Sudanese women fleeing civil war face rape and abuse in Libya

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

Like all the Sudanese women the BBC spoke to about their experiences of being trafficked to Libya, her name has been changed to protect her identity.

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

With a trembling voice, he explains how his home in Omdurman was raided during Sudan’s violent civil war, which broke out in 2023.

The family first went to Egypt before paying smugglers $350 (£338) to take them to Libya, where they had been told life would be better and they could find jobs in cleaning and hospitality.

But as soon as they crossed the border, Layla says the smugglers took them hostage, beat them and demanded more money.

“My son needed medical attention after he was hit repeatedly in the face,” she tells the BBC.

The traffickers released them after three days, without saying why. Layla thought her new life in Libya was starting to look up after family. managed to travel west and he rented a room and started working.

But one day her husband left to look for work and never returned. Then, her 19-year-old daughter was raped by a man known to the family through Layla’s work.

“He told my daughter that he would rape her little sister if she talked about what he did to her,” Layla says.

She speaks quietly for fear that the family will be evicted if her landlady finds out about the threats.

Layla says they are now trapped in Libya: they have no money left to pay the smugglers to leave and they cannot return to war-torn Sudan.

“We barely have food,” he says, adding that his children are not in school. “My son is afraid to leave the house because other children often hit him and call him names for being black. I feel like I’m going to lose my mind.”

Millions of people have fled Sudan since war broke out between the army and the paramilitary Rapid Support Forces (RSF) in 2023. The two sides had staged a joint coup in 2021, but a power struggle between their commanders engulfed the country into a civil war.

More than 12 million people have been forced to leave their homes, while famine has spread to five areas, and 24.6 million people – about half the population – are in urgent need of food aid, experts say.

The UN refugee agency says more than 210,000 Sudanese refugees are now in Libya.

The BBC has spoken to five Sudanese families who initially went to Egypt, where they said they experienced racism and violence, before moving to Libya, believing it would be safer and with better job opportunities. We contacted them through a researcher on migration and asylum seekers in Libya.

Salma tells the BBC that she was already living in Cairo, Egypt, with her husband and three children when the Sudanese civil war broke out, but when large numbers of refugees entered the country, conditions for migrants worsened.

They decided to move to Libya, but what awaited them there was “hell,” says Salma.

She describes how, as soon as they crossed the border, they were placed in a warehouse run by traffickers. The men wanted money they had paid in advance to smugglers on the Egyptian side of the border, but it never arrived.

His family spent almost two months in the warehouse. At one point, Salma was separated from her husband and taken to a room for women and children. Here, she says that she and her two eldest children were subjected to various forms of brutality because they wanted the money.

“Their whips left marks on our bodies. They beat my daughter and put my son’s hands in a burning oven while I watched.

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

Salma says her son and daughter were traumatized by the experience and have suffered from incontinence ever since. Then lower your voice.

“They would take me to a separate room, the ‘rape room,’ with different men each time,” she says. “I have a son from one of them.”

Finally, he got some money through a friend in Egypt and the traffickers freed the family.

She says a doctor told her it was too late to have an abortion, and when her husband discovered she was pregnant he abandoned her and the children, leaving them sleeping on the street, eating leftovers from garbage bins and begging on the street.

They found shelter for a time on a remote farm in northwestern Libya and spent entire days with little or no food. They quenched their thirst by drinking contaminated water from a nearby well.

“It breaks my heart to hear my (oldest) son say that he is literally starving,” Salma says over the phone, as her baby’s cries grow louder in the background.

“He’s very hungry,” she says, “but I don’t have anything, not even enough milk in my breasts to feed him.”

Jamila, a Sudanese woman in her 40s, also believed reports from the Sudanese community that a better life awaited them in Libya.

She fled previous unrest in Sudan’s western Darfur region in 2014 and spent years in Egypt before moving to Libya in late 2023. She says her daughters have been repeatedly raped since then; They were 19 and 20 when it first happened.

“I sent them to clean up while I was sick; they came back at night covered in dirt and blood; four men raped them until one of them fainted,” she tells the BBC.

Jamila says she was also raped and held captive for weeks by a man, much younger than her, who had offered her a job cleaning his house.

“He used to call me ‘disgusting black woman’. He raped me and said, ‘This is what women are made for,'” she recalls.

“Even the children here are mean to us, they treat us like beasts and sorcerers, they insult us for being black and African, aren’t they African themselves?” Jamila says.

When her daughters were raped for the first time, Jamila took them to the hospital and reported it to the police. But when the police officer realized they were refugees, Jamila says he withdrew the report and warned her that she would be jailed if the complaint was officially filed. This was in western Libya.

Libya 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 migrants.”

The country is divided in two, each part run by a different government, but the situation is easier for migrants in the east, as they can file official complaints without being detained and access medical care more easily, according to the group. human rights Libya Crimes Watch. .

While sexual violence is common within unofficial facilities run by traffickers, there is also evidence that abuses occur in official detention centers in Libya, especially in the west.

Hanaa, a Sudanese woman who works collecting plastic bottles from bins to feed her children, says a group of men kidnapped her in western Libya, took her to a forest and raped her at gunpoint.

The next day, her attackers took her to a center run by the state-funded Stability Support Authority (SSA). No one told Hanaa why she had been detained.

“Young men and boys were beaten and forced to completely remove their clothes while I watched,” Hanaa tells the BBC.

“I was there for days. I slept on the bare floor, resting my head on my plastic slippers. They let me go to the bathroom after hours of begging. They hit me repeatedly on the head.”

There have been numerous previous reports of migrants from other African countries suffering abuse in Libya. The country is a key stepping stone on the path to Europe, although none of the women the BBC spoke to were planning to travel there.

In 2022, Amnesty International accused the SSA of “unlawful killings, arbitrary detentions, interception and subsequent arbitrary detention of migrants and refugees, torture, forced labor and other scandalous human rights violations and crimes under international law.”

The report states that Interior Ministry officials in the capital Tripoli told Amnesty that the ministry had no oversight over the SSA as it reports to Prime Minister Abdul Hamid Dbeibeh, whose office did not respond to our request for comment.

Libya Crimes Watch has told the BBC that systematic sexual abuse of migrants takes place in official immigration detention centres, including the notorious Abu Salim prison in Tripoli.

In a 2023 report, Doctors Without Borders (MSF) said there were an “increasing number of reports of sexual and physical violence, including intimate body searches and systematic stripping and rape” in Abu Salim.

The Minister of Internal Affairs and the Department for Combating Illegal Migration in Tripoli did not respond to our request for comment.

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

He says he can’t go home because of what happened to him.

“I bring shame to the family, they would say. I’m not sure they would even welcome my corpse,” she says. “If only I had known what awaited me here.”