Sudanese women fleeing civil war face rape and abuse in Libya

“We live in terror,” Leila whispers into the phone so no one can hear. 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 disturbing.

With a trembling voice, she explains how her home in Omdurman was attacked during Sudan's brutal 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 cleaning and the hospitality.

But as soon as they crossed the border, Leila says the traffickers held them hostage, beat them 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. Leila thought her new life in Libya was getting better after the family managed to travel west and she rented a room and began work.

But one day her husband left to look for work and never came back. Her then 19-year-old daughter was raped by a man known to the family from Leila's work.

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

She spoke quietly, fearing the family would be evicted if their landlady heard about the threats.

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

“We have almost no food,” she says, adding that her children do not go to 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 Sudan since the outbreak of war between the army and the paramilitary Rapid Support Force (RSF) in 2023. The two sides staged a joint coup in 2021, but a power struggle between their commanders plunged the country into civil war.

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

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

The BBC spoke 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 with better job opportunities. We contacted them through a researcher on migration and asylum seekers in Libya.

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

They decide to move to Libya, but what awaits them there is a “living 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 that had been paid in advance to traffickers on the Egyptian side of the border, but it never arrived.

Her family spent nearly two months in the warehouse. At one point, Salma is 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'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 been incontinent ever since. Then she lowers her voice.

“They took me to a separate room, the 'rape room' with different men each time,” she says. “I'm carrying a child of one of them.”

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

She says a 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 rough, eat scraps from garbage cans and beg on the streets .

They took refuge on a remote farm in northwest Libya for a time, spending whole 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 (elder) 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 enough milk in my breast to feed him.”

Jamila, a Sudanese woman in her mid-40s, also believed reports in 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 came back at night, covered in dirt and blood – four men raped them until one of them passed out,” she told the BBC.

Jamila also says she was 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 'nasty black.' He raped me and said, 'This is what women are made for,'” she recalled.

“Even the children here are mean to us, treat us like beasts and sorcerers, 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 informed the police. But when the officer realizes they are refugees, Jamila says he withdrew the alert and warned her she would be jailed if the complaint was formally filed. This was in the western part of Libya.

Libya has not signed 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, with each part governed by a different government, but the situation is easier for migrants in the east, as they can file formal complaints without being detained and have easier access to healthcare, according to the human rights group Libya Crimes Watch.

Although sexual abuse is common in informal facilities run by traffickers, there is also evidence that abuse occurs in official detention centers in Libya, particularly in the west.

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

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

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

“I was there for days. I slept on the bare floor with my head propped up on my plastic slippers. They let me go to the toilet after hours of begging. I was repeatedly beaten on the head.'

There have been numerous previous reports of migrants from other African countries being mistreated in Libya. The country is a key stopover on the way to Europe, although none of the women the BBC spoke to planned 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 shocking human rights violations and crimes under international law”.

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

Libya Crimes Watch told the BBC that systematic 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 were “increasing reports of sexual and physical abuse, including systematic stripping and searches of private parts and rape” in Abu Salim.

The interior minister and the anti-illegal migration department 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.

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

“I'm bringing shame on the family, they would say. I'm not sure they would even welcome my dead body,” she says. “If only I knew what awaited me here.”