BATTICALOA (Sri Lanka): A feared militia along Sri Lanka’s volatile eastern coast has abducted hundreds of men and boys, some as young as 12, and is training them for combat in camps operated with the government’s consent, witnesses and officials said.

The so-called K-faction takes its forced recruits to rudimentary thatched-roofed bases near army compounds where they are used as labourers or taught to use weapons, witnesses, family members and aid workers told The Associated Press in recent interviews.

Named after its commander, who goes by the nom de guerre ‘Karuna’, the paramilitaries, a breakaway faction of Sri Lanka’s main Tamil Tiger rebel movement, have added a new factor to Sri Lanka’s civil war, which began in 1983 and has savaged the nation.

Their existence also complicates efforts by foreign mediators to revive peace negotiations.

Fighting this year has killed over 1,000 people on this island off southern India, rendering a 2002 cease-fire essentially void.

By allowing Karuna’s forces to operate, the government has gained an ally against a common enemy, said Robert Karniol, Asia Pacific bureau chief for Jane’s Defence Weekly.

“The Tamil Tigers are a serious threat to the government and anything that weakens or distracts from that is advantageous to Colombo,” Karniol said.

The Karuna faction split from the Liberation Tigers of Tamil Eelam (LTTE) in 2004, with Karuna saying the larger group didn’t defend the interests of the country’s eastern Tamils. The faction has since built up a strong military presence in the island’s east.

It is demanding a role in peace talks with the government and says there can be no solution without them.

Hundreds of Karuna fighters are terrorizing the district of Batticaloa, the scene of a rash of abductions that began in March, residents said.

The total number of disappearances is unclear because so many go unreported, but officials from several aid organizations estimate at least 300 people have been taken by Karuna’s men this year.

“It has definitely been hundreds and it might not be all of them,” said Bjorn Kjelsaas of the Sri Lanka Monitoring Mission, established to oversee the 2002 ceasefire.

The government, for its part, denies helping the Karuna faction.

“We don’t know about his (Karuna’s) whereabouts. We have been right throughout denying that we are involved with them,” the government’s national security spokesman, Keheliya Rambukwella, said.

But the two forces clearly work together, many people say. Karuna faction troops, mostly dressed in civilian clothing, work alongside police and army officials at roadblocks, according to a high-ranking local official and aid workers. Because of the violence in the area— unexplained killings happen nearly every day, as various factions battle for supremacy— only a handful of people were willing to use their names.

A leader of the faction’s political wing, E. Prethip, told The Associated Press that the group’s members are ‘volunteers’.

He blamed the Tamil Tigers for committing atrocities in Karuna’s name, and said members were armed only in self defence.

“They carry out ambushes, loot houses, kill civilians. They kidnap the children and they say it was done by Karuna,” Prethip said in his office, where children served visitors drinks.

“Our military does not cooperate with the Sri Lankan army, but we’re not enemies either,” he said, sitting in front of a bookcase filled with children’s books and a recent copy of ‘Eye Spy’ intelligence magazine.

The disappearances have become so common that almost every family around Batticaloa has lost a son, or knows someone who has, residents said. A teacher said his 10th grade high school class had almost no boys left.—AP