Child soldiers, many of whom were taken from their homes against their will, tell Pieter Teschof the horror of being forced into a bloody conflict
FRIDAY EVENING ON May 9th in Omdurman - the twin of Sudan's capital Khartoum across the Nile - was like any other Friday night, with people gathering at the Hamed al Nil mosque for the weekly display of the "whirling dervishes" (holy men who use dance as a physical method of trying to reach religious ecstasy). As the sun sets, the balmy air is heavy with burning incense.
These Sufi devotees are the descendants of the Mahdist movement that captured Khartoum and killed British general Charles Gordon in 1885. They now dress in colourful jallaba or robes, and profess their faith peacefully by chanting and dancing themselves into a trance.
Many of the Sufis have strong links with the western provinces like Darfur, and belong to its ethnic groups. These groups are popularly described as "Arabs" and "Africans" but don't look much different in appearance from each other.
There was some excitement and talk that Dr Khalil Ibrahim, the leader of the Islamist Justice and Equality Movement (Jem) was making his way from Darfur with 3,000 fighters through the desert travelling with their "technicals" - mostly customised Toyota Landcruisers with mounted machine guns - to the capital, but most people dismissed these rumours, refusing to believe that the war in faraway Darfur would be fought out on their streets.
But somewhere in the western desert north of Omdurman, columns of Jem fighters had gathered with their Landcruisers for the last camp before the assault on the capital on May 10th. Among their ranks were many frightened teenage boys, most of whom were taken by force from refugee camps and villages in Chad and Darfur.
UP UNTIL THEN, child soldiers in Darfur's armed groups had been largely ignored by the media and aid agencies, but their presence was later to be added to the range of war crimes in the region.
Among these young boys was 12-year-old Abdel Karim - told with a few slaps to prepare food for the fighters without lighting a fire as tomorrow would be their big day to topple President Omar Hassan al-Bashir and proclaim Dr Khalil as the new president of Sudan.
By all accounts, Jem's raid that Saturday was a close-run thing, as its motorised columns came within reach of the presidential palace on the leafy bank of the Blue Nile. They were finally stopped at the New Bridge after entering Omdurman on the same road that General Kitchener took to defeat the Dervish army - with great slaughter - north of Omdurman in 1898.
Witnesses later describe how Jem fighters commandeered a police car at Souk Libya, on the edge of Omdurman. They forced the officers to guide them - with blue lights flashing - to strategic points, like Radio Omdurman and the army staff college at the new Nile Bridge, where the heaviest fighting took place, causing hundreds of casualties on both sides.
Abdel Karim was lucky enough to escape his captors at Souk Libya before the main battle began. He found a hiding place in one of the abandoned stalls until the next day when local people found him and handed him over to the Sudanese police.
NEARLY TWO MONTHS later, Abdel Karim is in a special detention centre run by the Sudanese National Council for Child Welfare (NCCW). The centre, located in the desert at Geilli about 60km north of Khartoum, was a training school for oil workers but was converted by the NCCW to cater for about 90 boys aged between 11 and 17. Abdel Karim tells how he was captured by Jem fighters early this year outside Hajar Hadeed camp north of El Geneina, the capital of West Darfur and hard on the border with Chad.
"I was shepherding our sheep when I was approached by armed men who took three sheep but promised me money if I was going with them into the forest, but they did not pay me and put me in their car and tied me up instead," says Abdel Karim.
He describes how he was then taken with other boys and forced to cook and do other menial tasks. He was brought through the Jebel Moon, Uum Durman and Um Jaras regions to where the Jem fighters congregated at Jebel Meidob, north-eastern Darfur, before they rushed through the desert towards Omdurman. He recounts how they were attacked by planes several times, killing some boys.
A similar story is told by other boys, with small variations, of being forced or duped to join Jem, sometimes beaten, tied up and often hardly fed and given water, but given amphetamine injections under the guise of vitamin injections to keep them going.
And while Abdel Karim was not given a Kalashnikov, or military training, older boys from 14 and 15 upwards were - like Jidu (17) from N'Djamena and Ahmed Haroun (15), a Darfuri refugee living on the Chadian side of the border town Tine.
Jidu tells of how he knew Dr Khalil Ibrahim from N'Djamena where he used to deliver meat to him and others, and how he promised him money if he joined Jem, but Ahmed Haroun says he knew only Dr Khalil from Al Jazeera TV.
"You are in the army now and you are going on a special mission, Dr Khalil told us at Jebel Meidob," says Ahmed Haroun telling how they were give a klash, khaki (uniform) and some rudimentary training.
Later at Omdurman, faced with tanks near the New Bridge, the two boys quickly discarded their weapons and uniforms and sought refuge with locals who gave them water, tea and food but who, the next day, handed them over to the authorities.
There is not one boy who does not want to return to his family, but they all say that they are looked after well by the NCCW, which has agreed to work with the Red Cross and Unicef. These have requested that the Sudanese authorities release the boys without charge.
"We are considering the request, we don't want to imprison these boys, but we may want to put them through juvenile court so the world can be told their story," says Hassabo Mohamed Abdelrahman, commissioner general of the Humanitarian Aid Commission.
He accused the West of "double standards". "Why has not the prosecutor of the International Criminal Court, Luis Moreno-Ocampo, said one word about Dr Khalil, Jem and the May 10th attack?"
WAR IN DARFUR: BACKGROUND TO A GENOCIDE
The conflict in Darfur erupted in early 2003 when rebels took up arms against the government in Khartoum, accusing it of marginalising the western regions of Sudan. Since then, fighting between rebels, government forces and allied militia groups, known as the Janjaweed, has forced more than 2.5 million Darfuris from their homes.
The Sudanese government has bombed rebel-held villages and mobilised the Janjaweed in a scorched-earth campaign. The UN estimates that more than 200,000 people have died since the conflict started - most of these as a result of starvation and disease.
In 2005, a UN commission found that while the Sudanese government and militias had acted together in committing widespread atrocities in Darfur, it did not amount to genocide. This week, the International Criminal Court's chief prosecutor called for the arrest of Sudanese president Omar Hassan al-Bashir (left), accusing him of genocide, crimes against humanity and war crimes in the region.
Efforts to resolve the conflict have been hindered by several factors, including tribal tensions, fragmented rebel demands, animosity between Sudan and neighbouring Chad, and what many consider to be a piecemeal approach by the international community.