GULU, July 7 (IslamOnline.net & News Agencies) - The sufferings of the inhabitants of the Black Continent of Africa seem endless, pointless and hopeless for all, even for The Lord’s beloved ones; children. Life in this northern Ugandan city is anything but tough for innocent children and women, as they are subjected to rape and even forced to eat their flesh, according to press reports.

The calm of the night there is disturbed by innocent murmurings and chatter of youth which disguised their terrible reality caused by Lord’s Resistance Army - a rebel group led by a once-altar man who believes he had links to angels.

“It is a place where you have to be cursed to spend your childhood, because this is a place where children's nightmares come true,” the BBC correspondent Hilary Andersson tells the horrific story.

“The children arrived in the city in droves to sleep on the streets because in their villages they could be kidnapped by the rebels,” according to her feature published Saturday, July 5.

They are grabbed with fear that if they are kidnapped their noses and ears will be hacked off.

“In some parts of town the little bodies are so closely huddled together that you tiptoe and balance your way through them, hard pressed to pick a place to put your foot.”

Older female captives are forced to become the "wives" of senior commanders and are subjected to rape, unwanted pregnancies and the risk of sexually transmitted diseases, including HIV and Aids. The younger girls are forced into grueling domestic work, according to the same source.

New males captives are forced to participate in atrocities, such as killing, maiming and intimidating the local population by burning down their homes.

The Lord’s Resistance Army (LRA) is led by a man called Joseph Kony, “once an altar boy and now reputed to have 60 wives, to wear women's dresses and occasionally dreadlocks.

He is a man who believes he has a direct link with the angels - they speak to him, he tells the captured children, and tell him what to eat and what not to eat, when to eat it and when ambushes are coming his way.”

“Kony believes that he has been handpicked by God to overthrow Uganda's government and introduce the Bible's Ten Commandments as law.

“Anecdotal evidence by the few who have met him indicate that Joseph Kony might be insane.

“Still, for 17 years, Uganda's army has failed to defeat him. So the mass kidnapping of little children in northern Uganda goes on,” Andersson continued.

“The LRA, which has earned a terrifying reputation for its brutality against the people of northern Uganda, has abducted an estimated 20,000 children over the years.”

According to New York-based Human Rights Watch some 5,000 of them have been abducted since June 2002.

In a report in March, it said the number was likely to increase because of the return of the rebels to Uganda after the government intensified a military offensive against their bases in neighboring Sudan.

At a center for children who have escaped, the BBC Correspondent met a boy called Dennis. He is 14 now but was kidnapped when he was 11 and spent three years in captivity.

“Like everyone else the night he was kidnapped, he was tied by ropes to other children and marched off to the bush with a heavy load on his head.”

“One day, he told me, the rebel leader gave a random order that no one should eat at four o'clock - a message from the angels.”

“One of the kidnapped boys with Dennis disobeyed and so the rebels selected seven boys, including Dennis, and ordered them to kill the offender.”

Fearing for his life, Dennis said “I picked up a heavy stick and beat him on the head until his skull cracked open and he died.”

“His hands started fidgeting as he told me the story. The boy he had been made to kill was his friend,” Andersson wrote.

In the hospitals near Gulu, children who have escaped their captors come in everyday.

“They have terrible wounds from being beaten with sticks and machetes - for being bad in the eyes of the rebels.”

The Gulu Support the Children Organization (GUSCO) says they have dealt with about 4,000 former child captives since 1997.

As for the girls kidnapped, they are given to rebel commanders when they are 12 years old for rape.

The rape can go on for years and many give birth. But it gets worse.

A woman called Laweel was told that she and 10 others were to be made an example of as a way of warning the community not to fight the rebels.

“They were to be mutilated, and sent home alive.”

“So they were lined up in front of their captors. Kidnapped children were told to sharpen the knives and machetes laid there, and one by one the women had their noses, lips and ears cut off. Then they were made to eat their own flesh.”

“I tried to keep looking at Laweel as I spoke to her, so as not to offend her, but it was really hard.”

“Her disfigurement is so appalling that your mind instantly conjures up images of the event. It must be the worst part of it all that now, as she goes through her life, people look they other way.”

Schoolgirls who have been abducted by the notoriously brutal rebel group become sex slaves for militia leaders.