The Times on the human cost of the Sudanese genocide: The children of Darfur have seen awful things: burning, looting, rape and death. They have been the targets of violence as well. Aid workers say that sex has been forced on girls as young as 8. Other children have been shot or otherwise brutalized, and many have gone without adequate nutrition for months. "A child is supposed to be growing up protected from the world," said Francis M. Deng, the United Nations representative on internally displaced persons. "They should be playing and learning. If your life is interrupted so fundamentally, you are denied the basics needed to grow up healthy." Take the case of Mubarak, who had been a typical 15-year-old in this part of the world, which meant he worked the fields with his father during the planting and harvesting seasons but ran off with his friends whenever he could. Too poor to afford a real, inflatable ball, he and his pals improvised, tying old clothes together with twine to form a rounded clump. Barefoot and energetic, they would kick their ball back and forth in the sand for hours. His friends are gone now, as are his relatives. Some were killed and others were lost in the mass of more than a million people driven from their villages in Darfur, a region of western Sudan where the government has tried to crush a rebel movement by allowing Arab militias to attack local villagers. Playing is the furthest thing from his mind these days, says Mubarak, who looks young but speaks of things that make him seem far more like a man than a boy. Mubarak's village, Kudum, a tiny place with 200 families in southern Darfur, was overrun last August by members of these militias, called Janjaweed. Mubarak recalls the chaos as the men, on horses and camels and shooting in the air, moved in fast, and he and his family and the other villagers ran for their lives. Behind him, he says, he remembers fire. Mubarak's father and mother and his four siblings took refuge in a wooded area nearby. But when his father left to scout out their escape route, the Janjaweed reappeared. Mubarak watched as the militiamen told his mother to take off her clothes. Aid workers who have heard, and vouched for, Mubarak's story said they believed that the men raped her.