Sudanese women fleeing civil war face rape and violence in Libya

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

As with all the Sudanese women the BBC spoke to about going to Libya, her name has been changed to protect her identity.

Warning: This story contains details that may upset some.

In a trembling voice, she explains how her home in Omdurman was raided during the brutal Sudanese civil war that broke out in 2023.

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

But once they crossed the border, Layla says the traffickers took them hostage, beat them and demanded more money.

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

After three days, the traders let them go without explaining why. Layla thought that her new life in Libya was starting to settle down after her family managed to travel west and she rented a room and started working.

But one day her husband left to look for work and did not return. Then her 19-year-old daughter was raped by a person known to the family through Leyla’s work.

“He told my daughter that he would rape her younger sister if she told me about what he had done to her,” says Layla.

She speaks in a low voice, fearing that the family will be evicted if the landlady hears about the threats.

Layla says they are now trapped in Libya, with no money left to pay the traffickers to leave and unable to return to war-torn Sudan.

“We hardly have any food,” she says, adding that her children are not in school. “My son is afraid to leave the house because he is often beaten and insulted by other children because he is black. I feel like I’m going crazy.’

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

More than 12 million people have been forced from their homes as famine has spread across five districts, with 24.6 million people – about half the population – in urgent need of food aid, experts say.

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

The BBC spoke to five Sudanese families who first went to Egypt, where they say they faced racism and violence, before moving to Libya, believing it would be safer there 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 Sudan’s civil war broke out, but when a large number of refugees entered the country, conditions for migrants there worsened.

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

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

Her 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 older children were subjected to various forms of cruelty because they wanted money.

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

“Sometimes I wished we’d 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 she lowers her voice.

“I was taken to a separate room, the ‘rape room’ with different men each time,” she says. “I’m having a baby with one of them.”

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

She says the doctor then 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.

For a while, they took refuge on a remote farm in northwestern Libya, spending days with little to no food. They quenched their thirst by drinking contaminated water from a nearby well.

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

“He is so hungry,” she says, “but I have nothing, not even the milk in my breast, 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 while I was sick; they returned at night covered in dirt and blood – four men raped them until one of them passed out,” she told the BBC.

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

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

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

When her daughters were raped for the first time, Jamila took them to the hospital and reported it to the police. But when the policeman realized they were fugitives, Jamilha says he withdrew the report and warned her that she would be jailed if a formal complaint was filed. It was in the west of Libya.

Libya is not a signatory to the 1951 Refugee Convention. or the 1967 protocol. on refugee status – and considers refugees and asylum seekers to be “illegal migrants”.

The country is divided into two parts, each governed by a different government, but the situation is easier for migrants in the east, as they can file formal complaints without detention and have easier access to medical care, according to rights group Libya Crimes Watch. .

While sexual abuse is common in informal institutions run by traffickers, there is also evidence that abuses occur in official detention centers in Libya, particularly in the west.

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

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

“Young people and boys were being beaten and forced to take off their clothes completely while I watched,” Hanaa told the BBC.

“I was there for days. I slept on the bare floor with my head resting on plastic slippers. I was allowed to go to the toilet after many hours of begging. I was hit on the head several times.”

In the past, there have been numerous reports of ill-treatment of migrants from other African countries in Libya. The country is a key stepping stone on the way to Europe, although none of the women the BBC spoke to had any plans to go there.

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

The report said Interior Ministry officials in the capital Tripoli told Amnesty that the ministry does not control the SSA as it reports to Prime Minister Abdul Hamid Dbeiba, 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 migrant detention centres, including the notorious Abu Salim prison in Tripoli.

In a 2023 report, Médecins Sans Frontières (MSF) said there had been “increased reports of sexual and physical violence, including strip and intimate searches, and rape” in Abu Salim.

The interior minister and Tripoli’s Department for Combating Illegal Migration 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.

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

“I bring shame to the family, they would say. I’m not sure they would even welcome my dead body,” she says. “If only I knew what was waiting for me here.”