Part of the LRA’s success in eluding government forces has been its ability to slip back and forth over the porous borders of the Central African Republic, South Sudan and Congo. But since late last year, U.S. forces have been providing intelligence, looking at patterns of movement, and setting up better communications to link the countries’ forces together so that they can better track the guerrilla force.

Sent by President Barack Obama at the end of 2011, the 100 U.S. soldiers are split up about 15 to 30 per base, bringing in American technology and experience to assist local forces.

Exact details on specific improvements that the American forces have brought to the table, however, are classified, to avoid giving Kony the ability to take countermeasures.

“We don’t necessarily go and track into the bush but what we do is we incorporate our experiences with the partner nation’s experiences to come up with the right solution to go out and hopefully solve this LRA problem,” said Gregory, a 29-year-old captain from Texas, who would only give his first name in accordance with security guidelines.

The U.S. troops also receive reports from local hunters and others that they help analyze together with surveillance information.

“It’s very easy to blame everything on the LRA but there are other players in the region — there are poachers, there are bandits, and we have to sift that to filter what is LRA,” he said.

Central African Republic soldiers largely conduct security operations in and around the town, while Ugandan soldiers, who have been in the country since 2010, conduct longer-range patrols looking for Kony and his men.

Since January, they have killed seven LRA fighters in the area and captured one, while rescuing 15 people abducted by the group including five children, said their local commander, Col. Joseph Balikuddembe.

There has been no contact with the LRA since March, however, according to Ugandan Army spokesman Col. Felix Kulayigye, who said the LRA now is in survival mode. The LRA is thought to today number only around 150 to 300 die-hard fighters.

“They’re hiding,” he said. “They are not capable of doing.”

But with Kony still around, there are wide ranging-fears that the LRA will be able to rebuild.

“There’s periods of time when the LRA will lie low when the military pressure is too high or where there’s a threat that they don’t understand such as the American intervention,” said Matthew Brubacher, a political affairs officer with the U.N.’s mission in Congo, who was also an International Criminal Court investigator on the Kony case for five years.

“But then after a while after they figure it out, if they have the opportunity they’ll try to come back, so it’s just a matter of time they’ll try to come back. Kony always said ‘if I have only 10 men, I can always rebuild the force.”

Right now, expectations are high of the Americans serving in Obo and Djema in the Central African Republic, as well as those in Dungu in Congo and Nzara in South Sudan.

“For all the communities, the U.S. bases in Obo and Djema means one, Kony will be arrested, and two, there will be a lot of money for programs, humanitarian programs,” said Sabine Jiekak of the Italian humanitarian aid agency Coopi.

Central African Republic Deputy Defense Minister Jean Francis Bozize said it’s been difficult for the poor country’s small military to deal with Kony in the southeast as well as several other militant groups in the north.

An African Union mission expected to begin later this year should help expedite the cross-border pursuit of the LRA.

In the meantime, Bozize said the American forces could make a big difference.

“The involvement of U.S. forces with their assistance in providing information and intelligence will allow for all forces to operate from the same base-level of intelligence … (giving) better coordination with better results,” he told reporters in the capital, Bangui.

But the military mission is not a simple one.

How do you find small groups of seasoned fighters hidden deep in the jungle, who have eluded authorities for decades? How do you prevent brutal reprisal attacks on civilians? How can you bring together several countries’ troops to cooperate on cross-border pursuits?

The LRA usually attacks late at night, then melts back away into the jungle. Seasoned bush fighters, they employ many techniques to elude pursuit — walking along rocks or along streams to avoid leaving tracks, for example, and sometimes even marching backward to fool trackers.

Kony has reportedly stopped using radios and satellite phones for communications, instead relying on an elaborate system involving runners and multiple rendezvous points.

Key to his capture is good information from local residents — which they will only give when they can be sure of their own safety, according to American commanders.

“The population have to believe that they are secure and once they believe they are secure from the LRA, you start to deny the LRA the opportunity to attack villages to get people, to get food, to get medicine,” Gen. Carter Ham, the head of U.S. Africa Command, told reporters in Stuttgart.

That may take some time in Obo, a town of some 15,000 where around 3,500 people have sought refuge to escape LRA violence in the area.

Rural farmers and others stick to within 5 kilometers (3 miles) of the village for safety — originally the area that Central African Republic soldiers were able to patrol but now more a rule of thumb followed by the locals.

They’ve started recently to venture out farther, emboldened by the presence of the Ugandans and Americans to help the government forces, but are too nervous to stray too wide from the safety of the village.

“They’re still scared, they’re still wary because Joseph Kony is still out there,” said Mayor Joseph Kpioyssrani, looking at the jungle behind him.

