Gen. Muhoozi Kainerugaba, son of Ugandan President Yoweri Museveni and top commander of the Ugandan military, said on Wednesday that his forces are “ready to assist” Israel in battle with Iran.
“We want the war in the Middle East to end now. The world is tired of it. But any talk of destroying or defeating Israel will bring us into the war. On the side of Israel!” Kainerugaba said on social media platform X on Wednesday, launching a string of posts that continued into Friday afternoon.
“If Israel needs help, it only need ask. Their Ugandan brothers are ready to assist,” he added.
Kainerugaba explained that “we stand with Israel because we are Christians.” He also expressed gratitude for Israel’s support for Uganda, professed boundless admiration for the skill and dedication of the Israeli military, and scorned the Iranians.
“Our brothers in IDF are bombing Iran too much. That makes us look like cowards. Let us fight them, man to man on the ground. It can’t take us more than 2 weeks to capture Tehran. A UPDF Brigade is enough for that job,” he said in one characteristically feisty comment.
The IDF is the Israel Defense Forces, while the UPDF is the Uganda People’s Defense Force, the national military commanded by Kainerugaba.
On Friday, the Ugandan military chief said his “greatest hero” was Israeli Gen. Moshe Dyan, legendary leader of the Six-Day War in 1967. “I hope I do not let him down,” Kainerugaba said.
“For all those who ask where I get my confidence from, it is from Jesus Christ. God’s only Son. Continuing to fight Israel will bring disasters on Iran that they cannot conceive,” he mused in another post.
Many of Kainerugaba’s social media posts were threats to strike back with overwhelming force if Iran dared to attack Uganda.
“As our father King David said against the giant Goliath, we say to Iran ‘You come against me with sword, spear and javelin, but I come against you in the name of God Almighty, the God of the armies of Israel, whom you have defied,’” he said in one such post.
“If Tehran dares to hit us with missiles, we shall retaliate with our own missiles,” he said on Thursday. Uganda does not actually have any long-range ballistic missiles, its air force consists of six Russian jet fighters, and Iran is not believed to have any missiles that could reach Uganda.
Kainerugaba was energetic in his responses to those who claimed Iran would have little reason to attack Uganda, or that Uganda would be hard-pressed to respond with significant military force.
When a critic on social media claimed Iran could “erase Uganda from the surface of the Earth” with a single missile and suggested taking away Kainerugaba’s phone before he made more threats he could not back up, the Ugandan military chief replied, “Come and take it from me. And see if you leave with your testicles.”
Kainerugaba’s pro-Israel posts included a fond remembrance of the time a “beautiful IDF soldier” tried to teach him about guns:
In another, he offered a “sneak peek” of a statue of Lt. Col. Yonatan “Yoni” Netanyahu, the leader and only casualty of the daring Israeli operation that rescued 103 Israeli hostages from Palestinian terrorists at Uganda’s Entebbe International Airport in 1976. Yoni’s younger brother, Benjamin Netanyahu, is the current prime minister of Israel:
Kainerugaba announced in February that a statue of Lt. Col. Netanyahu would be constructed at the Entebbe International Airport, on the exact spot where he was killed in 1976. To date, no other Ugandan official has said anything about the statue. It is widely, but not universally, believed that Yoni Netanyahu was killed by a Ugandan sniper during the famous raid.
“Israel stood with us when we were nobodies in the 1980s and 1990s. Why wouldn’t we defend her now that our GDP is $100 billion? One of the largest in Africa,” Kanierugaba said on Thursday to explain his sense of gratitude and protectiveness toward Israel.
Uganda’s relations with Israel improved greatly after the overthrow of deranged and brutal dictator Idi Amin in 1979, as Prime Minister Netanyahu said when attending a memorial ceremony at Entebbe on the 40th anniversary of the raid in 2016.
“Forty years ago, they landed in the dead of night in a country led by a brutal dictator who gave refuge to terrorists. Today we landed in broad daylight in a friendly country led by a president who fights terrorists,” Netanyahu said.
