Sudan world's most dangerous place for children

Around half of respondents picked Sudan as one of their three choices, with many singling out the troubled western region of Darfur. The UN Children's Fund (UNICEF) says 1.8 million children have been affected by a three-year conflict in Darfur, where they risk being recruited to fight and are especially vulnerable to disease and malnutrition.

"It is a traumatised population and you can see it in the children's faces," said Hollywood actress and UNICEF goodwill ambassador Mia Farrow, who last month visited camps for some of the 2.5 million displaced by Darfur's war.

"Everyone has lost family, seen villages burn, seen relatives raped, been raped."

UN High Commissioner for Refugees Antonio Guterres - who selected Congo, Uganda and the Sudan/Chad border, where some 200,000 refugees from Darfur eke out an existence - pointed to the physical and psychological consequences of living in crowded, underfunded camps "which are not conducive for a healthy child development".

In southern Sudan, children also suffer the effects of low-level violence, poverty and a lack of basic services. The region is struggling to recover from a 21-year civil war with the north that killed 2 million people, as 600,000 refugees forced to flee the country trickle home.

AlertNet, a humanitarian news website run by Reuters Foundation, asked 112 aid experts and journalists to highlight the world's most dangerous places for children.

After Sudan, they chose northern Uganda, Democratic Republic of Congo, Iraq, Somalia, India, the Palestinian territories, Afghanistan, Chechnya and Myanmar - with the top three clearly ahead.

More than 2 million children worldwide have died as a direct result of armed conflict in the past decade, and about 20 million have been forced to flee their homes, according to UNICEF. More than a million have been orphaned or separated from their families.

CHILD SOLDIERS
"The most dangerous places are those conflict zones where children are actively recruited into the fighting forces, and the current worst offender...is Uganda's Lord's Resistance Army," said Gareth Evans, head of the International Crisis Group think tank.

"Its recruiting, indoctrination and battle tactics have left countless children either dead, or dreadfully physically or mentally scarred."

During its brutal, two-decade insurgency, the cult-like rebel group has kidnapped up to 25,000 children to serve as soldiers and sex slaves. Each evening about the same number of child "night commuters" trudge into towns to avoid abduction.