Sudanese women fleeing civil war face rape and abuse in Libya

“We live in terror,” Layla whispered into the phone so no one could hear. Early last year, she fled Sudan with her husband and six children in search of safety and is now in Libya.

All Sudanese women, whose names have been changed to protect their identities, have spoken to the BBC about their experiences of being trafficked to Libya.

Warning: This story contains details that some may find disturbing.

In the year With a trembling voice, she recounts how her home in Omdurman was invaded in 2023 when the Sudanese civil war erupted.

The family first went to Egypt and paid traffickers $350 (£338) to take them to Libya; They were told to take them to Libya, where life would be better and they would find jobs in cleaning and hospitality.

But as soon as they cross the border, Laila said, the smugglers kidnap them, beat them and demand more money.

“My son needed medical attention after being repeatedly punched in the face,” she told the BBC.

The traffickers released them after three days without saying why. Leila thinks her new life in Libya is starting to improve after the family. He was able to travel to the west And she rented a room and started working.

But one day her husband went to look for work and never came back. Then her 19-year-old daughter Layla was raped by someone known to the family at work.

“He told my little sister he would bully her if she told me what he did to her,” she said.

She remains silent for fear that the family will be evicted if her husband hears about the threat.

Leila said they are now trapped in Libya, unable to return to war-torn Sudan because they have no money to pay smugglers to leave.

“We don’t have any food,” she said, adding that her children are not in school. “My son is afraid to leave the house, as other children often beat him and call him black.

In the year Millions have fled Sudan since the war between the army and the Rapid Support Forces (RSF) began in 2023. Although the two sides staged a joint coup in 2021, a power struggle between their commanders plunged the country into civil war.

More than 12 million people have been displaced and famine has spread to five regions, with 24.6 million people – nearly half – in urgent need of food aid, experts say. They speak.

The United Nations refugee agency says there are more than 210,000 Sudanese refugees in Libya.

The BBC first spoke to five Sudanese families who went to Egypt, saying they had been subjected to racism and violence before moving to Libya in the hope of better job opportunities. We contacted them through the Migration and Asylum Researcher in Libya.

Salma told the BBC that she was living in Cairo, Egypt with her husband and three children when Sudan’s civil war broke out, but the situation for refugees there worsened as large numbers of refugees entered the country.

They decided to move to Libya, but a “living hell” awaited them there, Salma said.

She describes how as soon as they crossed the border, they were kept in a warehouse run by smugglers. The men demanded an advance payment to the smugglers at the Egyptian border, but it never arrived.

Her family spent two months in a warehouse. At one point, Salma was separated from her husband and taken to the women and children’s ward. Here she says that she and her two eldest children were subjected to various cruelties for wanting the money.

“Their whips left a mark on our body, they beat my son and put my son’s hands in a burning oven as I watched.”

“Sometimes I wish we could all die together. I couldn’t think of any other way out.”

Ms Salma said her son and daughter were traumatized by the incident and have since suffered self-esteem issues. Then she lowers her voice.

“They would take me to a different room, the ‘rape room’ with different men each time,” she said. “I am carrying the child of one of them.”

Eventually she raised some money through a friend in Egypt and the traffickers let the family go.

Then, when a doctor tells her it’s too late for an abortion, her husband discovers she’s pregnant and abandons her and the children, leaving them to sleepless nights, eating scraps and begging on the streets.

They found refuge for a short time in a remote farm in northwest Libya and spent the day on little food. They quenched their thirst by drinking contaminated water from a nearby well.

“It breaks my heart to hear that my (eldest) son is literally going to starve to death,” Salma said over the phone as her son’s cries grew louder in the background.

“He is very hungry,” she said, “but I have nothing. I don’t even have enough milk in my breasts.”

Jamila, a Sudanese woman in her mid-40s, believes reports in the Sudanese community that a better life awaits them in Libya.

In the year She fled the unrest in Sudan’s West Darfur region in 2014 and spent years in Egypt before moving to Libya in late 2023. Since then, her daughters have been repeatedly raped – initially when they were 19 and 20 years old.

“I was sick and I sent them to clean up, and at night they would come back covered in dirt and blood – four men dared them until one of them passed out,” she told the BBC.

Jamila, on the other hand, said that she was raped by a man much younger than her who offered her a job cleaning the house and was tied up for weeks.

He called me “disgusting black”, he dared me and said “that’s what women are made for”.

“Even the children here are mean to us, they consider us beasts and witches, they insult us as black and African, aren’t they themselves Africans?” Jamila says.

When her daughters were raped for the first time, Jamila took her to the hospital and informed the police. However, when the police officer found out that they were refugees, Jamila withdrew the report and warned that he could be arrested if the complaint was made public. This was in the west of Libya.

Libya in 2010 It is not a signatory to the 1951 Refugee Convention or the 1967 Protocol Relating to the Status of Refugees – and considers refugees and asylum seekers “illegal immigrants”.

The country is divided in two and each part is led by a different government, but the situation is easier for refugees in the east as they can make official complaints and access health services without being arrested, according to the human rights organization Libya Criminal Watch. .

While sexual abuse is common in informal facilities run by traffickers, there is evidence that violence is taking place in official detention centers in Libya, particularly in the west.

Hana, a Sudanese woman who collects plastic bottles from landfills to feed her children, was abducted in western Libya, taken to a forest and raped by a group of men at gunpoint, she said.

The next day, her attackers took her to a facility run by the government-funded Stability Support Authority (SSA). No one told Hannah why she was arrested.

“I watched young men and boys being beaten and forced to strip completely,” Hanna told the BBC.

“I was there for days, lying on the bare floor, resting my head on my plastic slippers. After hours of begging, they let me go to the bathroom. I was repeatedly beaten on the head.”

There have been several reports in the past about the abuse of migrants from other African countries in Libya. None of the women the BBC spoke to planned to travel there, but the country is a keystone for travel to Europe.

In the year In 2022, Amnesty International accused the SSN of “unlawful killings under international law, arbitrary detention, interference and arbitrary detention of refugees and migrants, torture, forced labor and other appalling human rights violations and crimes.”

Interior Ministry officials in the capital, Tripoli, told Amnesty that the ministry did not respond to inquiries after Prime Minister Abdulhamid Dibbeh said it had no control over the SSA, the report said.

Libya Crime Watch told the BBC that systematic sexual abuse of refugees takes place in official refugee detention centres, including the Abu Salim prison in Tripoli.

In the year In a 2023 report, Médecins Sans Frontières (MSF) said “reports of sexual and physical violence, including systematic groping and body searches and rape, are increasing” in Abu Salim.

The Interior Minister and the Department for Combating Illegal Migration in Tripoli did not respond to our inquiries.

Salma has now left the farm and moved to a new unit nearby with another family, but she and her family still face the threat of displacement and abuse.

She says she can’t go back home because of what happened to her.

“They say I have brought shame to the family. I am not sure they will even accept my dead body,” she said. If only I knew what awaited me here.