Copyright

William Collins

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WilliamCollinsBooks.com

This eBook first published in Great Britain by William Collins in 2020

Copyright © Christina Lamb 2020

Cover image: Two women mourn relatives and friends killed during the Višegrad massacres of Bosnian people in 1992, their bodies dumped in the River Drina. Photographed by Dijana Muminovic at the funeral in Potočari where 775 bodies exhumed from Lake Perućac were buried on 11 July 2010, during the 15th anniversary of the genocide in Srebrenica.

Maps by Martin Brown

Christina Lamb asserts the moral right to be identified as the author of this work

A catalogue record for this book is available from the British Library

All rights reserved under International and Pan-American Copyright Conventions. By payment of the required fees, you have been granted the non-exclusive, non-transferable right to access and read the text of this e-book on screen. No part of this text may be reproduced, transmitted, downloaded, decompiled, reverse engineered, or stored in or introduced into any information storage retrieval system, in any form or by any means, whether electronic or mechanical, now known or hereinafter invented, without the express written permission of HarperCollins e-books.

Source ISBN: 9780008300005

eBook Edition © March 2020 ISBN: 9780008300029

Version: 2020-02-12

Epigraph

We have given our most precious thing and have died inside many times but you won’t find our names engraved on any monument or war memorial.

Aisha, survivor of rape in the 1971 Bangladesh war

Contents

1  Cover

2  Title Page

3  Copyright

4  Epigraph

5  Contents

6  Maps

7 Prologue: The Girl I Once Was

8  1 On Mussolini’s Island

9  2 The Girls in the Forest

10  3 The Power of a Hashtag

11  4 Queue Here for the Rape Victim

12  5 Women Who Stare into Space

13  6 The Women Who Changed History

14  7 The Roses of Sarajevo

15  8 This Is What a Genocide Looks Like

16  9 The Hunting Hour

17  10 Then There Was Silence

18  11 The Beekeeper of Aleppo

19  12 The Nineveh Trials

20  13 Dr Miracle and the City of Joy

21  14 Mummy Didn’t Close the Door Properly …

22  15 The Lolas – Till the Last Breath

23  Postscript: Giving the Nightingale her Song

24  Acknowledgements

25  Select Bibliography

26  About the Author

27  About the Publisher

LandmarksCoverFrontmatterStart of ContentBackmatter

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Maps

Argentina

Syria and Iraq

Bosnia and Herzegovina

Democratic Republic of Congo, Nigeria and Rwanda

Burma and the Philippines

Prologue

The Girl I Once Was

They put the names in the bowl and began to draw them out. Ten names, ten girls. The girls quivered like kittens caught under a dripping tap. For them this was no lucky dip. The men pulling out the slips of paper were fighters from Islamic State and each would take a girl as a slave.

Naima stared at her hands, blood pounding in her ears. The girl next to her was younger than her, about fourteen, and mewling with fear, but when Naima tried to hold her hand, one of the men whipped off his belt and lashed them apart.

That man was older and larger than the others, around sixty, she guessed, with a belly cascading over his trousers and a vicious curl to his lips. By then she had been nine months in ISIS captivity. She knew none of them were kind but she prayed that one didn’t pick her name.

‘Naima.’ The man who read out her name was Abu Danoon. He looked younger, almost like her brother, the hair on his chin still fluff; maybe he would have less cruelty in his heart.

The draw continued. The fat man picked out the young girl next to her. But then he said something to the others in Arabic, pulled out two crisp hundred-dollar notes and slapped them on the table. Abu Danoon shrugged, pocketed the money, and handed over his slip of paper.

Minutes later the fat man was shoving her into his black Land Cruiser and driving through the streets of Mosul, a city she had once dreamed of visiting but which was now the capital of these monsters who had swept into her homeland and abducted her and six of her brothers and sisters, among thousands of others.

She stared through the tinted windows. An old man sitting on a cart was whipping a donkey to jerk it forward, and people were out shopping, though the only women in the streets were in black hijab. It was strange to see everyday life still going on for other people, almost like watching a movie.

Her captor was an Iraqi called Abdul Hasib and he was a mullah. The religious ones were the worst.

‘He did everything to me,’ she later recounted. ‘Hitting, sex, pulling my hair, sex, everything … I was refusing so he forced me and hit me. He said, “You are my sabaya” – my slave.

‘After that I just lay there and tried to float my mind above my body as if it was happening to someone else so he couldn’t steal all of me.

‘He had two wives and a daughter but they did nothing to help me. In between pleasing him I would have to do all the housework. Once I was washing dishes and one of the wives came and made me take a tablet – some kind of Viagra. They also gave me contraceptives.’

Her only respite came every ten days when the mullah went to Syria to visit the other part of their Caliphate.

