Joseph Kony is one of the most vilified rebel leaders on the planet. He stands accused of brainwashing countless children across northern Uganda, turning the girls into sex slaves and the boys into prepubescent killers.

His so-called Christian movement, the Lord’s Resistance Army, has terrorized villagers in at least four countries in central Africa for nearly 20 years, killing tens of thousands of people, burning down huts and hacking off lips. The fact that Mr. Kony, whose followers believe he is a prophet, rarely appears in public has only added to his brutal mystique.

Exiled to a fiefdom on the border of southern Sudan and the Congo, Mr. Kony in 2007 emerged from the wilderness indicating a willingness to sign a historic peace deal with the Ugandan government that would disband his army. But in April 2008, he backed out, saying he needed more time to consult Ugandan elders and contemplate the war crimes charges brought by the International Criminal Court in 2005.

In October 2011, President Obama said that he had ordered the deployment of 100 armed military advisers to central Africa to help regional forces combat Mr. Kony’s group.

American efforts to combat the group also took place during the Bush administration, which authorized the Pentagon to send a team of 17 counterterrorism advisers to train Ugandan troops and provided millions of dollars worth of aid, including fuel trucks, satellite phones and night vision goggles, to the Ugandan army. Those efforts scattered segments of the LRA; its remnants dispersed and regrouped in Uganda’s neighbors.

In the spring of 2010, apparently desperate for new conscripts, Mr. Kony’s forces killed hundreds of villagers in the Congolese jungle and kidnapped hundreds more, according to witnesses interviewed at the time.

In 2010, C.J. Chivers of The New York Times wrote about a document that gave an insider’s view into what he called Mr. Kony’s “exaggerated style of public weirdness and calculated ferocity.”

The L.R.A., he wrote, was the offshoot of a failed rebel movement led by Alice Lakwena, who said she was possessed by a troupe of spirits who urged her to war, Mr. Kony has presented himself over the years as the channel through which these lingering voices communicate from the beyond.

His guerrilla dossier, Mr. Chivers said, smacks of a peculiar brand of bush opportunism. Ms. Lakwena, after her forces were routed in the 1980s, said the spirits had abandoned her, and she fled to Kenya, where she passed her final years in a rambling, alcoholic daze. Mr. Kony promptly took her place, insisting he was the spirits’ new vehicle.