Published by
Daily Monitor
Daily Monitor
In October 2011, then US President Barack Obama surprised many when he announced that he was sending roughly 100 US troops to central Africa to help hunt down Joseph Kony (or JK in the shorthand of journalists)—leader of the brutal Ugandan rebel group, the Lord’s Resistance Army (LRA). The Uganda People’s Defence Forces (UPDF) had by that point been on the trail of Kony since the LRA was driven out of northern Uganda at the start of the 2000s, following nearly 15 years of a bloody insurgency. The LRA had by 2004, when it decamped to South Sudan, abducted more than 20,000 children, and raped th…