After a month or so, Abdul Hasib sold her for $4500 to another Iraqi called Abu Ahla, a healthy profit. ‘Abu Ahla ran a cement factory and had two wives and nine children. Two of his sons were fighters with ISIS. It was the same thing, forcing me to have sex but then he took me to the house of his friend Abu Suleiman, and sold me for $8000. Abu Suleiman sold me to Abu Daud who kept me for a week then he sold me to Abu Faisal, who was a bomb maker in Mosul. He kept me for twenty days of raping then sold me to Abu Badr.’

In the end she was sold to twelve different men. She lists them one by one, their nom de guerre and real names, even their children’s names, all of which she had committed to memory, for she was determined they would pay.

‘To be sold like that from one to another as if we were goats was the worst,’ she said. ‘I tried to kill myself, to throw myself out of a car. Another time I found some tablets and took the lot. But still I woke up. I felt even death didn’t want me.’

I am writing a book about rape in war. It’s the cheapest weapon known to man. It devastates families and empties villages. It turns young girls into outcasts who wish their lives over when they are hardly begun. It begets children who are daily reminders to their mothers of their ordeal and are often rejected by their community as ‘bad blood’. And it’s almost always ignored in the history books.

Every time I think I have heard the worst I can hear, I meet someone like Naima. In jeans and a checked shirt with black trainers, her hazel-brown hair drawn back in a ponytail from a pale scrubbed face, she looked like a teenager, though she was twenty-two and had just turned eighteen when she was captured. We sat on cushions in her neatly swept tent in Khanke camp near the northern Iraqi city of Dohuk, one of row upon row of white tents that had become a home of sorts to thousands of Yazidis. We talked for hours. Once she’d started, she did not want to stop. And though sometimes she laughed, telling me of small acts of revenge she managed to inflict on her captors, she never smiled.

Before I left she turned her phone over to show me a passport photo inside the back cover. It was her as a smiling schoolgirl and the only thing she had left from a childhood in which she had never heard of the word rape. ‘I need to believe I am still that girl,’ she said.

Maybe you think of rape as something that has ‘always happened in war’, that goes along with pillage. Ever since man has gone to war he has helped himself to the women, whether to humiliate his enemy, wreak revenge, satisfy his lust, or just because he can – indeed rape is so common in war that we speak of the rape of a city to describe its wanton destruction.

A photo of Naima on her phone case (Alex Kay Potter)

As one of few women in a field that was still mostly male, I came into war reporting by accident and it was not the bang-bang that interested me but what went on behind the lines – how people keep life together and feed, educate and shelter their children and protect their elderly while around them all hell is breaking loose.

The Afghan mother telling me how she scraped moss from rocks to sustain her children as she shepherded them through the hills to escape bombing. The mothers under siege in the old city of East Aleppo who conjured up sandwiches for their children from fried flour and foraged leaves, and kept the children warm by burning furniture or window frames while streets around them were bombed into grey dust. The Rohingya women who carried their children through forests and across rivers to safety after Burmese soldiers massacred the men and burned down their huts.

You won’t find these women’s names in the history books or on the war memorials that we pass in our railway stations and town centres but to me they are the real heroes.

The longer I have done this job, the more disquieted I have become, not just at the horrors I have seen, but at the feeling we often only hear half the story, perhaps because those collating the accounts are generally male. Even now, histories of these conflicts are mostly told by men. Men writing about men. And then sometimes women writing about men. Women’s voices are too often left out. During the first part of the war in Iraq in 2003, up to the toppling of Saddam Hussein, I was one of six correspondents on the ground for my newspaper, the Sunday Times. When I read the reports afterwards, my three male colleagues and one of my two fellow women had not quoted a single Iraqi woman. It was as if they weren’t there.

It is not just the writers who see these lands of war as lands of men. Women are often excluded from negotiations to end wars even though study after study have shown that peace agreements are more likely to endure if women are involved.

I used to think we were safer as women in a war zone, that there was a certain honour toward women. But there is no honour among terrorist groups and merchants of evil. It seems clear that in many of today’s conflict zones it is more dangerous to be a woman. Over the last five years, I have seen more shocking brutality against women, in country after country, than I have witnessed in more than three decades as a foreign correspondent.

One only need visit the great galleries of the world or leaf through the classics to see that rape in war is nothing new. The very first history book in western history, by Herodotus, opens with a series of abductions of women by the Phoenicians then the Greeks and eventually the Trojans snatching Helen, setting off the Greek invasion of Asia and the Persian retaliation. ‘Plainly the women would never have been carried away, had not they themselves wished it,’ quotes Herodotus, in an early indication of how men would write history. In Homer’s Iliad, the Greek general Agamemnon promises Achilles women in abundance if he captures Troy: ‘… if the gods permit us to sack the great city of Priam, let him pick out twenty Trojan women for himself.’ Indeed the feud between the two men is caused by Agamemnon being forced to give up the woman he took as a ‘prize’ and trying to help himself to that of Achilles.

