Sweat dripping from his unkempt beard, second lieutenant Kasim Lukumo halted briefly to point at the thick tangle of the central African jungle.
“See how difficult it can be to find someone here if they want to hide from you,” Lukumo told AFP, as he adjusted the straps of his 30-kilo pack and the automatic rifle slung across his chest. “You can’t see more than just some few metres around and in front of you — sometimes you can’t see someone even when they are near.”
If there is a frontline in the hunt for Joseph Kony and his rebel Lord’s Resistance Army, then Lukumo and the 60 other soldiers in 77-Juliet squad are on it.
The unit is one of several dozen Ugandan army hunting squads — backed up since late last year by 100 American special forces troops — searching for any traces of the brutal rebel group in an inhospitable 400-kilometre stretch in the far eastern corner of the Central African Republic.
For the past two months, 77-Juliet have trekked almost a thousand kilometres across an unpopulated wedge of land between two rivers — dense stretches of jungle alternating with open patches of sun-scorched rocks — where the Ugandan military believe Kony and his top commanders are hiding out. Waking before dawn each morning they pack up last night’s camp before receiving the coordinates for that day’s march from intelligence officers at the nearest base a 100 kilometres away. They usually face a march of some 20 kilometres (12 miles). The plan is to use the squads to constantly harry the rebels, who have splintered into small groups, denying them breathing space to regroup and resupply. And the Ugandan army says those tactics are paying off.
“The man is weak — he is feeling pressure and in a bad condition because he has no supplies, no food,” captain Daud Muhamad, the commander of 77-Juliet, told AFP. He leaned against a towering tique tree, swatting away at the swarm of tiny flies buzzing ceaselessly around his head. Infamous for mutilating their victims and abducting children to use as sex slaves and porters, the LRA have terrorised the region for over two decades.
Last month a video calling for the arrest of Kony, a former altar boy who is wanted by the International Criminal Court, became an unlikely Internet sensation. The Kony2012 film — made by US advocacy group Invisible Children — was watched by over 100 million people and the group has urged supporters around the world to put up posters of Kony in their cities this Friday night.
