Feral Jundi

Sunday, June 2, 2019

Books: To Stop A Warlord, By Shannon Sedgwick Davis

This is very cool and I wanted to get this book out there for folks to check out. It is on Kindle and hardcover and would be a great addition to your library on all things PMSC. What makes this story unique is that Eeben Barlow’s company STTEP was brought in by the author of this book to help in the hunt for Joseph Kony of the LRA.

Awhile back I was able to write about the deal and check out this post for more information. Eeben also filled in a few of the blanks about this contract and it was quite unique. STTEP was training Ugandan military to conduct pseudo-operations against the LRA! –Matt

 

 

One woman’s inspiring true story of an unlikely alliance to stop the atrocities of a warlord, proving that there is no limit to what we can do, even in the face of unspeakable injustice and impossible odds

“This compelling and inspiring book beautifully moves each of us to take action to help the most vulnerable among us.”—Archbishop Emeritus Desmond Tutu 

Late one night in the summer of 2010, Shannon Sedgwick Davis, a lawyer, human rights advocate, and Texas mom to two young boys, first met a Ugandan general to discuss an unconventional plan to stop Joseph Kony, a murderous warlord who’d terrorized communities in four countries across Central and East Africa.

For twenty-five years, Kony and his Lord’s Resistance Army had killed over a hundred thousand people, displaced millions, and abducted tens of thousands of children, forcing them to become child soldiers. After Sedgwick Davis met with survivors and community leaders, aid workers and lawmakers, it was clear that the current international systems were failing to protect the most vulnerable. Guided by the strength of her beliefs and convictions, Sedgwick Davis knew she had to help other parents to have the same right she had—to go to sleep each night knowing that their children were safe.

But Sedgwick Davis had no roadmap for how to stop a violent armed group. She would soon step far outside the bounds of traditional philanthropy and activism and partner her human rights organization, the Bridgeway Foundation, with a South African private military contractor and a specialized unit within the Ugandan army. The experience would bring her to question everything she had previously believed about her role as a humanitarian, about the meaning of justice, and about the very nature of good and evil.

In To Stop a Warlord, Shannon Sedgwick Davis tells the story, for the first time, of the unprecedented collaboration she helped build with the aim of finally ending Joseph Kony’s war—and the unforgettable journey on an unexpected path to peace. A powerful memoir that reads like a thriller, this is a story that asks us just how hard we would fight for what we believe in.

100 percent of the author’s net proceeds from this book will go to organizations seeking justice and protection for civilians in conflict zones.

“This is an extraordinary memoir by an extraordinary leader—it’s impossible to read without feeling moved to do more to help those with less.”—Adam Grant, New York Times bestselling author of Originals and Give and Take

Buy the book here.

 

Saturday, October 15, 2011

Military News: US Sends Military Advisers To Africa To Hunt Down Joseph Kony And The LRA!

Filed under: Military News,Uganda — Tags: , , , , — Matt @ 4:50 PM

Yes! This is a mission that just makes sense and I will be cheering it on all the way. It is about time and hopefully these guys can find them and eliminate them. Especially since Invisible Children has set up a communications network to give a voice to the people.

Perhaps that will be a big focus in the beginning, and that would be to upgrade the communications networks and even expand them throughout all of the villages.  That map I posted shows exactly the areas that the LRA is at, and the more updates and data coming in from that network, the better. Couple that with some of the toys that these advisers will have, and I am hoping that this mission won’t take long.

But who knows?  The LRA are some serious jungle dwellers, and have survived this long. Personally, I could care less how long it takes, because this is one of those deals that should have been taken care of a long time ago. It is worth the push and it is worth the effort. –Matt

 

Obama sends military advisers to central Africa
By Matt Spetalnick and Laura MacInnis
Oct 14, 2011
President Barack Obama said on Friday he was sending about 100 U.S. troops to central Africa to help and advise government forces battling Ugandan Lord’s Resistance Army rebels accused of murder, rape and kidnapping children.
Obama — who once denounced the LRA as an “affront to human dignity” — made clear the troops would serve as trainers and advisers in efforts to hunt down rebel leader Joseph Kony and would not engage in combat except in self-defense.
In a letter to Congress, Obama said the first U.S. forces arrived in Uganda on Wednesday and would be deployed to South Sudan, the Central African Republic and the Democratic Republic of the Congo “subject to the approval of each respective host nation.”
Obama’s decision commits U.S. forces to help confront a rebel group that has drawn international condemnation for decades of chilling violence, including hacking body parts off victims and the abduction of young boys to fight and young girls for use as sex slaves.
While the U.S. military has maintained a large base in Djibouti since 2003, the latest mission marks an expanded role in conflicts in sub-Saharan Africa by putting U.S. troops in the field to support local forces in direct combat with insurgents.

