Two children stand on the roadside staring into the thick darkness of a banana plantation, their slender shoulders drooping from the weight of ammunition around their necks. Their eyes betray unadulterated terror, and the younger one, no more than 13, looks close to tears.

Towards the jungle, across from the bleak strip of peninsula that separates the town of Batticaloa from the Sri Lanka mainland, comes the penetrating thud of shells from government field-guns.

As each shell falls, the children, cadres from the Karuna Faction, a breakaway militia which split from the Tamil Tigers two years ago, nervously twitch their fingers on the triggers of AK47s.

The Karuna Faction are now in the middle of a brutal struggle against their former comrades in the Tamil Tigers, a situation the Sri Lankan Army is well placed to exploit. But the three-way battle is causing untold misery in and around Batticaloa.

Army trucks hurtle past the children standing guard, heading towards positions in the west and north.

Across from a heavily guarded checkpoint, Vijay Lakshmi, 52, sits in a refugee camp surrounded by 27 members of her family. The sound of fighting in the distance is coming from the Sittnadikudi district, where she once lived.

For her and an estimated 196,000 others around Batticaloa, including the 12,000 people who share this camp, home is now a white United Nations tent.

Her children and grandchildren are fed sparse rations of rice in a communal kitchen. The World Food Programme fears it will run out of rations for the refugees within a month.

This remote eastern corner of one of the world's most beautiful tourist destinations has become the centre of a humanitarian crisis both the UN and the International Red Cross say is fast rivalling that in Darfur. As in the Sudan, the forced recruitment of children is at the heart of the crisis.

"The Government is shelling our land each day, the Tamil Tigers are looting everything and the Karuna Faction are abducting our children," Ms Lakshmi says.

A fortnight ago Ms Lakshmi's eldest nephew, Rajnish, 15, was dumped in a paddy field. His neck had been broken and his groin peppered with bullets. A pro-Tamil Tigers pamphlet had been stuffed in his mouth. His crime had been manning a Karuna Faction checkpoint. He had been "recruited" at gunpoint four months earlier.

He was one of a growing number of child military victims of a bloody war being fought through thick jungle between Government troops, Government-backed Tamil fighters led by Commander Karuna, and battle-hardened guerrillas from the Liberation Tigers of Tamil Eelam (LTTE).

Karuna is the nom de guerre of 42-year-old Vinayagamoorthy Muralitharan, a widely feared guerrilla. Until two years ago he was the Tigers' military commander. Hailing from a small village near Batticaloa, he broke away from the Tigers, saying the eastern Tamils were dying in disproportionate numbers for the northern leadership.