Ali’s comments in interviews were full of contradictions, often making it hard to determine what was true or not. In one interview, for example, he said he was in Khartoum before he escaped, while in another, he said he had escaped directly from the LRA base camp.

Such contradictions are not unusual for ex-LRA. During initial interviews, they are often not keen to share their full story, and the different versions they offer tend to reflect a developing willingness to share.

Where possible contradictions in this piece were resolved by triangulating Ali’s testimony with a range of other sources, including ex-LRA combatants, journalists, civil society members, officials from NGOs, and analysts.

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Although Ali tended to emphasise his position as a middleman for commodities trading, the available evidence shows a more direct involvement. For example, research by the European Union (EU) has shown how members of the LRA – including Ali – were involved in the trafficking of ivory to Kafia Kingi via the Democratic Republic of the Congo and the Central African Republic.

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Throughout the interviews, Ali was careful to emphasise the non-military aspects of his LRA life. Just as when Islamic State fighters presented themselves as cooks and cleaners after leaving the group, Ali described a non-violent world of diplomacy and business.

It is unclear if Ali participated in combat, but available evidence suggests he was involved in military life. UN and US sanction reports describe his participation in intelligence gathering and operational planning. They accuse him of enforcing discipline in camps, punishing and killing LRA members who disobeyed rules.

Yet, Ali’s descriptions of his political and business dealings are confirmed by multiple other ex-LRA combatants, and by the fact that he came of age as the LRA was entering a different period – one more focused on the need to simply make ends meet.

Not long ago, Ali Kony, a neatly dressed Ugandan man in his early 30s, was primed to take over from his father as the head of an infamous armed group that had spent the best part of four decades sowing fear across swathes of Central and East Africa.

Yet one morning last year, he sat reclined on a worn beige leather sofa in a small house in a peaceful Ugandan town. Pink, purple, and green Christmas tinsel hung off the walls as Ali’s children darted in and out, showing off their homework to a proud father. Ali, it appeared, had chosen a different path.

“I grew up there, I had children there, I had spent so much time there,” he said of the hardscrabble rebel camps where he had lived almost since birth. “I thought of having another life.”

Born in the early-to-mid 1990s, Ali was until recently one of the most senior figures in the Lord’s Resistance Army, the rebel group created in northern Uganda in the second half of the 1980s and led by the self-styled spirit medium, Joseph Kony.

Ali was one of his father’s closest sons as well as the LRA’s so-called minister of foreign affairs. He helped thrash out peace deals with other rebel groups, and traded ivory with merchants from China and Yemen.

Yet a privileged life within the LRA – once one of the world’s most notorious militia groups – was not the life Ali wanted. He slipped away from an LRA camp four years ago, spending time in a Sudanese border town before – in mid-2023 – returning to Uganda, where he met President Yoweri Museveni and eventually joined the national army.

The story of Ali’s topsy-turvy defection and what has proved to be a hard homecoming – revealed in detail for the first time by The New Humanitarian – is indicative of the story of the LRA writ large.

Over the past decade, hundreds of worn-out LRA members have trodden a similar path to Ali, abandoning the group and leaving Joseph Kony with no more than a couple dozen remaining fighters. Once focused on overthrowing Museveni, and once known for its extreme acts of violence, the LRA now has more prosaic concerns: staying alive.

Yet Ali’s defection is more significant than his peers. That somebody considered to be Joseph Kony’s successor should leave the LRA shows that even the leader’s inner circle is now crumbling. It is a sign that one of Africa’s longest-running rebel insurgencies is now on its very last legs. How long it might still last, though, remains anybody’s guess.

Although Joseph Kony is aging and often unwell with diabetes, he is still viewed by Ali and other current and ex-rebels as a messianic figure with political and spiritual powers. And while the LRA is all but defeated, Ali’s descriptions of how the group survives in the margins demonstrate how remarkably endurant its rump of remaining members are.

In Uganda now for nearly two years, Ali’s life outside the LRA also shows the challenges that ex-combatants face. Once a brigadier with multiple business ventures, Ali is now barely known to the local community. His children have been getting sick from unfamiliar food, and from cold weather they aren’t accustomed to.

Still, Ali does not regret his decision to leave. “I have love for my father, and I would have liked to have stayed with him,” he told The New Humanitarian. “But I have my own vision… to see cities, maybe to travel to other countries where nobody shoots you or can arrest you.”

The New Humanitarian met Ali early last year in a rented house in the northern Ugandan town of Gulu, which was once the epicentre of the LRA war. The rebels claimed to protect the local Acholi community in the north against Museveni’s regime, but they often turned against their community, driven by a violent messianic ideology.

Soon into its insurgency, violence became an end in itself for the LRA. According to the UN, the group was responsible for more than 100,000 deaths and the abduction of up to 100,000 children. Kony and other commanders received the first International Criminal Court arrest warrants in 2005. They were widely portrayed as evil incarnate.

Over time, the LRA was pushed out of Uganda to neighbouring states. Further military pressure fragmented the group, and a Ugandan amnesty law encouraged defections. Its political message waxed and waned, with complaints about Acholi and northern Uganda’s marginalisation mainly emerging during peace talks. Its numbers, meanwhile, faded as experts joked there were more LRA analysts than rebels.

Still, the group remained active, surviving in a hard-to-reach contested border zone (the Kafia Kingi enclave) between Sudan’s Darfur region and the Central African Republic. To evade capture, the group remained mobile and changed its modus operandi, reducing abductions and looting and relying instead on agriculture and illicit trade.

Ali became a central figure during this transition – of which little has been written – cultivating business networks and integrating the LRA into a regional black market underworld that helped the group operate under the radar. His story is therefore also a story of the LRA 2.0 – one that defies media stereotypes of an often secretive group.

In Kafia Kingi, the LRA’s rear base from 2010, Ali was involved in sourcing ivory from local traders, and from local hunters who would “kill the elephants, bring the tusks and sell it to us”. Ali traded with merchants from around the world. It was, he said, “a booming business”.

Ivory earnings were supplemented with income from gold, which Ali bought from markets in Darfur and flipped to Sudanese traders, and from marijuana, which he sourced from local growers and sold on to “big businessman”.

Life had a more mundane side too. The group grew cassava, maize, beans and pumpkins, and made money selling honey to locals. Bees were expelled from hives using fire (“making them drunk, so they escape and won’t bite you,” Ali said) and with chargers from rocket-propelled grenades: “remove the charger, throw it in the hive, making them drunk and harmless – you can even put your hand in there,” Ali added.

While running business matters, Ali said he also worked as the LRA’s foreign affairs minister, a role confirmed by other former LRA combatants and reflected in his fluent Arabic and various nicknames – “Bashir” [after the ousted Sudanese dictator] and “Caesar” [after the Roman general].

Ali said his portfolio included forging non-aggression pacts with other armed groups in the area. Some pacts included trade agreements and deals to exchange intelligence and protection. He described them as some of his biggest achievements with the LRA.

Of course, not everything about the LRA changed in this period. Abductions and looting still took place, while Ali and others retained faith in Joseph Kony’s power. Ali said his father predicted Covid-19 and even shared a premonition of him in Gulu.

Although Ali and others helped the group transform and survive the dangerous borderlands, life also remained tough. Until 2017, the group was still being tracked by the Ugandan and US armies, and deadly firefights with other armed groups were common. Defections happened regularly – and even Ali was considering his options.

• A Tell report / By Kristof Titeca – a professor at the Institute of Development Policy at the University of Antwerp. Republished with the permission of The New Humanitarian.