(more…)

Sunday, July 4, 2010

Cool Stuff: Get Kony, By Ian Urbina

     This is an outstanding article and Sam here is quite the guy. I certainly hope he can find and kill Joseph Kony, and save as many children as he can over there.  What is really cool is I guess Hollywood digs his story too and they will be making a movie about him. Thanks to Jason for sending me this. –Matt

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“I found God in 1992,” says Sam Childers. “I found Satan in 1998.” The reference is to Joseph Kony, leader of the outlaw Lord’s Resistance Army. Photograph by Jonathan Becker.

Get Kony

By Ian Urbina

April 27, 2010

The Lord’s Resistance Army—a murderous rebel group made up mostly of Ugandans, and led by a crazed warlord named Joseph Kony—today ranges across the jungles and scrubland of Uganda, Congo, Sudan, and the Central African Republic. Its ranks may be depleted, but the remnant deals death wherever it goes. U.S.-backed military forces are trying to hunt Kony down. So is a Pennsylvania-based evangelical preacher named Sam Childers—a biker and former drug dealer who has found his calling in this quest for a killer. Last year the author joined Childers as he continued his hunt for Kony. It is a story of pursuer and pursued, each believing that God is on his side.

It’s two a.m., and we’re barreling down a deeply pocked dirt road in Southern Sudan. In the cool of night, the temperature is nearly 100 degrees. Sam Childers, 46, is behind the wheel of a chrome-tinted Mitsubishi truck. Christian rock blares on the speakers. He has a Bible on the dash and a shotgun that he calls his “widow-maker” leaning against his left knee. His top sergeant, Santino Deng, 34, a Dinka tribesman with an anthracite complexion and radiant black eyes, sits in the passenger seat, an AK-47 across his lap. I sit in the back. Since leaving the town of Mundri, headed toward the Congolese border, we’ve been driving for two bone-jarring days on roads littered with the charred wrecks of armored vehicles and fuel tankers, remnants of battles past. A truck follows close behind, carrying 15 men from the small militia group under Childers’s personal command. The convoy is on its way to a Sudanese town called Maridi. In the area we’re passing through, just hours ago soldiers from the Lord’s Resistance Army (L.R.A.) hacked 15 villagers to death with machetes, then disappeared into the bush. Intelligence sources from the Sudan People’s Liberation Army—the ragtag military wing of the breakaway government of Southern Sudan—have indicated that elements of the L.R.A. are now headed to Maridi. Childers wants to intercept them, and kill their leader.

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Friday, April 23, 2010

Africa: Why Can’t Anyone Stop The LRA?

Filed under: Africa — Tags: , , , , — Matt @ 4:01 AM

    Apart from friendships with shady dictators, the LRA has gotten pretty good at what it does — massacring and hiding throughout the region. “They’ve developed skills that no military has on Earth,” said Frank Nyakairu, who covered the LRA for 10 years for Uganda’s Daily Monitor and now works for Reuters. LRA fighters are excellent at hiding in and moving quickly across rough terrain, often at night, and few conventional militaries can keep up. The LRA has also honed its ability to forage and loot the supplies it needs, including child soldiers. Few if any similar guerrilla or insurgent groups worldwide have been capturing, brainwashing, and training children for as long as the LRA, and its leaders have refined their brutal techniques to an art form.

    The LRA’s child soldiers have also made offensive operations against the movement extremely difficult because, bluntly put, children are a tactical advantage. Nyakairu covered several ambushes, for example, in which LRA child soldiers posed innocently playing football or bathing naked. As soon as Ugandan forces passed, the children grabbed hidden guns and opened fire.

***** 

   This is a chilling run down on the history of these animals, and how they have gotten away with their murderous exploits.  The quote up top is especially troubling.  In essence, this group of soldiers will do anything to survive. They have had total freedom to develop whatever strategy and tactics they think is necessary, and this child soldier based army is what has evolved.

   I have talked about pseudo-operations recently and this is another area of discussion in which no one has really covered.  Using children for operations, is an unfortunate tactic of some of the most despicable characters out there.  But it is something that needs to be studied, because in a world of non-state actors, there are no rules.  Using children as soldiers is perfectly acceptable to these folks, just as long as they achieve their goals.

   Like the quote up top has stated, the ‘LRA has developed skills that no military has on earth’, and love them or like them, they have survived. They survive in the bush, they move fast, they have learned to live a life on the run, and they deploy their child soldiers like little pseudo operators, and this is working for them.  Highly immoral, but it is working for them.

