The United Nations Security Council in New York City on Monday officially placed the Ugandan Islamist group known as Allied Democratic Forces on its blacklist as a result of the group's recruiting, training and using children as soldiers, and for brutally killing, maiming and sexually abusing women and children, as well as its terrorist attacks on U.N. "blue helmet" peacekeepers.
The U.N. committee reported that the group, which while Ugandan hides from security and military forces in the Democratic Republic of Congo since the mid-'90s, will experience an arms embargo, freezing of all assets, and a travel ban under the United Nations sanctions already being imposed on Congo's government.
The Islamist ADF leader, Jamiel Mukulu, has aleady been subjected to U.N. sanctions since 2011, but he remains in-charge of the al-Qaida affiliated terrorist group.
The ADF, which is also called the ADF-National Army for the Liberation of Uganda, originally banded together to fight the Ugandan government, but the jihadists were forced across the border into Congo. Estimates of the size of the group vary between 1,200 and 1,400 jihadists.
The Ugandan government says the ADF is allied with Somalia's deadly Al Shabaab movement, another al- Qaida-linked group, whose name means "The Lads" in Arabic.
The ADF obtains most of its finances through smuggling gold into Uganda and selling it, according to counterterrorism experts.
U.N. officials claim that the ADF recruits children through madrasas or mosques located in Congo, Uganda and Tanzania. The recruiters entice the youngsters with promises or they may kidnap them from their villages.
According to the International Crisis Group, a European-based think-tank, the ADF is "one of the oldest but least known armed groups ... and the only one in the area to be considered an Islamist terrorist organization."