Kony’s LRA sprung up in 1986 as a rebel movement among the Acholi people in northern Uganda to fight against the Kampala government, but has for decades been leading its violent campaign without any clear political ideology.

Emmanuel Daba, 33, was one of 76 people abducted in the first LRA raid on Obo in 2008 and forced to fight for the guerrillas for two years before managing to escape.

“We were trained to kill — forced to kill — otherwise we’d be killed ourselves,” he said outside the tiny radio station where he now works broadcasting messages to try and encourage others with the LRA to defect or escape. “I still have dreams — nightmares.”

This year, the U.S. Defense Department is committing $35 million to efforts to find and fight Kony.

Since 2008, the U.S. State Department has sent some $50 million in funds to support the Ugandan military’s logistics and non-lethal operations against the LRA, including contracting two transport helicopters to ferry troops and supplies. Another $500 million has been given over that time for the broader northern Uganda recovery effort in the aftermath of Kony’s presence there.

In Stuttgart, Ham keeps a “Kony 2012″ poster hanging on his office door.

Though he isn’t committing to the goal of the viral YouTube campaign to see Kony neutralized by the end of the year, he does define success as either capturing or killing the LRA leader eventually.

“I’m confident that the mission will be successful, but I can’t give you a timeline when that’s going to occur…” Ham said. “It is one of those organizations that if you remove the senior leader and the small number of those who surround him, I believe this is one of those organizations that will not be able to regenerate.”

Just where it first cropped is not certain, but an early depiction appears in the 18th century French painting “The Oath of the Horatii” by Jacques-Louis David.

After being adopted by Italian dictator Benito Mussolini, fellow fascist Adolf Hitler imitated the salute in Germany. The Nazi party’s flat-handed version was usually accompanied by the cry “Sieg heil!” (“Hail victory”) and was widely seen as an expression of virility, power and obedience.

But while such salutes are today best known for their use by the far right, they also have been a staple of the far left.

The Young Pioneers, a Soviet youth organization, turned the open-hand to the side for their salute, while other communist groups often used the closed-fist to symbolize unity and solidarity.

The raised fist has been used by the civil liberties movement, the feminist movement, the labor movement and scores of others to show the same thing.

The Nazi version of the salute was tolerated at the 1936 Olympics in Berlin. But at the 1968 Olympics in Mexico City, two black American athletes, Tommie Smith and John Carlos, were suspended by the U.S. Olympic Committee after giving the black power salute of a raised fist as a protest at their medal victory ceremony.

In Hollywood, Charlie Chaplin lampooned the gesture in “The Great Dictator.” And who could forget Peter Sellers’ inability to control his right arm as the title character in “Dr. Strangelove?”

More recently, in the popular teen book series and movie “The Hunger Games,” a three-fingered salute becomes a rallying cry for the oppressed in the nation of Panem, which holds televised games that have children fight to the death. In one scene, the main character, Katniss Everdeen, raises her left hand to her lips and then extends her arm outward, directly into a camera. People in Panem’s oppressed districts respond with their own salute and then start to riot.

In the book, Katniss says the gesture was “old and rarely used” and “means thanks, it means admiration, it means goodbye to someone you love.”

Not so for Breivik.

In a manifesto he published online before the July 22 attacks, he described the initiation rites, oaths and the “clenched fist salute” that he used in court, saying they showed “strength, honor and defiance against the Marxist tyrants of Europe.”

Tell that to the Young Pioneers.

The 37-year-old Siddiqui faces a possible 10 years in prison if convicted of membership in al-Qaida and the Islamic Movement of Uzbekistan.

Siddiqui trained with both terrorist groups in Pakistan and in the border region with Afghanistan in 2009 and 2010, with the aim of taking part in violent jihad, or holy war, according to the indictment.

Authorities have said he was one of about a dozen radical Muslims who left the northern port city of Hamburg in 2009 to pursue terrorist training in the border region. Several of them have been captured or killed.

Another member of the group, German-Syrian dual national Rami Makanesi, was convicted last year in a Frankfurt state court of membership in al-Qaida and sentenced to four years and nine months. He was arrested in Pakistan in June 2010 and then extradited to Germany.

Prosecutors maintain Siddiqui received general military training at a camp run by the Islamic Movement of Uzbekistan and helped produce a German-language propaganda film.

In the summer of 2009, he decided to leave the group’s camp, and moved to an al-Qaida training area where he learned how to use heavy weapons, including anti-tank weapons and mortars, prosecutors said.

In June 2010, a “high-ranking al-Qaida member” instructed Siddiqui to return to Germany to become part of a European network of the terrorist organization, prosecutors said in a statement when Siddiqui was charged.

