Kony shifts LRA top command to his sons

Joseph Kony

What you need to know:

According to the report, Kony’s son Ali is increasingly involved in operational planning and his other son Saleh has been entrusted with managing the financial and logistical networks.

KAMPALA- A new report tracking Joseph Kony and his Lord’s Resistance Army (LRA) activities has revealed that the warlord is shifting the top command of his rebel group from older to younger commanders.

This, the LRA crisis tracker report, says partly explains why the rebel group has continued to elude its hunters and continues to hide in the Kafia Kingi enclave between the border of Sudan and Central African Republic (CAR) since December 2012.

“He will likely continue to marginalise older commanders, replacing them with more loyal younger officers who were abducted as children and earned his trust by serving as his bodyguards,” reads the report issued by the Washington-based Resolve LRA Crisis Initiative and Invisible Children.

“When necessary, Kony will discipline and even execute LRA fighters who anger him (as many as 10 combatants have been executed at his command over the past two years),” it adds.

The report, which tracks Kony’s movements from 2005, however, does not disclose identities of the disgraced commanders who have been sidelined nor their replacements.

The report states that Kony, who was in 2005 indicted by the International Criminal Court (ICC) for crimes against humanity, is also grooming his two sons, Ali and Salim Saleh to take over alternate command posts of the LRA - formed in the late 1980s to fight the new NRM government which had come to power in 1986.
“Ali (Kony’s son) is increasingly involved in operational planning and is seen as a gateway to Kony,” the report says and continues that Saleh has on the other hand been entrusted with managing the financial and logistical networks.
In May this year, Daily Monitor broke the story of Kony’s son Saleh taking over most of the LRA command from his father.

Brig Sam Kavuma, the Ugandan commander in charge of the African Union Regional Task Force (RTF) pursuing the LRA in the Central Africa Republic at that time, said although Kony is still overall leader of LRA, Saleh had increasingly become more influential and taken over most of the field operations from Dominic Ongwen.

Both the Ugandan and US governments, which are pursuing Kony and his LRA, have indicated previously that they may not sustain the hunt beyond 2015, which the report says might give him leeway to “deepen ties” with the Sudanese military whose troops are in Kafia Kingi.