   Now to answer the question why no one is able to stop them?  There is a simple answer to this question.  There is no political will to do what is necessary.  Everyone cries as to how immoral or terrible the LRA is, but no one has the guts to step in and just kill him.  We are too worried about what these corrupt countries and militaries think in this region, and we continue to throw money at them with the hopes that they will accomplish a task that they are not up to.  Worse yet, if they actually kill or capture Joseph Kony, they will effectively end their anarchy gravy train that the West has loaded up with money.  Kill Joseph, and the AGT is done.

   Nope, if the West actually cared about the people of these regions, they would effectively ignore these governments and militaries, and kill Joseph Kony.  Of course these countries would grumble and whine about threatening their sovereignty, but in the end, the world would be a better place because we actually removed such horrible human. I see no other way, and as this article has explained, the strategy has failed to kill him.  What instead has happened, is the west has stood by and watched a psychotic killer, destroy the lives of thousands of children, as well as kill and maim thousands of people throughout Africa. –Matt

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Why Can’t Anyone Stop the LRA?

One of the evilest rebel armies in Africa has been kidnapping children and brutally murdering civilians for 20 years despite constant international efforts to wipe it out. Why?

BY MICHAEL WILKERSON | APRIL 19, 2010

In its nearly 20 years of fighting in northern Uganda, the Lord’s Resistance Army (LRA) killed or injured thousands of civilians, abducted scores of children to fill its ranks, and traumatized a whole generation of Ugandans. But in recent years, it was beginning to look as if Uganda’s nightmarish two-decade struggle against the LRA was at last coming to an end. The rebels had mostly been driven out of northern Uganda in 2005 by government troops, and the last LRA attacks on Ugandan soil were in 2006. The terror that once plagued the country’s north was finally fading into memory.

The LRA, however, was not. It was just moving next door — to the Democratic Republic of the Congo (DRC), South Sudan, and the Central African Republic (CAR), where the rebels have continued their trademark nastiness, including a DRC rampage between Dec. 14 and 17, 2009, that killed more than 300 people. The massacre, chronicled in a recent Human Rights Watch report, shows that the LRA is still an immense threat to unarmed civilians.

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Sunday, April 11, 2010

Uganda: Uganda Enlists Former LRA To Hunt And Kill LRA

Filed under: Africa,Uganda — Tags: , , , , — Matt @ 12:07 PM

   Another awesome article by Mr. Gettleman.  This is great news and I wonder if the Ugandan military is reading FJ?  Because if they are, then they more than likely got this idea about turning the enemy from all the stuff I have posted on pseudo operations and the Selous Scouts. Whomever gave them the idea, good job.

   With that said, I would highly recommend to the Ugandan military to also give these former rebels as much support and training as possible.  They have a unique knowledge base about the prey they are going after, and if they have the right tools and support, they could easily gain the edge on any LRA troopers they come across.

    Each of these hunter killer teams should also have Ugandan special forces attached with them.  That way, any kind of CAS that Uganda can bring to the fight, could be called up by trusted SF guys.  Or SF handlers could help to coordinate blocking forces, so they could actually entrap LRA groups. Even AFRICOM could provide assistance with a UAV or two. At the least, Uganda should be studying exactly how the Selous Scouts in Rhodesia conducted their programs. Very cool, and I hope they get that bastard Joseph Kony. –Matt

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Uganda Enlists Former Rebels to End a War

April 10, 2010

By JEFFREY GETTLEMAN

OBO, Central African Republic — The night is inky, the helicopters are late and Cmdr. Patrick Opiyo Makasi sits near a dying cooking fire on a remote army base, spinning his thoughts into the darkness.

“It was either them or me,” Commander Makasi said of the countless people he has killed. “Them or me.”

The Lord’s Resistance Army, a notoriously brutal rebel group, snatched him from a riverbank when he was 12 years old, more than 20 years ago, and trained him to burn, pillage and slaughter. His name, Makasi, means scissors in Kiswahili, and fellow soldiers said he earned it by shearing off ears and lips.

But now he has a new mission: hunting down his former boss.

In an unorthodox strategy that could help end this seemingly pointless war, the Ugandan Army is deploying special squads of experienced killers to track down the L.R.A.’s leader, Joseph Kony, one of the most wanted men in Africa, who has been on the run for two decades.

These soldiers, like Commander Makasi, are former L.R.A. fighters themselves, and just about all of them were abducted as children. They recently surrendered and are now wading through black rivers and head-high elephant grass across three of the most troubled countries in the world — the Central African Republic, the Democratic Republic of Congo and Sudan — where the last remnants of the L.R.A. are believed to be hiding. They say they know all of Mr. Kony’s tricks.

Some critics may not think this wise, putting so much trust in men whose moral compass had been turned upside down for so long.

(more…)

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