"In the evening, the Janjaweed attacked. The area was full of crying from every direction, and shooting," says Ilham Isaak Abakker Abdullah. Aged 13, and light-voiced, she wears a pink dress and scarf and hasn't shown her face in weeks. "I saw many people killed, then I was grabbed by two men on horses wearing Sudan army uniforms."
My local translator stops, no longer willing to delve into her story. "She is only 13," he says, and walks away. Tentatively, she continues talking to me in Arabic: "They tied me to a tree and raped me all night. I became very ill and fell down. They thought I died, so they left me."
Unable to walk and barely conscious, Ilham crawled out of the "rape camp" near Funu, in northern Darfur, where she was being held. "I was very lucky," she says. She found a relative nearby who carried her just over a mile to a donkey, and they rode together a few hours to Abu Lehah, a village that has become a safe haven for the survivors of this secret rape camp. "I was unconscious and stayed there 16 days," she says. Ilham then set out on a 125-mile trek south to Bahai in Chad, where she eventually found medical help.