“The network was supposed to secure financial support for the organization, but at the same time be ready for other, not yet concrete, orders from the al-Qaida leadership,” the statement said.

German magazine Der Spiegel, which obtained the full 114-page indictment, identified the al-Qaida leader behind the orders as Younis al-Mauritani, who was apprehended in 2011 by Pakistani agents working with the CIA.

After receiving his orders, prosecutors said Siddiqui slipped across the border into Afghanistan to return from there to Germany, but was captured by American troops in Kabul before he could leave the country.

Intelligence officials have said that, while in American custody, he provided interrogators with details of an early stage terrorist plot in Europe around Christmas 2010, which led the U.S. and others to issue a travel alert for Europe.

He was turned over to German authorities last April and is being tried in Koblenz, because it is near where he was brought back in to Germany at the U.S. Air Force’s Ramstein Air Base.

Before going to Pakistan, Siddiqui and several other suspects met at Hamburg’s al-Quds mosque, the prayer house that had served as a gathering point for some of the Sept. 11 attackers before they moved to the U.S. to attend flight schools in 2000, German intelligence officials have said. The mosque has now been shut down by authorities.

Intelligence officials also said Siddiqui was a friend of Mounir el Motassadeq, who was convicted by a German court in 2006 of being an accessory to the murder of the 246 passengers and crew on the four jetliners used in the Sept. 11 terrorist attacks. El Motassadeq also frequented the al-Quds mosque.

It has opened the floodgates to hundreds of new investigations in Germany, though his death serves as a reminder that time is running out for prosecutors.

Ukrainian-born Demjanjuk steadfastly maintained that he had been mistaken for someone else — first wounded as a Soviet soldier fighting German forces, then captured and held as a prisoner of war under brutal conditions.

And he is probably best known as someone he was not: the notoriously brutal guard “Ivan the Terrible” at the Treblinka extermination camp. That was the first accusation against him, which led to him being extradited from the U.S. to Israel in the 1980s. He was tried, convicted, and sentenced to death — only to have the Israeli Supreme Court unanimously overturn the verdict and return him to the U.S. after it received evidence that another Ukrainian, not Demjanjuk, was that Nazi guard.

“He has become at least one of the faces” of the Holocaust, Israeli historian Yehuda Bauer said in a telephone interview from Jerusalem.

“His case illustrates the principle that whenever even a very low-ranking Nazi criminal can be found and convicted, the importance is not in the sentence, not in the amount of time such a person may have to sit in jail … the important thing is to bring the crime to the attention of the general public.”

But attorney Yoram Sheftel, who defended Demjanjuk in the Israel trial, criticized the German conviction of Demjanjuk as a Sobibor “Wachmann” — the lowest rank of the “Hilfswillige” prisoners who agreed to serve the Nazis and were subordinate to German SS men — while higher-ranking Germans were acquitted in years past.

“I can only call it a prostitution of the Holocaust,” he said.

After his conviction in May, Demjanjuk was sentenced to five years in prison, but was appealing the case to Germany’s high court. He was released pending the appeal, and died a free man in his own room in a nursing home in the southern Bavarian town of Bad Feilnbach.

His son, John Demjanjuk Jr., said in a telephone interview from Ohio that his father apparently died of natural causes. Demjanjuk had terminal bone marrow disease, chronic kidney disease and other ailments and local authorities said the exact cause of death was still being determined.

“My father fell asleep with the Lord as a victim and survivor of Soviet and German brutality since childhood,” Demjanjuk Jr. said. “He loved life, family and humanity. History will show Germany used him as a scapegoat to blame helpless Ukrainian POWs for the deeds of Nazi Germans.”

Demjanjuk spent most of his 18-month trial in Munich lying in a special bed brought into the courtroom, and listened to the proceedings through a Ukrainian interpreter.

Though he made no lengthy statements to the court on his own, in one read aloud by his attorney, he told the panel of judges he had been a victim of the Nazis himself — first wounded as a Soviet soldier fighting German forces, then captured and held as a prisoner of war under brutal conditions.

“I am again and again an innocent victim of the Germans,” he said in the statement.

He said after the war he was unable to return to his homeland, and that taking him away from his family in the U.S. to stand trial in Germany was a “continuation of the injustice” done to him.

“Germany is responsible for the fact that I have lost for good my whole reason to live, my family, my happiness, any future and hope,” he said.

Despite his conviction, his family never gave up its battle to have his U.S. citizenship reinstated so that he could live out his final days nearby them in the Cleveland area. One of their main arguments was that the defense had never seen a 1985 FBI document, uncovered in early 2011 by the AP, calling into question the authenticity of a Nazi ID card used against him.

