Although Lord’s Resistance Army leader Joseph Kony thinks he is a messiah and claims to be a fundamentalist Christian, he apparently had no qualms about ordering his notoriously brutal rebel army to commit horrific acts of death and destruction against local Congolese populations as the LRA fled their outpost in Congo’s Garamba National Park following the launch of “Operation Lightening Thunder,” joint offensive begun in mid-December by the armies of Uganda, Congo, and southern Sudan.
On Christmas day, the L.R.A killed 40 people in the village of Faradje; the BBC reported that the LRA. cut off peoples’ lips as a warning to others to keep quiet about the new atrocities being committed. The New York Times reported that as the L.R.A. fighters fled, they “hacked to death dozens of villagers in their path.” The Ugandan army also accused the LRA of killing more than 100 people in a Catholic church in another Congolese village near the south Sudan border.
For an idea of where the L.R.A. has recently been operating (read: wreaking havoc and committing mass atrocities against civilians), see this helpful map from the U.N.