Rape and pillage was a way of rewarding unpaid recruits and for a conqueror to emphasise victory by punishing and subjugating opponents, what the Romans termed Vae victis (Woe to the conquered).

Nor was it just in ancient times. If we follow the ancient Greeks, Persians and Romans, Alexander the Great and the string of fair-haired blue-eyed children left across Central Asia, to the ‘comfort women’ of the Imperial Japanese Army and the mass rapes of German women by the Red Army in World War Two, we see that women have long been seen as spoils of war.

‘Man’s discovery that his genitalia could serve as a weapon to generate fear must rank as one of the most important discoveries of prehistoric times along with the use of fire and the first crude stone axe,’ concluded the American writer Susan Brownmiller in her ground-breaking account of rape, Against Our Will, published in 1975.

Rape is as much of a weapon of war as the machete, club or Kalashnikov. In recent years, ethnic and sectarian groups from Bosnia to Rwanda, Iraq to Nigeria, Colombia to Central African Republic, have used rape as a deliberate strategy, almost a weapon of mass destruction, not just to destroy dignity and terrorise communities but to wipe out what they see as rival ethnicities or non-believers.

‘We will conquer your Rome, break your crosses and enslave your women,’ warned Abu Mohammad al-Adnani, spokesman for the Islamic State, in a message to the West as ISIS fighters swept into northern Iraq and Syria in 2014, abducting thousands of girls like Naima.

A similar threat came from Boko Haram, an even more deadly terror group, as it stormed villages in northern Nigeria, killing the men and rounding up girls as ‘bush wives’ to be kept in camps to produce offspring, a new generation of jihadis in a chilling real-life version of Margaret Atwood’s The Handmaid’s Tale.

‘I abducted your girls … I will sell them in the market, by Allah,’ declared Abubakar Shekau, after kidnapping hundreds of schoolgirls. ‘I will marry off a woman at the age of twelve. I will marry off a girl at the age of nine.’

I listened to women with unimaginable stories and as I poured my heart into trying to do justice in recounting them for the readers of my newspaper, I asked myself, over and over, How does this keep happening?

The intimate nature of rape means it is under-reported generally and even more so in conflict zones where reprisals are likely, stigmatisation common, and evidence hard to gather. Unlike killings, there are no corpses and numbers are hard to quantify.

But even where we do know, where courageous women come forward to describe their ordeals, rarely is action taken. It almost seemed as if rape was somehow trivialised and regarded acceptable when it occurred in war, particularly in far-off places. Or that we didn’t want to know. Sometimes after I tapped the last full stop and sent off my stories, editors told me they were too shocking for readers, or slapped ‘Disturbing Content’ warnings across the top.

To my astonishment the first prosecution of rape as a war crime was only in 1998.

Surely rape during war had been illegal for centuries? The first trial I could find was in the German town of Breisach in 1474 when Sir Peter von Hagenbach, a knight working for the Duke of Burgundy, was convicted for violation ‘of the laws of God and man’, a five-year reign of terror in which he raped and killed civilians as governor in the upper Rhine valley. His defence that he was ‘only following orders’ was rejected and he was executed. Some describe the twenty-eight-man panel set up by the Archduke of Austria as the very first international criminal tribunal; others argue that this wasn’t war rape as there was no conflict at the time.

One of the very first comprehensive efforts to codify the laws of war rejected the long-held view of rape as an inevitable consequence of conflict. President Abraham Lincoln’s General Orders No. 100, also known as the Lieber Code, issued in 1863 for the conduct of Union soldiers in the US Civil War, strictly prohibited rape ‘under penalty of death’.

In 1919, in response to the atrocities of the First World War, including the massacre of hundreds of thousands of Armenians by the Turks, a Commission of Responsibilities was set up. Rape and forced prostitution were near the top of a list of thirty-two war crimes.

That didn’t stop it in the Second World War. Outrage at the horrors of that war, when all parties to the conflict were accused of rape, led to the victors establishing the first international tribunals in Nuremberg and Tokyo to prosecute war crimes. Yet there was not a single prosecution for sexual violence.

Not even an apology. Instead silence. Silence on the sexual slavery of the comfort women. Silence on the thousands of German women raped by Stalin’s troops which I read nothing about in my school history books. Silence too in Spain where General Franco’s Falangists had raped women and branded their breasts.

For too long this has been the reaction. War rape was met with tacit acceptance and committed with impunity, military and political leaders shrugging it off as if it were a sideshow. Or it was denied to have ever happened.

