Diatta, 49, worries over her 24-year-old son Peter, who, last she heard, was enlisted with the US Marines fighting in Iraq.

" It is a choice he made, to build his military career, but I don't sleep anymore, listening to the news all night long," said Diatta, who comes from Casamance in southern Senegal and has lived across the border in a Bissau suburb more than two decades.

Her son Peter lives in the United States in Maryland with his two sisters, while his father, an American, once posted to Guinea-Bissau, now works in Mozambique for the US Agency for International Development, while she stayed on.

Diatta says the family has always kept in touch regularly and her husband calls her frequently from Mozambique, urging her to keep on praying.

But that her son would go into the Gulf conflict as a Marine came to her as a surprise. The last time she had seen Peter was in September, when he visited her to offer his condolences for the loss of several close relatives in a Senegalese ferry accident that killed over 1,800 passengers.

It was from her parents in-law that she learned that her son was one of the first Marines bound for Kuwait, ready to engage in battle. Peter, who got married in January, had not told her.

"Since he left for Kuwait, I haven't heard from him," Diatta said. "Whenever I hear an American soldier died, I cry for hours because it could be him."

With steady support from her husband, the distraction of her work teaching Senegalese children traditional African dance, and occasionally resorting to traditional medicine-men to "know if my son is alive", Diatta does her best to keep her head.

The 110 children she teaches "bring me a little solace," she told AFP.

She is outraged by the war she holds responsible for all her concern.

Diatta angrily described US President George W. Bush as "a murderer, an adventurer."

He "thinks only of the war because he does not have a son in the army and sits safely in his office in Washington."

Bush was "sending our children to the slaughter", Diatta charged, calling for an end to the war.

"We want peace in the world," she said, but her first prayers are that her son "will come home safe and sound".

SPACE.WIRE