Carnage as US-backed Congo Raid Fails

[unhappycamper]

Carnage as US-backed Congo Raid Fails
February 09, 2009
International Herald Tribune

The American military helped plan and pay for a recent attack on a notorious Ugandan rebel group, but the offensive went awry, scattering fighters who carried out a wave of massacres as they fled, killing as many as 900 civilians.

The operation was led by Uganda and intended to crush the Lord's Resistance Army, a brutal rebel group that had been hiding out in a Congolese national park, eschewing efforts to sign a peace treaty. But the rebel leaders escaped, breaking their fighters into small groups that continue to ransack town after town, hacking, burning, shooting and clubbing to death anyone in their way.

Uganda has long been an ally of the United States, but the American role in the offensive has not been widely known. Senior American military officials said a team of 17 advisors from the Pentagon's new Africa Command had worked closely with Ugandan officers on the mission, providing them with satellite phones, prized intelligence and $1 million in fuel.

No American forces got involved in the ground fighting in this isolated, rugged corner of Congo, but human rights advocates and villagers here complain that the Ugandans and the Congolese troops who carried out the operation did little or nothing to protect nearby villages, despite a history of rebel reprisals against civilians.

The troops did not seal off the rebels' escape routes or deploy soldiers to many of the nearby towns where the rebels slaughtered people in churches and tried to twist off the heads of toddlers.


Rest of Africom article at: http://www.military.com/news/article/carnage-as-us-backed-congo-raid-fails.html?col=1186032310810

[EmilyAnne]

1. Thanks for posting!

[Captain Hilts]

2. I'm glad they tried to do SOMETHING, ANYTHING to stop what's going on there. nt