The second paragraph of Article 27 of the Geneva Convention adopted in 1949 states: ‘Women shall be especially protected against any attack on their honour, in particular against rape, enforced prostitution, or any form of indecent assault.’

For decades it has been the world’s most neglected war crime. It took rape camps being set up again in the heart of Europe for the issue to get international attention. Like many people, the first time I heard of sexual violence in conflict was in the 1990s during the war in Bosnia.

The resulting outrage suggested the end of the tacit acceptance of rape in war that had existed historically. In 1998, the same year as the first conviction, rape as a war crime was enshrined in the Rome Statute which established the International Criminal Court.

On 19 June 2008, the United Nations Security Council unanimously passed Resolution 1820 on the use of sexual violence in war, indicating that ‘rape and other forms of sexual violence can constitute a war crime, a crime against humanity, or a constitutive act with respect to genocide’.

A year later, the Office of the Special Representative of the UN Secretary General on Sexual Violence in Conflict was established.

But twenty-one years after the creation of the International Criminal Court, it had not made a single conviction for war rape. The only one had been overturned on appeal.

Having these crimes on the statute books is a start, but clearly no guarantee of enforcement or even proper investigation. By their very nature these crimes are often not witnessed and direct orders not written down, and hard for victims to prove or admit to. The situation has not been helped by the fact that investigators are often male and not always adept at eliciting testimony on such sensitive matters. Decision-making positions are often held by male prosecutors or judges who do not see sexual violence as a high priority compared to mass killings, sometimes even suggesting the women ‘asked for it’.

Sadly, the fact that the international community now recognises that sexual violence is often used as a deliberate military strategy, which can be prosecuted, has ended nothing in many places across the world. The 2018 report of the UN Special Representative on Sexual Violence in Conflict listed nineteen countries where women were being raped in war and named twelve national military and police forces and thirty-nine non-state actors. This was by no means a comprehensive list, it noted, but ‘where credible information was available’.

And then there was #MeToo. For many of us 2017 may be remembered as a turning point for speaking out about sexual violence. The emergence of the Me Too movement following the allegations by a string of actresses and production assistants against Hollywood producer Harvey Weinstein lifted the guilt and shame so many assaulted women felt and emboldened them to speak out.

Like many women I followed the Me Too movement with a mixture of delight and horror. Delight that so many women were speaking out and refusing to take more of the harassment many of us middle-aged women once took for granted. Horror that sexual violence was so prevalent – one in three women experience sexual violence in their lifetime. It knows no race, no class, no borders: it happens everywhere.

But I also felt a certain unease. What about the women who do not have resources for lawyers or access to media? What about those in countries where rape is used as a weapon?

As we saw with those who spoke about Harvey Weinstein, even strong independent women in the liberal west who speak out about sexual predators do so with extreme difficulty and dread. Often they are pilloried in the press and have to go into hiding, as happened to Dr Christine Blasey Ford, the lawyer who alleged she had been sexually assaulted as a teenager by Brett Kavanaugh, nominee for Supreme Court judge.

Imagine then women with no money or education in lands where those with the gun or machete exert the power. Not for them rape counselling or compensation. Instead they are often the ones condemned. Condemned to a lifetime of trauma and disturbed nights, problems in forming relationships, not to mention physical damage, perhaps a childless existence – they may even be ostracised from their communities, what one referred to as ‘slow murder’.

Around the world a woman’s body is still very much a battlefield, and hundreds of thousands of women bear the invisible wounds of war.

And so I set out to tell some of these women’s stories in their own words. It would be the start of a shocking journey through Africa, Asia, Europe and South America to explore some of the darkest deeds known to man. The more places I went to the more prevalent I found rape was, because of the repeated failure of the international community and domestic courts to bring perpetrators to justice.

These are not easy stories to tell or to listen to. But they are often ones of astonishing bravery and heroism.

Women are not just bystanders of history. It’s time to stop only telling half the story.

1

On Mussolini’s Island

Leros, August 2016

When I look back to that summer on the tiny Greek island of Leros, to the derelict mental asylum littered with pigeon droppings and rusting iron bedsteads, where I first met the Yazidis, I still see the girl’s eyes, so deep and troubled and pleading.

She is thrusting her phone at me to show me a video. I can see an iron cage with perhaps a dozen young women inside and Arabic men crowded around jeering, Kalashnikovs on their shoulders. At first, I don’t understand. The women look petrified. Then the men step back, flames engulf the cage, there are screams and the video ends.

‘That is my sister,’ said the girl. ‘They are burning virgins alive.’

Everything seems to stop and spin. It is a vision of Hell. I don’t know if the sound in my head is the sea outside or blood rushing to my ears. Sun is pouring through a hole in the roof and sweat is running down our faces. A small Yazidi child is trailing through the rubble and broken glass and downed rafters, singing to herself, a waif of a thing with strands of hair stuck to her cheek like fronds. She is getting closer and closer to a large crater in the floorboards until, in panic, I yank her away. Her mother, resting against a stone wall next to the girl whose sister was burnt alive, stares blankly ahead. What has happened to these people?

