not forget the really important stuff about these jihadis: what are their pronouns?ISIS may one day establish a caliphate covering much of Africa. Most people thought this group had been eliminated years ago. It would have geopolitical implications and add another dimension to the mass migration of African youth into Europe.
