Victims of a Civil War

[From the French language press]:

Sous la férule d'un cheikh soufi, ils sont cinq cents enfants venus du Darfour à écrire et réécrire les versets du Coran sur une planchette de bois, la "loha", calée sur les genoux.

AFP - Agence France-Presse, France - jeudi 22 novembre 2007

Under the leadership of a Sufi shaykh, they were five hundred children from Darfur to write and rewrite the verses of the Qur'an on a little wooden board, the "loha", lying on their knees.

Some have only five years, others are emerging from adolescence, and all of them are supported, housed, fed and educated at Ombadda, near Khartoum, by a Qadiriya Brotherhood, the oldest Sufi Brotherhood in Sudan.

Victims of a civil war that broke out in 2003, the black tribes of Darfur (Western Sudan), are Muslim just like their adversaries, the Janjaweed.

"Everything is destroyed there, we can no longer live and study," said Abd el-Wahid, a 13 years old from Kungara, in Northern Darfur, where the United Nations has counted 200,000 dead and more than 2 millions people uprooted.

Not much inclined to let us interview the students , Shaykh al-Rifaï, a young religious bearded man 31 years old, adds: "You see how sad are their faces, they carry a lot of misery within."