I want to get out of that asylum with its barred windows and stained walls. Before coming here I’d watched an old documentary called ‘Island of Outcasts’ and images crowd into my head from that film of shaven-headed men and women, some of them naked and chained to their beds, limbs jerking at strange angles, others in shapeless smocks, crammed on the floor of a room staring into the camera.

Through the window’s bars, I can see down below, row upon row of white prefab containers surrounded by wire concertina fence, and beyond that the Aegean Sea, jarring in its deep blue perfection.

The camp where these Yazidis are living is more than a thousand miles from their homeland under the tall sacred mountain between Iraq and Syria on which they believe Noah’s Ark came to rest.

Living in containers in the shadow of the derelict asylum (Georgios Makkas/Panos Pictures)

I had never before met Yazidis. Their religion is one of the world’s most ancient but, like most people, the first I had heard of them was at the end of summer in 2014 when I saw the pictures of thousands of Yazidis trapped on that mountain where they had fled convoy after convoy of black-clad ISIS fighters intent on exterminating them.

In the ruins of that asylum that sweltering August day, one after another came forward from the shadows to tell me their stories, stories that shook my very core, were worse than anything I had heard in three decades as a foreign correspondent.

Broken people, the women with thin wavy bodies and long purplish hair framing faces drained of light, it seemed to me they were neither living nor dead. All had lost parents, brothers, sisters. In whispery voices like wafts of wind, they told of their beloved homeland of Sinjar, which they pronounced as Shingal, and the mountain of the same name which they thought would give sanctuary but where many perished of hunger and thirst. They told of a small town called Kocho, which ISIS had kept under siege for thirteen days then slaughtered all the men and older women and captured the virgins. And of the Galaxy Cinema, on the east bank of the Tigris river, where girls – some of them their sisters – were divided into ugly and beautiful then paraded to ISIS fighters in a market to be bought as their sex slaves.

The mother of the little girl who almost walked into the hole was from Kocho. She was thirty-five, her name was Asma Bashar and her voice was staccato like a machine gun. The others called her Asma Loco because they said she had lost her mind. She told me that forty members of her family had been slaughtered, including her mother, father and brothers. Four sisters and twelve nieces had been taken as sex slaves. ‘I have no one left but one sister who managed to escape from captivity and is now in Germany,’ she said. ‘I take pills to try and blot out what happened.’

A younger woman who until then had stood still as a portrait against the cracked blue wall, started speaking. ‘I am twenty but I feel more than forty,’ she said. Her name was Ayesha and she told me her parents and brothers were killed in Kocho. ‘I saw my grandmother die, I saw children die and now I just remember bad things. Four of my friends were sold for just twenty euros.’

Ayesha, whose parents and brothers were killed by ISIS (Georgios Makkas/Panos Pictures)

She had managed to flee to the mountain with her husband then they had somehow made their way across war-torn Syria into Turkey. There they had paid $5000 to people smugglers to cross the Aegean to Greece, making several abortive attempts in patched-up overcrowded dinghies before finally landing on the island.

‘After all this we find we are still not free,’ she said. She held out her left wrist. Raised red scars criss-cross the pale skin like angry worms. ‘I tried to kill myself with a knife,’ she shrugged. The last time had been just two weeks earlier.

Leros has always been an island of outcasts – a leper colony, an internment camp for political prisoners and an asylum for so-called ‘untreatables’. In 2015 it became one of many Greek islands that had been swamped by refugees, fleeing war in Syria, Iraq and Afghanistan.

It was the refugee crisis that had brought me as a journalist to the island. Leros was one of five Greek islands that had been declared ‘hotspots’ after the European Union struck a deal with Turkey in 2016, paying them three billion euros to stop any new arrivals crossing the Aegean. Ten thousand refugees left stranded on the islands were concentrated in these five processing centres but the process was so slow they were in effect island prisons. I’d been to others in Lesbos, Chios and Kos and witnessed the uneasy juxtaposition of these desperate refugees fenced in camps, stadiums and former factories, so preyed on by sex-traffickers that women wore nappies at night in order not to have to leave their tents, while nearby carefree holidaymakers were enjoying the sun, sea and moussaka washed down by ouzo.

Leros was different. I’d never been anywhere quite like it. It had the blinding white fishing villages of higgledy-piggledy houses, windmills, tavernas and sparkling blue seas typical of the Greek islands. But its main town Lakki was a study in Stalinist art deco, all wide avenues and sharp-angled villas in stark concrete, with a colonnaded cinema, a circular marketplace, a school that resembled an agricultural silo, a minimalist clock tower, as well as buildings that looked like a UFO and an old-fashioned transistor radio. It was like stumbling across a forgotten film set.

