Night Akumu, 19, lies quietly on her bed in Gulu’s Independent Hospital. Her head rests heavily on a thick foam pillow and her arms lay limply against her sides. Akumu’s torso and lower-body are covered by a sheet. Two large burgundy stains mark the place where limbs should be.

Akumu wears a permanent dazed expression of surprise on her face that seems to ask, “Please, somebody tell me: where are my legs?” Akumu joins those killed and injured in the World Trade Center: an innocent victim of religious extremism.

On August 10, Akumu and two other women were drawing water from their community’s well in the suburbs of the northern Uganda city of Gulu. Akumu’s companion placed a jerry can on the grass next to the well, and suddenly all three women were tossed violently into the air. The plastic container detonated a landmine, placed specifically to maim the women who daily collect water for their villages.

Lying on the adjacent bed is one of Akumu’s companions, a doe-eyed 12-year-old girl named Peace, swathed from chest to ankles in bandages with tubes running from her neck. The doctors say Peace is likely to recover the use of her limbs, although her left leg is badly mangled. For Akumu there is no such hope. The blast shredded her legs. Doctors amputated the ruined limbs just above the knee. The third woman, an elderly lady, was killed instantly.

These are three of the casualties in Uganda’s own “War on Terror”. While the world closely monitors unfolding events in Afghanistan and Pakistan, Uganda is also fighting a dirty battle against an army who preys on “soft” civilian targets.

In Uganda however, the struggle is not with Islamic fanatics, but Christian extremists: the forces of the Lord’s Resistance Army, or LRA, led by a man named Joseph Kony. The LRA is as equally deadly as its Islamic counterparts, and as equally twisted in its religious convictions.

As a young man in the late 1980’s, Kony joined a rebel group led by his cousin, the “visionary” Alice Lakwena. Lakwena’s group called itself The Holy Spirit Movement and attracted fighters from the deeply religious but impoverished and illiterate villages of Uganda’s north. Government forces soundly defeated her and her followers after a decisive battle in which Lakwena’s fighters relied on butternut oil for mystical protection from bullets. Kony survived the resulting massacre. He also picked up a few military lessons from the debacle.

Kony has spent the last decade fighting his own grisly war, trying to impose the rule of the Ten Commandments on northern Uganda. His forces amputate the lips and genitals of their victims, mostly villagers who are attacked seemingly at random. LRA fighters loot whole towns, and burn whatever they can’t carry. These atrocities are all carried out against Kony’s own people, the Acholi.

The rebels have almost no domestic support. They draw reinforcements through a horrifying system of abduction and indoctrination: children are abducted from schools and forced to commit atrocities in their home areas – sometimes including the murder of their own parents. Horrifically traumatized as a result, these kids become unable to return home. They have no other options but to fight for Kony’s LRA.

Geoffrey Akena, 18, was captured from his home 18 months ago. Kony made him a fighter. One day, Akena was ordered to murder a man who had tried to escape from Kony’s army. Akena was given a machete, called a “panga”, and told he would himself be killed if he refused to do the deed. Akena ignored the pleas of the bound and helpless man, chopping off his head after several blows to the neck.

Akena spent one year with Kony until being rescued by government soldiers last December. Though he has moved back into his village, he is clearly disturbed by the things he has done. His village mates also treat him warily.

A perhaps more horrid fate awaits captured women and girls. They become, literally, sex slaves to Kony’s fighters. A girl-child is enslaved at first menstruation, the others immediately.

Fifteen-year-old Mary Atieno [not her real name] was abducted on June 12 from her boarding school near the town of Lira, about 100 km east of Gulu. Atieno was raped repeatedly during the following month, taken in turn as a “wife” by Kony’s fighters. Atieno says she lost count after the 20th rape. She escaped in July during a gunbattle between the rebels and government forces.

Today, Atieno receives counseling and is trying to continue with her education. Atieno dreams of someday being a nurse, a dream which will be shattered if the rapists infected her with HIV, the virus which invariably leads to AIDS and death.

In the heady days after the World Trade Center attacks of Sept. 11, United States President George Bush placed Joseph Kony and the LRA on the master list of banned terror organizations. This had some positive effects: the Sudanese government in Khartoum had been backing Kony’s group in a proxy struggle against the Ugandan government (which supports the Sudan’s People’s Liberation Army. The Army consists of moderate Sudanese from the Christian south fighting for independence from the largely fundamentalist Muslim and Arab north).

Sudan, mortified at the prospect of American military action, abandoned Kony and opened its borders to Ugandan troops.

The Ugandan army has destroyed Kony’s bases in Southern Sudan, but now finds itself facing a cornered and wounded animal. Nearly 20,000 Ugandan soldiers are pursuing thousands of Kony’s increasingly desperate fighters. Making the situation more complex, the rebels have with them thousands more abducted children and adults. Ultimately, like the machete killer Akena, many of these abductees are themselves combatants in a bizarre blending of victim and aggressor.

Today, hundreds of thousands of innocent people are displaced by the fighting. Every night, thousands flee behind the walls of Gulu’s Lacor Hospital (its Canadian founder, Lucille Teasdale, was made famous by a TV movie about her life. She died of AIDS after performing surgery on the victims of Kony’s rebellion).

Ken Davies of the United Nations World Food Programme watches the stream flowing through Lacor’s front gate.

“Look at the people coming into the hospital, because they’re so scared of what could happen tonight from the rebels,” he says, waving his hand at the crowds shuffling in through the darkness.

“It’s shocking. On a bad night, they’ve had 35,000 people coming into this hospital to seek protection.”

Davies is in northern Uganda because of the ominous timing of the renewed fighting, which has prevented the people from working the fields.

“Because of the insecurity since early June, people have become terrified of going out in their fields,” Davies says. “The harvest should take place now, in August and September. This year they can’t get out to harvest. They need 100 per cent of their food from the WFP. And if they don’t plant in the next month, they won’t have any harvest in December. And that will mean 500,000 to 1 million people with no food.”

Uganda has formally requested help from the American government, pointing out that the LRA is on Washington’s list of world terror organizations. But with the focus of the war on terror moving to Iraq, and staying firmly on Islamic organizations, there seems little hope that Ugandans will see Western military aid or support anytime soon.

• Write to Murray Oliver: CTVbureau@africamail.com