HIGHLIGHTS OF NIF ROLE IN THE GREATER HORN OF AFRICA

The Ugandan Front
In 1993, the Khartoum regime began supporting a small and relatively inactive residual guerrilla force on the Ugandan border in an area inhabited by Acholi-speaking people. This was the Lord's Resistance Army (LRA), a millenarian movement inspired by the prophetess Alice Lakwena, who rebelled against the Ugandan government in 1987 and took refuge in Kenya after her defeat. The LRA leader, Josephy Kony, is a visionary who claims to be guided by spirits and daubs his fighters with a magic substance that is supposed to protect them against bullets.
In 1996, the Sudanese made contact with another anti-Ugandan organization, the Nile West Bank Liberation Front. It has operated from bases within Democratic Republic of Congo and has carried out its actions largely in the far northwestern Kaya region of Uganda . It is predominantly made up of Muslims from the local Nubi, Kakwa and Aringa ethnic communities. Its officers are mainly ex-members of Idi Amin's army. It has been both less violent and less militarily active than the LRA.
Another Ugandan group that received support from Sudan and also from Al Qaeda was the Allied Democratic Forces (ADF). The ADF, which adopted an Islamist ideology, emerged out of a core group of puritanical Moslems from the Tabliq sect, whose members portray themselves as "Moslem evangelists." Determined to put an end to what they considered to be the marginalization of Muslims in Uganda , a faction of Uganda 's Tabliqs resorted to armed struggle in the hopes of establishing an Islamist state that would respect their interests.
Together with the obscure and largely defunct National Army for the Liberation of Uganda (NALU), the Tabliqs moved to western Uganda to start the rebellion under the ADF umbrella. Among ADF's recruits, there were Rwandan Hutu supporters of the former government responsible for the 1994 genocide, fighters from the local Bakonja ethnic community in the Congo, and unemployed youth from various Baganda, Banyoro and Batoro ethnic communities The ADF set up rear bases in neighboring Congo where it could receive military support from Sudan and from whence it began recruiting and training fighters with the promise of money and education. Al Qaeda helped to set up camps for training ADF fighters, and when Osama bin Laden's organization settled in Afghanistan in 1996, ADF members traveled there to undergo training as explosives experts. The Ugandan government attributed numerous terrorist bombings that occurred in the capital, Kampala , between 1997 and 1999 to the ADF.
Even after bin Laden's departure, Sudan continued to support the Ugandan Islamic fundamentalists. As late as June 2004, Uganda and the Democratic Republic of Congo were engaged in negotiations on how to dispose of about 2.5 tons of arms that the Sudanese government had supplied to ADF rebels based in the Congo

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