The island had once been central to Mussolini’s plans to create a second Roman Empire. Leros, along with all the Dodecanese, had been seized from the Ottoman Turks in 1912, becoming part of an Italian colonial empire that included Libya, Somalia and Eritrea. When Mussolini took power in the 1920s, he decided its deep natural harbour made the ideal naval base from which to establish control over the entire eastern Mediterranean. So he sent in naval forces and administrators, as well as architects to plan a modern city in the fascist style the Italians call razionalismo.

After Italy was defeated in the Second World War, control of the islands passed to Greece, and Lakki (or Portolago as the Italians had called it) was largely abandoned. When the colonels later seized power in Greece in 1967, they used Mussolini’s naval barracks to lock up political prisoners, then as a place to banish the mentally ill. Thousands of patients were shipped from the mainland and kept in medieval conditions until this was exposed in the press and the 1990 documentary I had seen, which prompted outrage across the EU and led to its closure in 1997. Then came the refugees.

To get to the refugee camp I drove past a series of abandoned brick buildings and rusted ambulances. A few people came out to stare including a wild-eyed man pushing a wheelbarrow and waving a fist – some patients had remained.

It was an eerie place for a camp. Inside were about 700 Syrians, Iraqis, Afghans and Pakistanis, a third of whom were children. There were around a hundred Yazidis. These refugees made up 10 per cent of the population of the small island.

Up close the white containers turned out to be Iso-Boxes designed for transporting food, now turned into homes, with lines of laundry strung between them and old men crouched outside playing improvised backgammon with bottle tops. Conditions were not bad compared to some camps I had visited but, as its administrator Yiannis Hrisafitis pointed out, ‘This wasn’t their dream.’ They were not allowed to leave the island and so were stranded in limbo while EU countries failed to agree who would take them. Meanwhile they had nothing to do, nothing to think about but their terrible memories, and no hope for the future.

I wandered between the laundry lines followed by a small boy clutching a large teddy bear, who ran away when I tried to speak to him. A gaggle of Syrian women sat on a bed smoking, their faces deeply lined. The local hospital had told me that there were regular suicide attempts.

The camp was surrounded by a double fence topped with whorls of razor wire like a prison. ‘It’s to stop those from outside coming in,’ explained Yiannis. ‘Maybe somebody wants to steal children or young women or buy organs or sell drugs.’

The Yazidi section had another fence round it to make a camp within a camp. Yiannis explained that a couple of weeks before my visit the Yazidis had been attacked by other refugees, Sunni Muslims, who denounced them as devil worshippers just as ISIS had done, so he had cordoned them off for their own protection. They had gone to the asylum to talk to me because they considered it safer.

I noticed the Yazidis all had red and white cords twisted round their wrists. When I asked what these signified, they explained that the white symbolised the peace they yearn for, and the red the blood of their people killed in previous genocides – by Muslims, Persians, Mongols, Ottomans, Iraqis … all their neighbours. They told me the latest genocide, by ISIS, was the seventy-fourth. There had been so much violence against Yazidis that they had a word for attempted extermination – ferman – long before its English equivalent, genocide, which was coined only in 1944 by Polish lawyer Raphael Lemkin.

‘Here is like a prison, everyone fighting each other,’ said Ayesha, the very still girl who seemed to have stepped out of a painting. ‘We have nothing left, no money, we spent everything to get here and the world does not care about us.’

On my last day on the island the Yazidis told me of a secret village in Germany where they said more than a thousand of the girls kept as sex slaves were being sheltered after having escaped or been rescued. I was intrigued.

2

The Girls in the Forest

Baden Württemburg

Turko looked down at her wrist on which she wore a bracelet of blue glass-eye beads common in the Middle East as protection against the evil eye, as well as one of the twisted red-and-white genocide cords, and she fiddled with them. ‘How does it help me to tell my story?’ she asked.

That was a difficult question. Turko was from Kocho, the village where ISIS massacred 600 people and abducted many girls. She told me she was thirty-five but with her dark hair scrunched back from a face that looked as if it had had all the light drawn out, she looked ten years older.

I was torn between the journalistic desire to know, the fear of what she might have to say, and above all the concern that telling me her story would bring her more grief. I looked around the small room she had been living in for the last year, sparsely furnished with a single bed, small wardrobe and a few photographs of children taped on the wall, almost like a student’s room. Outside the window was nothing but dark forest.

‘Maybe so it never happens again to other women,’ I ventured. ‘But don’t say anything you don’t want to.’

