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Child victims of the battle to end a bloody civil war

LYING howling on a torn mattress, in a cot by a window overlooking the Sri Lankan capital, Colombo, the wounded toddler was a pitiful sight.

A female relative fretted, trying to calm the girl down as the medics worked around her. The 18-month-old had been shot in the stomach in the final stages of the fighting in the north-east of the country and there was an ugly line of stitches across her abdomen where doctors had operated to remove the bullet. Her right leg was missing a chunk of flesh and had been gashed.

The little girl is one of thousands of casualties hidden away from public view in hospitals across Sri Lanka, guarded by soldiers and police who roam the wards. As soon as they are fit enough to be moved, the injured are returned to the grim internment camps that are home to approximately 300,000 people.

Sri Lankan guards 'sexually abused girls' in Tamil refugee camp

A British medic held for months in an internment camp for Tamil civilians has revealed how military guards dealt out cruel punishments, while many suspected of links to Tiger rebels were taken away and have not been seen since

We heard the bullets and then the first shell hit our sandbags

The shell exploded without warning. Kandiah Rasamahendran felt a searing pain in his left leg and looked down, to see blood gushing from the wound. His young sons were screaming, his wife struck dumb with shock. Frantically, he scooped sand from the floor of their makeshift bunker and poured it into the gaping hole, trying to staunch the bleeding.

Selection

Eyewitness to carnage

The young mother was standing by the side of the road, clutching her baby. The baby was dead. Damilvany Gnanakumar watched as she tried to make a decision. Around them, thousands of people were picking their way between bodies strewn across the road, desperate to escape the fighting all around them.

This is really a disaster. I don't know really how to explain it. At the moment, it is like hell...

"The most terrible thing that I have seen was when a mother had a bullet go through her breast and she was dead and the baby was still on the other side of the breast and the baby was drinking her milk, and that really affected me. I was at that place where it happened...I'm talking to you now, but maybe tomorrow I'll be dead." Vany Kumar, 25, speaking by telephone from a shelled hospital in Sri Lanka's no fire zone.

In squalid internment camps, the fight for survival goes on amid reports of 15,000 killed

The first accounts of the suffering of civilians during the final stages of the war in Sri Lanka began to emerge from the camps where as many as a quarter of a million Tamils are being held behind barbed wire. Men and women described how they were shot at by the Tamil Tigers as they tried to escape the so-called no-fire zone and how a hospital was repeatedly shelled inside an area designated by the government as a safe zone.

'Two of us fled. 75 other women killed themselves with grenades'

By the time Arulmathy and her fellow Tamil Tigers realised they were surrounded, it was too late. They had fallen asleep and now Sri Lankan soldiers were swarming into their bunker. Arulmathy watched aghast as 75 women she had fought beside for so many months reached for their hand grenades, pulled the pins and blew themselves to pieces, as they had been ordered to do.

Release her: urgent plea for British medic held in war zone

A British woman who was working at a hospital helping victims of Sri Lanka's civil war has been interned in one of the island's detention camps, prompting her family to plead for urgent diplomatic help to secure her immediate release.

Tamils trapped in internment camps tell of desperate hunt for loved ones

The three children standing in the dirt outside the tent in Sri Lanka's newest internment camp have not seen their mother for weeks, ever since a shell exploded next to the bunker where they had taken cover, ripping a hole in her stomach.

Tamil civilians slaughtered as army shells 'no-fire zone'

Hundreds of civilians are being killed or seriously injured in artillery and gun attacks as the Sri Lankan army attempts to finish off the last Tamil Tiger rebels trapped in a shrinking pocket of land.

'I'm only 16. They gave me a rifle. It was heavy. They said we had to go forward. If we came back, they would shoot us'

Tamil children as young as 11 were forced at gunpoint to fight for the Tigers in Sri Lanka's civil war. Survivors talked of their ordeal to Gethin Chamberlain in Ambepusse.

Civilians held in Sri Lanka camps face disease threat

Thousands of civilians fleeing fighting in Sri Lanka have been interned by the government in cramped, makeshift camps with overflowing drains, water shortages and the threat of disease looming large in the sweltering, unsanitary conditions.

Refugee tide threatens to overwhelm camps in Sri Lanka, says UN

Unicef said today it faced a "human avalanche" of destitute people in Sri Lanka as the country's military entered an established no-fire zone and freed 3,000 civilians trapped between the army and Tamil Tiger rebels

Eyewitness account: 'Hospital is paralysed by shelling'

Cluster bombs and artillery shelling have killed many civilians at a makeshift hospital within the last strip of Sri Lanka's coastline still controlled by the Tamil Tigers, a doctor said today.

Sri Lanka rebels forcing children to fight, UN says

Children as young as 12 are being given guns and forced to fight on the frontline alongside desperate Tamil Tiger rebels cornered inside Sri Lanka's no-fire zone, the UN said today. Those forcibly recruited included the 16-year-old daughter of a member of the UN staff, who had stayed inside the narrow strip of coast where the Liberation Tigers of Tamil Eelam (LTTE) are making their last stand.

"My face and clothes were splattered with the blood of this boy. I never knew blood was warm."

SOPIKA had only ever known war. It had always been there, part of the scenery, part of her very existence. Yet for the first nine of her 10 years, it had seemed to visit only those on the edges of her life. Now, as the bullet passed through the body of the young boy ahead of her on the edge of the lagoon on the north east coast of Sri Lanka where she and her family had sought refuge from the killing, it finally found her. In the darkness, she felt a sudden dampness on her face and on her clothes as the boy's blood splashed onto her.

Thousands of trapped Sri Lankan civilians pour through breach in Tamil Tiger lines

Tens of thousands of civilians trapped by fighting in Sri Lanka fled to safety today after the military smashed through one of the Tamil Tigers' last major defensive lines. Video footage released by the Sri Lankan defence ministry showed civilians pouring through a breach in an earth barrier which the rebels had been using to hold back the military onslaught.

UK's role in Tamil leaders' failed surrender bid

British say involvement was indirect at most: Two were killed despite cautious negotiations

Prisoners of peace: hundreds of thousands face two years trapped in Sri Lankan camps

Priority is to find Tamil Tigers, says government: UN concern grows over 'shocking' conditions.

Makeshift Sri Lanka hospital is shelled, taking 47 lives

At least 47 people were killed today and more than 50 injured when a shell struck the last hospital inside the so-called no-fire zone in north-eastern Sri Lanka, where casualties of the country's brutal civil war are being treated.

Monsoon threatens Sri Lankan refugees with 'humanitarian disaster', warns UN

Tens of thousands of detained refugees from the war in Sri Lanka are threatened by the imminent arrival of monsoon rains in the north of the country, according to an internal United Nations document.

Audio: 'The ceasefire doesn't work and the fighting continues'

Gethin Chamberlain on Sri Lankan government saying it won't use artillery against the Tamil Tigers.

Audio: Tamil Tigers routed

"As a conventional force, they are finished..."

Gethin Chamberlain on the bloody end of Sri Lanka's 26-year conflict