Sudanese women fleeing civil war face rape and abuse in Libya

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

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

Warning: This story contains details that may be disturbing.

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

The family first went to Egypt before paying traffickers $350 (£338) to take them to Libya, where they were told life would be better and they could find work in cleaning and catering.

But as soon as she crossed the border, Layla says the traffickers kidnapped her, beat her and demanded more money.

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

The traffickers released them after three days, without saying why. Layla thought her new life in Libya was starting to get better after her family he managed to travel west and he 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 was raped by a man known to the family through Layla’s work.

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

He speaks quietly, fearing that the family will be evicted if the landlady hears about the threats.

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

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

Millions have fled since the war between the Sudanese army and RSF paramilitaries broke out in 2023. The two sides staged a joint coup in 2021, but a power struggle between commanders plunged the country into civil war.

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

The UN Refugee Agency says there are now more than 210,000 Sudanese refugees in Libya.

The BBC spoke to five Sudanese families who initially moved to Egypt, where they said they faced racism and violence, before moving to Libya in the hope of safer work opportunities. We contacted them through a researcher on Libyan migration and asylum seeker issues.

Salma told the BBC that she was already living in Cairo, Egypt, with her husband and three children when Sudan’s civil war began, but as more refugees entered the country, conditions for migrants worsened.

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

He describes how, as soon as they crossed the border, they were put into a warehouse run by the traffickers. The men wanted the money paid in advance across the border in Egypt, but it never came.

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 and her two older children were subjected to various atrocities because they wanted 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 solution.”

Salma says her son and daughter were traumatized by the experience and have been incontinent ever since. Then he lowers his voice.

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

Eventually, he raised some money through a friend in Egypt and the traffickers released the family.

She says a doctor told her it was too late for an abortion, and when her husband found out she was pregnant he abandoned her and the children, leaving them to sleep, eat scraps from garbage cans and beg on the streets.

They found shelter for a while in a remote farm in northwestern Libya, where they spent whole days with little food. They quenched their thirst by drinking contaminated water from a nearby well.

“It breaks my heart to hear that my (elder) son is literally dying of hunger,” Salma says over the phone as her child’s cries grow louder.

“He is so hungry,” she says, “but I have nothing, not even enough milk in my breast to feed him.”

Jamila, a Sudanese woman in her 40s, also believed that within the Sudanese community they were waiting for a better life in Libya.

He fled the 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, when they were 19 and 20 years old the first time.

“I sent them on a cleaning job when I was sick, they came back at night covered in dirt and blood, four men raped them until one of them fainted,” she told the BBC.

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

“He called me ‘disgusting black.’ He raped me and said, ‘That’s what women were made for,'” she recalls.

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

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

Libya is not a signatory to the 1951 Refugee Convention or the 1967 Protocol on the Status of Refugees – and considers refugees and asylum seekers illegal migrants.

The country is split in two, each run by a different government, but the situation is easier for migrants in the east, where they can file official complaints without arrest and have easier access to health care, according to human rights group Libya Crimes Watch. .

While sexual violence is common in unofficial facilities run by traffickers, there is evidence of abuses taking place in Libya’s official detention centers, especially in the west.

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

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

“Young men and boys were beaten and forced to strip completely as I watched,” Hanaa told the BBC.

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

Previous reports of migrants from other African countries being mistreated in Libya have been rife. The country is a key step on the way to Europe, although none of the women the BBC spoke to had any plans to travel there.

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

The report says that officials at the Ministry of Interior 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 systemic sexual abuse of migrants takes place in official migrant detention centres, including Tripoli’s notorious Abu Salim prison.

In a 2023 report, Doctors Without Borders (MSF) said there was a “growing number of allegations of sexual and physical violence” against Abu Salim.

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

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

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

“I bring shame to the family, they would say. I’m not sure they’ll even welcome my dead,” he says. — If only I had known what was waiting for me here.