Turko fixed her eyes on me as if staring into my soul. Then she started speaking. ‘Everything began that first Sunday in August two years ago when Daesh moved into Sinjar,’ she said. ‘We thought the peshmerga [Kurdish militia] who manned the checkpoints would protect us but they had fled.

‘I used to work doing odd jobs in the fields and was with my mother and three-year-old niece early that morning when three cars roared up and armed men in black jumped out. They rounded up about forty people and shoved us into a chicken shed where they said “Give us your phones, gold and money!” They took everything we had.

‘Then they separated the men from the women and children. My uncle and cousin were with us and they took them to the fields. Then we could hear the bullets, rat-a-tat-tat, one after another.

‘We started shaking. They put us in a truck and drove us past the dead bodies of the men to Badosh prison. The prisoners had been released and they had filled it with women, hundreds of women. It was a kind of Hell. We were given no food or water, just a piece of dry bread each day. We were so desperate we were forced to drink from the latrines.

‘On the first day the fighters brought a long-bearded man with three Korans who told us he would teach us Islam. We said no, we don’t want your religion, we want our families back. That made them angry. They pointed their guns at us and said “We’ll kill you if you don’t convert!” Then they pushed us against the wall and beat us with wooden sticks.

‘We marked a notch on the wall for each night. After fifteen days we were loaded in buses to Tal Afar, and taken to a hotel where we were penned with hundreds of women. First they separated children under twelve then they divided us into married women and virgins. I pretended to be the mother of my three-year-old niece to avoid being taken with the virgins.

‘We were kept in that hotel for two months. Sometimes ISIS fighters came and beat everyone and took a woman or young girl for two days then brought them back. For a while I was taken with some of the older women and mothers to the next village to work in a bakery and make food. But then they realised the children were not ours and said they would take us to Syria.’

She stopped for a cigarette and drew on it heavily, her hand shaking.

‘We got to Raqqa about 11 p.m.,’ she continued. ‘They took us to a two-storey building with about 350 women and girls. Every day people were coming and looking at us then women would be taken and handed out to ISIS men.’

Turko was kept in that market for forty days, fearful every day. In the end it was her turn. She and her little niece were taken to the Syrian town of Deir Azzour and handed over to a Saudi man, a judge in the Sharia courts that ISIS had set up. The first night he summoned her to his bedroom. ‘I bought you so you are my sabaya and it’s written in the Koran I can rape you,’ he told her.

He was referring to a pamphlet issued by ‘the Isis resurgence fatwa department’ in October 2014 with guidelines on how to keep, capture and sexually abuse slaves. The pamphlet stated that Yazidis were infidels whose enslavement was a ‘firmly established aspect of sharia’ so they could be systematically raped. They could be given as gifts and sold on the whim of the owner for they were ‘merely property’.

‘I tried to resist him but he beat me until blood streamed from my nose,’ she said. ‘The next morning, he grabbed me by my hair, cuffed my arms to the bed [she mimicked being outstretched like a crucifix] then forced himself on me. For four months it was like this, he raped me three times every day and never let me out.

‘When he went to work, he locked me inside. He beat my niece but didn’t rape her.

‘One day he came home with a British woman he had married. She was 22 and went by the name “Muslim”. Whenever he raped me this woman went crazy, she was very jealous. Eventually he got fed up, put me in a black hijab, drove me to ISIS headquarters in the town and locked me in the car. After ten minutes he came back and said “I sold you for 350 dollars.”

‘They were trading us on the internet,’ she said. Fighters had a forum called Caliphate Market where they advertised women along with PlayStation consoles and second-hand cars.

‘My new “owner” was a prison warder from Syria. He took me and my niece to stay with an ISIS woman. It was the same as before. Every evening the Syrian came and raped me then went away in the morning. When the ISIS woman went out she handcuffed my arms to something so I couldn’t escape.

‘Any time any Yazidi girl fled captivity and went on TV, they would beat us more, saying they are badmouthing ISIS so we will teach you a lesson. I often thought of killing myself. The only reason I didn’t was because my brother’s little girl was with me and then she would die too.’

Turko in Schwabisch Hall (Georgios Makkas/Panos Pictures)

Turko was kept by the prison warder for two months until one of her uncles eventually paid $2500 to get her and her niece freed. On 25 May 2015, after more than nine months in captivity, she was taken to a refugee camp in northern Iraq.

On her hand was a small tattoo which she told me was the name of her brother. ‘I have no one else,’ she said. ‘My father died years ago and the last time I saw my mum was in the ISIS prison when we were first captured. From my whole family so many died.

‘That’s why when I heard about the air bridge to Germany, I applied to come with my sister-in-law and niece. What could we do in Iraq anymore, we who had been raped and dirtied?’

