LRA rebels attack Gulu IDP camp

Lord's Resistance Army (LRA) rebels attacked a camp for internally displaced persons (IDPs) in Oneko, 10 km west of the northern town of Gulu, on Monday night, killing two people near the camp, according to local sources and the Ugandan army. The sources said the rebels attacked a nearby army barracks, killing the son and wife of a soldier stationed there to defend the camp. Eight other people were wounded in the raid. "They [the LRA] also burned a number of huts, but we don't know about any abductions," a source told IRIN. The army spokesman, Maj Shaban Bantariza, told IRIN on Wednesday that he had no details about the deaths. "The local defence unit in charge of protecting the camp repelled the infiltration. They chased away the terrorists," he said. A number of huts in the camp, he added, had been razed. The attack occurred at about 01:00 GMT, hours before an army operation to arrest suspected LRA "collaborators" in Gulu District's biggest refugee camp, Pabbo, ended in a mysterious fire which destroyed 2,000 huts and rendered tens of thousands of people homeless. Those rendered homeless are part of 1.2 million people displaced by LRA activity in northern Uganda and now huddled in IDP camps. The camps are relatively safe, but have also frequently been attacked by the rebels in search of loot. The LRA say they are fighting to overthrow Uganda's government and replace it with a theocracy based on the Biblical Ten Commandments, but it is civilians in the north who have largely borne the brunt of their attacks. Meanwhile, the army claimed that recent successes against the LRA were unprecedented. "The list of senior LRA [members] we have killed includes most of [the LRA leader, Joseph] Kony's inner circle," Bantariza told IRIN. "This is going to make it a lot easier to finish him than it has ever been before." Bantariza said Kony was in Sudan and that Ugandan army soldiers would be deployed there to keep him on the run, if not to kill or capture him. "We have broken the back of the LRA. We need to maintain the pressure while the dry season is still here so we don't get bogged down in muddy terrain," he told IRIN. He said the intelligence services knew where Kony was in Sudan. "We are not relying on hearsay, but on credible intelligence," he told IRIN. "But, like [Osama] bin Laden, Kony is not easy to catch - he moves around a lot."