Some of the abandoned villages were cleared many months ago. Others were attacked as recently as last week. In each empty settlement, it is clear that life came to a sudden halt. Beds are overturned. Cooking pots lie on their sides, the fires below them out. In front of one hut is a child's sandal, but no child anywhere.

Huddled together in camps all over the Darfur region, in western Sudan, are the people who fled, some of the one million people displaced in what the United Nations calls the world's worst humanitarian crisis.

They were driven away in a conflict that is a web of bitter rivalries driven by two loosely allied rebel groups, the Sudan Liberation Army and the Justice and Equality Movement.

They have waged war against the government in Khartoum because they said the people of Darfur, especially the black Africans there, were being marginalized by the Arab-dominated government in the north.

The rebels scored some early victories, which prompted the army to respond with helicopter gunships and Antanov planes loaded with bombs.

But the most ruthless weapon that the government unleashed is the Janjaweed, traditional Arab fighters who have long roamed Darfur's landscape. There is no formal structure to these men, but they are said to number a few thousand, roaming in bands. The government denies that it has a relationship with the Janjaweed, but ousted villagers say the links are strong, and their accounts are backed by numerous aid workers and outside experts.

Guns, which are smuggled into Darfur from neighboring countries, have settled disputes in this region for years. Exacerbating the tension between Arab nomads and black African farmers are droughts in the north of Darfur and the slow creep of the desert toward the south.

After the rebels struck last year, the government tapped into the Arab- versus-African resentment that has long festered here. The army began teaming its soldiers with the Janjaweed, who know no rules of war.

Ahmed Angabo Ahmed, the commissioner of the Kass region in south Darfur, acknowledged that he enlisted some armed robbers in the police and army to hunt down rebels. But he said his new recruits are on the side of the law now and are not Janjaweed.

"The Janjaweed are outlaws," he said.

That is true. The Janjaweed ride into villages as a group and begin shooting anyone in sight. As the militiamen torch and loot, the villagers grab what they can and run.

Fatima Ishag Sulieman, 25, did not have time to get away. She was in bed when the Janjaweed moved in. Two men entered her hut. They hit her. Then they raped her in front of her family.

"I screamed and they ran away," she said in Arabic.

Sulieman and others uprooted from their homes end up in camps, some of them organized settlements and others squalid outposts. She now lives under a tree at a secondary school in Kass. All around the schoolyard are other villagers, most of them women and children. Many of them, she says, experienced what she did.

Others suffer in other ways.

Hawa Muhammad lost just about everything when the men on horseback came. They took her family's two horses, two donkeys and small herd of goat and sheep. They took her cooking pots and her clothing. They took her mother and her father, too.

Hawa is 15 and she looked as if she was in a trance as she recounted her tale. Her parents were killed by the Janjaweed, she said. She saw them fall.

She does not know why they were killed. She does know that she is the one whom her six younger sisters now turn to when their bellies rumble.

She left her village on the run and settled with thousands of others at the camp in Kalma, outside Nyala. Her account of how the attack unfolded is the same one heard in camp after camp across Darfur, as well as in the settlements in the desert of eastern Chad, where villagers have been streaming, as well.

"The men on horses killed my parents," she said. "Then the planes came." Adam Hassan, a weathered old man in an equally weathered robe, described the same type of dual attack. First it was Arab men on horseback, he said, who swooped down on his village, outside Kaliek. Then, he said, soldiers moved in.

In Hassan's case, it was his two sons, ages seven and 10, who were killed.

He now stays with his wife and two surviving daughters at the Kass schoolyard. He wants to return to his land and pick up where he left off.

Like so many of the uprooted villagers, Hassan is a farmer. He relies on the heavy rains that come in June every year to add some life to the dusty earth of Darfur. His sorghum and ground nuts keep his family alive.

But he and hundreds of thousands of other farmers in Darfur will miss this year's planting season. It is too unsafe for them to farm. That reality has aid agencies gearing up for what will be more and more hunger in the days ahead.

The United Nations, which conducted its own tour of Darfur last week, said the humanitarian crisis in western Sudan will last at least another 18 months and that is if the government manages to disarm the men on horseback soon.

It remains to be seen whether the lawlessness will be tamed. Like so many other villagers, Hassan is digging into his campsite for the long haul.

His empty village, he says, may stay empty for a long time to come.

"I may have to stay here forever," he said, fidgeting with his callused hands and looking glum. "There are too many Janjaweed."