Posted by Cody Leblanc

A new report and video by the Enough Project and the Satellite Sentinel Project, co-produced by Invisible Children and The Resolve, confirms that the Lord’s Resistance Army,or LRA, has turned to poaching elephants as a means to fund its atrocities.

On March 21, we heard the great news that 28 women and children were released from LRA captivity. As the LRA Crisis Tracker reports, the group was actually escorted and purposefully let go by four LRA fighters near the town of Digba in Bas-Uele district of northern DRC. This is the largest return of long-term LRA members in at least three years, and is a truly encouraging achievement for efforts to incentivize LRA defections, which have been expanded in the past year.

The Brief provides the most comprehensive analysis of recent LRA activity publicly available, giving field workers, policymakers, and activists a tool to better understand the LRA conflict.

January 1, 2013 by Michael

On December 14, 2009, a band of just a few dozen LRA fighters entered a small village in the Makombo area of Democratic Republic of Congo. They proceeded from house to house, killing or abducting anyone they encountered. Over the next four days, they repeated this tactic in at least nine additional villages, killing 321 people and abducting more than 250.

by Michael

This week we are sharing three top stories from 2012. After much debate, they have been chosen by our team as the best demonstrations of our impact and shared as a token of thanks to our supporters.

Our first is a story that stands above the rest as a sign of hope for our work. Contributions from Resolve supporters enabled us to advance U.S. actions that helped a wave of LRA fighters and abductees escape from the group in 2012 — maybe even as many as the previous three years combined.

On Dec. 4th, the US Senate passed next year’s defense authorizations bill after adding a new provision urging sustained commitment for efforts to help end LRA atrocities. The amendment was introduced by Senators Jim Inhofe (R-OK) and Chris Coons (D-DE), who chairs the Africa Subcommittee. It passed unanimously. The full text is below.

On September 28th, 2012, religious leaders from Congo, Central African Republic (CAR), and South Sudan met as part of the Regional Interfaith Network of Religious Leaders for Peace (Le Réseau Régional et Interconfessionnel des Leaders Religieux pour la Paix, RRILRP) and released a statement expressing their concerns and recommendations for seeing an end to the LRA conflict. They call for increased protection of civilians and humanitarian assistance, especially in the most isolated areas of CAR.

The LRA has long been associated with child soldiers, and rightfully so – UNICEF estimates that the LRA has abducted at least 35,000 children since 1986. But LRA Crisis Tracker data on abductions indicates that the LRA is relying less on abducted children to replenish fighting capacity, corroborating a trend that’s been highlighted anecdotally in the past two years by LRA analysts. Instead, the LRA seem to be abducting more adults, who often escape or are released within a few days, to transport food and other goods looted from local communities.

In recent months the M23 rebellion has severely destabilized eastern Congo, displacing 260,000 people in North Kivu province and raising doubts about whether Congolese troops can maintain control of key towns such as Goma. In an attempt to stem the advance of the M23 rebels, Congolese officials decided two weeks ago to redeploy the US-trained 391st Congolese battalion from LRA-affected areas of northern Congo to North Kivu.