Thirteen years ago, the viral “Kony 2012” video by Invisible Children catapulted Ugandan warlord Joseph Kony into the Western spotlight, exposing the horrific crimes of his LRA through haunting footage and heartbreaking testimonies. 

Despite a U.S. Special Forces mission underway at the same time to capture him, to the tune of $1 billion in American tax dollars, the accused war criminal is at large in the African bush — less powerful, but still free. 

The International Criminal Court, meanwhile, issued an arrest warrant for Mr. Kony in 2005, charging him with 36 counts of war crimes and crimes against humanity. The Court plans to try him in absentia starting Sept. 9, 2025. 

His continued evasion, however, raises a haunting question: what happens when the world loses interest, and should the hunt for justice and accountability have time limitations?

A Brutal Legacy 

At just 14, Victoria Nyanjura’s life was shattered when Mr. Kony’s Lord’s Resistance Army (LRA) abducted her from her dorm at St. Mary’s College Aboke in Uganda’s Kole District on the night of Oct. 9, 1996.

“I tried to hide under the bed, only they found me and took me,” she tells the New York Sun. “I didn’t know what was happening. I didn’t know if they would let me live or die. That was the beginning of all my misery.”

By morning, the rebels had abducted 139 girls. Refusing to let these fighters vanish with her students, Sister Rachele Fassera — the school’s courageous Italian deputy headmistress — chased them deep into the bush. She pleaded and negotiated with relentless determination, and against all odds, Sister Rachele secured the release of 109 girls. 

The rebels, however, forced 30 girls to stay behind — including Victoria — claiming them as sex slaves and so-called “wives.”

Bound with banana fibers, strange men dragged this terrified school student into the tangled wilderness.

“Late at night, they are owning you. You have no consent,” Ms. Nyanjura continues. “When you are abducted, you have no voice. If you want to live, you comply. There were moments when I truly believed I would be better off dead. I had made peace with death.”

The teenager was forced to marry a fighter and give birth to two children while in captivity. Then, after eight years of unimaginable abuse and as fighting intensified between Mr. Kony’s rebels and Ugandan forces, Ms. Nyanjura fled on foot with a baby on her back and a toddler in her arms, eventually making it to a displacement camp.

Now in her 40s, Ms. Nyanjura considers herself one of the fortunate ones. 

“Kony is considered one of Africa’s most brutal and infamous warlords. Massacres, mutilations, and psychological terror were hallmarks of LRA tactics,” Chief Executive Officer of White Mountain Research and the former Africa Counterterrorism Director in the United States Office of the Secretary of Defense, Rudolph Atallah, tells the Sun. 

“He displaced over 2 million people in Uganda alone and weakened regional stability across four countries. Kony’s cruelty and the scale of child conscription arguably make him uniquely notorious.”

These countries include the Central African Republic, South Sudan, the Democratic Republic of the Congo, and Uganda. 

The Backstory 

Mr. Kony emerged in the mid-1980s as the self-proclaimed savior of Northern Uganda, vowing to protect its people from the new regime of President Yoweri Museveni, a former Marxist who has ruled Uganda for almost four decades. By the 1990s, Mr. Kony’s LRA had devolved into a brutal insurgency, directing its violence not toward the government but instead unleashing terror on civilians.

The group abducted more than 76,000 people — half of them children. Boys were forced into becoming child soldiers, while girls were taken as “wives” and sex slaves. Cloaked in a twisted blend of Christian extremism and mystical prophecies, Mr. Kony declared himself a prophet with divine powers, using fear, ritual, and terror to maintain control. 

The militia leader and his cohorts stand accused of hacking off victim’s faces and body parts, torching entire villages and raping and marrying girls as young as 12 years old. 

The LRA was officially designated a foreign terrorist organization by the State Department under President Bush in 2001, shortly after the September 11 attacks, as part of a broader effort to combat global terrorism. Mr. Kony was individually designated a Specially Designated Global Terrorist in 2008 with a $5 million bounty on his head.

The Search 

President Obama took the matter a step further in 2011 by launching Operation Observant Compass — a joint effort between the United States and Ugandan forces to hunt down one of the world’s most wanted men.

The effort saw up to 250 U.S. Special Forces and airmen deployed alongside Ugandan troops. Though the mission failed to capture or kill Mr. Kony, it significantly weakened the LRA, reducing its numbers from around 3,000 fighters to fewer than 100 today.

Despite this attrition, the U.S. and Uganda formally ended the Operation shortly after President Trump came to office in 2017, citing the diminished threat. However, critics have condemned the Operation’s heavy reliance on the Ugandan military — an institution historically marred by corruption, human rights abuses, and connections to the very origins of the LRA uprising — as casting a lasting shadow over its legacy. 