But representatives of victims, Jewish groups and others welcomed his trial as a legitimate quest for justice.

“A death is always tragic. But in this case it is important to say that it was right to put him on trial and sentence him,” the president of Germany’s Central Council of Jews, Dieter Graumann, told the AP.

“Justice does not know a statute of limitation, and age does not protect from punishment. This was never about revenge, but about justice,” he added.

When they overturned his conviction in Israel, the supreme court judges there said they still believed Demjanjuk had served the Nazis, probably at the Trawniki SS training camp and Sobibor. But they declined to order a new trial, saying there was a risk of violating the law prohibiting trying someone twice on the same evidence.

“The view of the general Israeli public was that he was Ivan the Terrible, and the high court said no — that is very important, it shows the strength of the justice system,” Bauer said.

“But he was most certainly in Sobibor; there’s no doubt about that.”

After he was released in Israel, Demjanjuk returned to his suburban Cleveland home in 1993 and his U.S. citizenship, which had been revoked in 1981, was reinstated in 1998.

Demjanjuk remained under investigation in the U.S., where a judge revoked his citizenship again in 2002 based on Justice Department evidence suggesting he concealed his service at Sobibor. Appeals failed, and the nation’s chief immigration judge ruled in 2005 that Demjanjuk could be deported to Germany, Poland or Ukraine.

Prosecutors in Germany filed charges in 2009, saying Demjanjuk’s link to Sobibor and Trawniki was clear, with evidence showing that after he was captured by the Germans he volunteered to serve with the fanatical SS and trained as a camp guard.

Though there are no known witnesses who remember Demjanjuk from Sobibor, prosecutors referred to an SS identity card that they said features a photo of a young, round-faced Demjanjuk and that says he worked at the death camp. That and other evidence indicating Demjanjuk had served under the SS convinced the panel of judges in Munich, and led to his conviction.

Demjanjuk, who was removed by U.S. immigration agents from his home in suburban Cleveland and deported in May 2009, questioned the evidence in the German case, saying the identity card was possibly a Soviet postwar forgery.

He reiterated his contention that after he was captured in Crimea in 1942, he was held prisoner until joining the Vlasov Army — a force of anti-communist Soviet POWs and others formed to fight with the Germans against the Soviets in the final months of the war.

But Presiding Judge Ralph Alt said the evidence showed Demjanjuk was a piece of the Nazis’ “machinery of destruction.”

“The court is convinced that the defendant … served as a guard at Sobibor” from March 27, 1943, until mid-September 1943, Alt said in his ruling.

Demjanjuk was born April 3, 1920, in the village of Dubovi Makharintsi in central Ukraine, two years before the country became part of the Soviet Union. He grew up during a time when the country was wracked by famines that killed millions, and a wave of purges instituted by Stalin to eliminate any possible opposition.

As a young man Demjanjuk worked as a tractor driver for the area’s collective farm. After being called up for the Soviet Red Army, he was wounded in action but sent back to the front after he had recovered, only to be captured during the battle of Kerch Peninsula in May 1942.

After the war, Demjanjuk was sent to a displaced persons camp and worked briefly as a driver for the U.S. Army. In 1950, he sought U.S. citizenship, claiming to have been a farmer in Sobibor, Poland, during the war.

Demjanjuk later said he lied about his wartime activities to avoid being sent back to Ukraine, then a part of the Soviet Union. Just to have admitted being in the Vlasov Army would also have been enough to have him barred from emigration to the U.S. or many other countries.

He came to the U.S. on Feb. 9, 1952, and eventually settled in Seven Hills, a middle-class suburb of Cleveland.

He was a mechanic at Ford Motor Co.’s engine plant in the Cleveland suburb of Brook Park and with his wife, Vera, raised three children — son John Jr. and daughters Irene and Lydia.

___

Juergen Baetz in Berlin and Daniella Cheslow in Jerusalem contributed to this report.

John Demjanjuk Jr. said in a telephone interview from Ohio that his father died in the night of natural causes. Demjanjuk had terminal bone marrow disease, chronic kidney disease and other ailments.

It was not yet known whether he would be brought back to the U.S. for burial.

Ukrainian-born Demjanjuk (dehm-YAHN’-yook) had steadfastly denied any involvement in the Nazi Holocaust since the first accusations were levied against him more than 30 years ago.

“My father fell asleep with the Lord as a victim and survivor of Soviet and German brutality since childhood,” Demjanjuk Jr. said. “He loved life, family and humanity. History will show Germany used him as a scapegoat to blame helpless Ukrainian POWs for the deeds of Nazi Germans.”

