Obama extends US mission chasing Kony

 US President Barack Obama has said he would prolong the mission of 100 US Special Forces helping Ugandan troops scour thick African jungles for rebel Lord's Resistance Army (LRA) chief Joseph Kony.

Obama authorized the deployment last year to help hunt down Kony, one of the world's most wanted fugitives whose rebels are notorious for abducting young children for use as sex slaves and soldiers and for mutilating their victims.

"This is part of our regional strategy to end the scourge that is the LRA and help realize a future where no African child is stolen from their family, no girl is raped and no boy is turned into a child soldier," Obama said Monday.

The president said that after a review of the US deployment of the elite forces he had decided to extend their mission.

"Today I can announce that our advisers will continue their efforts to bring this madman to justice and to save lives," Obama said in a speech at the US Holocaust Memorial Museum.

The US soldiers are backing up Uganda troops searching for traces of the LRA in an inhospitable 350-mile (400-kilometer) stretch of jungle in the far eastern corner of the Central African Republic.

Last month, a video calling for the arrest of Kony, a former altar boy who is wanted by the International Criminal Court, became an unlikely Internet sensation.

US officials have said that the American troops -- most of whom are based in Uganda -- will bolster the Ugandan forces with intelligence gathering and coordination and logistics.

Soldiers with a Ugandan squad marching through the jungles in search of Kony told an AFP reporter this month that none of the US troops have been out in the bush with them.

But they communicate regularly with surveillance planes they say are flown -- sometimes at night -- by Americans and have seen their supplies and morale boosted in recent months. AFP