Robert Go, Banda Aceh – Ten-year-old Embrianda Hassan stayed up later than usual on Tuesday last week.
At 10pm that night, his school building burned like a tropical fever in the clear sky. Arsonists had tossed bags full of petrol onto its roof, setting it ablaze. On a steamy afternoon three days later, the fourth-grader played hide-and-seek among the smouldering ruins. White ash, the remains of books stacked in the former library, clung to his feet.
Embrianda said he is still attending school, but not at his home village of Mido, near this provincial capital of Aceh. He and friends walk several more kilometres each day to one of the few buildings missed by the arsonists' spree which destroyed more than 380 schools in the province.
Mr Rusli Abdullah teaches religion at a high school which was also burned down by unidentified men during the first week of Indonesia's martial law operations in Aceh. He said he believes rebels belonging to the Free Aceh Movement, or GAM, are responsible for the atrocious attacks.
He said: "This is something that GAM has done in the past. The rebels target schools because they think these are where Indonesia brainwashes Acehnese children." But Mr Rusli said some of his colleagues support the rebels' counter-claim that the attacks were orchestrated by Indonesian forces. They blame the notoriously undisciplined mobile police brigade, or Brimob.
The torching of schools, the very backbone of a society's future, underscores just how blurred the battle lines are here. It is hard to tell the good guys from the bad.
What is clearly emerging in Aceh, however, is that Indonesia's return to military operations against separatist rebels spells dark days ahead for the region's ordinary people.
Journalists who ventured out of the relative safety of Banda Aceh brought back stories of massacres and summary executions of villagers by soldiers. Other reports detail abductions of people who appeared to be non-combatants and discoveries of corpses, some shot and others exhibiting signs of torture, on roadsides.