His conviction helped set new German legal precedent, being the first time someone was convicted solely on the basis of serving as a camp guard, with no evidence of being involved in a specific killing.

Despite his conviction, his family never gave up its battle to have his U.S. citizenship reinstated so that he could live out his final days nearby them in the Cleveland area. One of their main arguments was that the defense had never seen a 1985 FBI document, uncovered in early 2011 by The Associated Press, calling into question the authenticity of a Nazi ID card used against him.

Demjanjuk maintained that he was a victim of the Nazis himself — first wounded as a Soviet soldier fighting German forces, then captured and held as a prisoner of war under brutal conditions.

“I am again and again an innocent victim of the Germans,” he told the panel of Munich state court judges during his 18-month trial, in a statement he signed and that was read aloud by his attorney Ulrich Busch.

He said after the war he was unable to return to his homeland, and that taking him away from his family in the U.S. to stand trial in Germany was a “continuation of the injustice” done to him.

“Germany is responsible for the fact that I have lost for good my whole reason to live, my family, my happiness, any future and hope,” he said.

His claims of mistaken identity gained credence after he successfully defended himself against accusations initially brought in 1977 by the U.S. Justice Department that he was “Ivan the Terrible” — a notoriously brutal guard at the Treblinka extermination camp.

In connection with the allegation, he was extradited to Israel from the U.S. in 1986 to stand trial on charges of war crimes and crimes against humanity, convicted and sentenced to death. But the Israeli Supreme Court in 1993 overturned the verdict on appeal, saying that evidence showed another Ukrainian man was actually “Ivan the Terrible,” and ordered him returned to the U.S.

The Israeli judges said, however, they still believed Demjanjuk had served the Nazis, probably at the Trawniki SS training camp and Sobibor. But they declined to order a new trial, saying there was a risk of violating the law prohibiting trying someone twice on the same evidence.

Demjanjuk returned to his suburban Cleveland home in 1993 and his U.S. citizenship, which had been revoked in 1981, was reinstated in 1998.

Demjanjuk remained under investigation in the U.S., where a judge revoked his citizenship again in 2002 based on Justice Department evidence suggesting he concealed his service at Sobibor. Appeals failed, and the nation’s chief immigration judge ruled in 2005 that Demjanjuk could be deported to Germany, Poland or Ukraine.

Prosecutors in Germany filed charges in 2009, saying Demjanjuk’s link to Sobibor and Trawniki was clear, with evidence showing that after he was captured by the Germans he volunteered to serve with the fanatical SS and trained as a camp guard.

Though there are no known witnesses who remember Demjanjuk from Sobibor, prosecutors referred to an SS identity card that they said features a photo of a young, round-faced Demjanjuk and that says he worked at the death camp. That and other evidence indicating Demjanjuk had served under the SS convinced the panel of judges in Munich, and led to his conviction.

He was ordered tried in Munich because he lived in the area briefly after the war.

Demjanjuk, who was removed by U.S. immigration agents from his home in suburban Cleveland and deported in May 2009, questioned the evidence in the German case, saying the identity card was possibly a Soviet postwar forgery.

He reiterated his contention that after he was captured in Crimea in 1942, he was held prisoner until joining the Vlasov Army — a force of anti-communist Soviet POWs and others formed to fight with the Germans against the Soviets in the final months of the war.

Demjanjuk was born April 3, 1920, in the village of Dubovi Makharintsi in central Ukraine, two years before the country became part of the Soviet Union. He grew up during a time when the country was wracked by famines that killed millions, and a wave of purges instituted by Stalin to eliminate any possible opposition.

As a young man Demjanjuk worked as a tractor driver for the area’s collective farm. After being called up for the Soviet Red Army, he was wounded in action but sent back to the front after he had recovered, only to be captured during the battle of Kerch Peninsula in May 1942.

After the war, Demjanjuk was sent to a displaced persons camp and worked briefly as a driver for the U.S. Army. In 1950, he sought U.S. citizenship, claiming to have been a farmer in Sobibor, Poland, during the war.

Demjanjuk later said he lied about his wartime activities to avoid being sent back to Ukraine, then a part of the Soviet Union. Just to have admitted being in the Vlasov Army would also have been enough to have him barred from emigration to the U.S. or many other countries.

He came to the U.S. on Feb. 9, 1952, and eventually settled in Seven Hills, a middle-class suburb of Cleveland.

He was a mechanic at Ford Motor Co.’s engine plant in the Cleveland suburb of Brook Park and with his wife, Vera, raised three children — son John Jr. and daughters Irene and Lydia.