Three skinny urchins, covered in sand from head to toe, arrived here at a base camp of the rebel Sudan Liberation Army the other day. They said they had run away from home – a tent in a refugee camp across the border in Chad – and walked three days across the desert, one bottle of water between them and no food. They said their villages had been destroyed. They were 11 to 13 years old. They now had one ambition: to join the rebels. Their impulse, though childish and reckless, mirrored that of the ostensibly veteran rebel fighters they had come to join in Darfur, Sudan’s western desert region, which for 18 months has been the playing field for a nasty civil war. A 19-year-old dropped out of secondary school to put on a pair of hand-me-down boots after his hometown, Karnoi, was stormed by government forces. A college student ditched his studies to don a rebel’s mustard colored turban, so disenchanted had he become by what he saw as the hopelessness facing black Africans like himself. A boy no more than 13, with a knack for making up songs in the dark, joined the rebels after his father was killed in an attack.Full Story
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