Others have praised the six-year endeavor as a victory for psychological operations and defections, dwindling the outfit down from several thousand to less than a few hundred, leading to top commander Dominic Ongwen surrendering in 2015 and the defection of Mr. Kony’s top communications soldier, Major Michael Omona, who the rebel group kidnaped at the age of 12. 

“The U.S.-Ugandan operation against it had a major positive impact in saving lives and cratering the LRA to the point of near-oblivion,” Senior Policy Advisor at The Sentry, Sasha Lezhnev, tells the Sun. “The LRA is a shadow of its former self today, but Mr. Kony remains at-large, and abductions of children continue on a smaller scale in the DRC (Democratic Republican of Congo).”

Kony’s Survival

The looming question is, despite the billion dollars shelled out by militaries and humanitarian groups over decades, including an elaborate real-time mapping network established by Invisible Children to support Washington’s then-mission, how has he managed to evade capture?

Defense and intelligence experts maintain that Mr. Kony is alive, although he has not been seen publicly since 2006. 

One former head of a prominent aid group in the region tells the Sun that Mr. Kony is notoriously paranoid and much more careful about his movement than other militia outfits. He and his fighters are said to avoid vehicles entirely, traveling only on foot in small, dispersed groups and refraining from using phones or any high-tech traceable technology.

Mr. Atallah says while the LRA has refrained from “major attacks or organized campaigns” in recent times, it continues to “engage in small-scale banditry, looting, and occasional kidnappings, especially of children for forced conscription.”

While drastically reduced in size and power, the LRA is believed to have secured its financial crutch in the form of wildlife and elephant poaching, ivory trafficking and the illegal diamond trade. 

So, where could he be?

Mr. Kony’s campaign of terror once stretched across South Sudan, the Democratic Republic of Congo, the Central African Republic, and parts of Sudan. His forces used the vast, ungoverned terrain of these war-torn regions to stage brutal attacks, elude capture, and exploit local instability.

“As of 2025, there is no confirmed evidence that Joseph Kony is dead. Occasional alleged sightings persist, but none have been verified conclusively. Multiple reports, including from Ugandan and U.S. intelligence, still assume he is alive, though likely aging,” said Mr. Atallah. “He would be around 63 years old.”

Mr. Kony is thought to be operating from remote strongholds in Sudan’s war-wracked Darfur region, particularly the Kafia Kingi enclave. 

“This is an ideal area for him to operate out of; he has a history there, and it keeps him close to CAR (Central African Republic)  where he still has some influence,” President of the operational and intelligence services firm the Ulysses Group, Andrew Lewis, tells the Sun. “Another area could be the Vakaga area in northern CAR.  There have been reports of LRA remnants operating in this area.”

These regions are notorious for black market trading and poaching networks that help sustain guerrilla operations. Recent testimonies from former LRA child soldiers suggest Mr. Kony continues to command from afar, using his isolation and the region’s chaos to stay elusive.

The Future

With the ICC trial upcoming in a few months, Mr. Atallah explained that the International Criminal Court warrant is “legally binding” but “has become largely symbolic.”

Mr. Kony’s former deputy, Mr. Ongwen’s trial cost over $2.7 million in 2015 alone, ending with a 25-year sentence in a plush prison, while Mr. Kony’s case is expected to cost even more. 

It is unclear whether the second Trump administration intends to re-invigorate the matter, although experts see this as unlikely given that the first operation ended under Mr. Trump’s tenure. The State Department’s Global Criminal Justice Rewards Program still lists Mr. Kony with a bounty, although the page is archived and appears yet to be updated. The Department did not respond to a request for comment. 

More recently, Russian mercenaries have shown an interest in hunting down the warlord. 

“Their involvement is not focused specifically on Kony but on expanding influence and securing mineral assets,” Mr. Atallah explained. “Russian private military contractors, like Wagner, have operated in CAR to protect mining interests, support the regime, and undermine Western influence. Russia may collect intelligence or offer assistance in exchange for mining concessions or loyalty from African nations.”

According to terrorism expert for the Counter Extremism Project, Riza Kumar, Mr. Kony was nearly captured by Russian mercenaries in the Central African Republic before reportedly fleeing towards Sudan in April last year. 

“Kony presumably remains at large around Kafia Kingi, the border area between Sudan and South Sudan,” she tells the Sun. 

Some fear the LRA could regroup in an area lacking strong governance and national armies. Yet, for the many thousands of Ugandans still living with Mr. Kony’s legacy, any semblance of justice cannot be achieved with military force. 

“For me now, whether he’s arrested or not wouldn’t contribute much to my healing,” Ms. Nyanjura adds. “But I reached a point where I just started looking for peace in the world because I realized that in situations like this, whether someone is arrested or not may not change the pain already caused. You know, once the damage is done.”