Germany had long had a sizeable Yazidi community and the idea of giving women like Turko shelter surfaced in September 2014 when local Yazidi leaders approached Winfried Krestchmann, premier of the southern state of Baden Württemburg. ‘Please do something!’ they begged as they showed him pictures of mass killings of their people in Sinjar, including beheadings and crucifixions, and told him of girls kept as sex slaves.

Krestchmann was a committed Christian and member of the Green Party and he was horrified. He spoke to Dr Michael Blume, an academic who was responsible for religious minorities for the state and married to a Turkish Muslim. They found that under German law it was possible for a province to intervene in a humanitarian crisis overseas, though it had never been done before.

That October the state government organised a refugee summit to bring together members of political parties, church leaders and mayors. All agreed they should help and arrange an air bridge from Iraq to bring out 1100 women and children who they would give three-year visas. Ninety million euros were apportioned to what they called the Special Quota Project and Dr Blume was appointed to run it.

‘The federal government said we, the state, would have to do everything ourselves,’ he said. ‘We didn’t know how – we had no army, no boots on the ground.’

Blume contacted Professor Jan Kizilhan, a psychologist specialising in trauma whose own family were Yazidi Kurds, and, in February 2015, they and a doctor set off for Iraq.

By then many of the enslaved women had escaped or, like Turko, had had their freedom bought and were in camps in Kurdistan in northern Iraq. Around 1600 women were referred to the German doctors. Each underwent an hour-long psychological assessment, a medical examination and a discussion of how they might benefit from the programme.

The stories were beyond imagination for the three German men. ‘After listening you don’t sleep,’ said Dr Blume.

There was the mother who told him how she had been forced to convert and read the Koran but stumbled over a passage so they tortured and killed her baby in front of her. An eight-year-old girl who had been sold from one man to another and raped hundreds of times. Or the young woman with the deeply scarred face and neck because she was so desperate she had set fire to herself.

‘As a man I feel ashamed and so does my wife as she is a Muslim,’ he said. ‘And as a German I know that less than a century ago our own European civilisation did such terrible things and we don’t seem to learn.’

It was perhaps no coincidence that Germany had been the country to take in the Yazidi women just as its leader Angela Merkel had been the one to say ‘wir schaffen das’ – ‘we can do this’ – as she opened the borders to one million refugees as the rest of Europe was closing theirs.

‘The hardest thing was deciding who to take and who not to take,’ Dr Blume said. ‘How do you decide between a woman who has lost two children and another who only lost one but it was killed in front of her?’

The first priority was emergencies. ‘Some were suicidal,’ he said, ‘or would have died because they were sick – gynaecological damage or terrible burns from self-immolation.’

For those remaining there were three key criteria – whether they had suffered traumatising violence; if they were without family support (if their husbands were alive they tended not to take them); and whether taking them to Germany would help them.

‘It was awful not to take all,’ said Dr Blume. ‘But every life is worth the effort.’

In March 2015 the first women were flown from Erbil to Stuttgart. Over the next year Blume made twelve trips to Iraq and brought over 500 women and 600 children. Of these around 1000 had been taken to Baden Württenburg, 60 to Lower Saxony and 32 in Schleswig Holstein.

It was an astonishing gesture by a single province. However, more than 5000 women were thought to have been enslaved, so Blume estimated that they had given refuge to only a third of those in need. ‘In the end around 2000 were referred and in the meantime the numbers grew because more girls managed to flee or bought their way out. So we believe there are still more than 2000 women needing help in camps in Iraq.’

Among the children rescued were young boys who had been beaten and forced to be child soldiers. These were all under thirteen as those fourteen or over were killed. ‘They were killed if they had hair on their ankles,’ said Blume.

As a father of two boys and a girl, he found the children’s stories particularly distressing. ‘Once I entered my office in Iraq and a thirteen-year-old Yazidi girl was standing there with her back to me and looked exactly like my daughter,’ he said. ‘She looked so similar, hair, everything … It made me realise it could have been ours. These children are like our children.’

It took me a series of phone calls and a few weeks after leaving Leros to establish that there was not a secret village of rescued Yazidi girls as the refugees had told me, but rather an entire German province. They had been housed in twenty-three secret shelters in twenty-one different towns, mostly remote areas, hidden from view to shield them from unwanted attention.

Dr Blume agreed to let me visit and meet some of the women who were open to sharing their stories. The first indication of how difficult this journey would be came when Shaker Jeffrey, the young Yazidi refugee living in Germany who had agreed to be my interpreter, stopped answering his phone in the days leading up to my flight to Stuttgart.

‘He’s going through a personal crisis,’ said the Yazidi doctor who had put us in touch. When we finally meet, I mutter to Shaker about his elusiveness. Later, in the car, he told me quietly that his own fiancée Dil-Mir was one of the girls enslaved by ISIS and taken to Raqqa, their capital in Syria. ‘Everything was set with my life,’ he said. He spoke excellent English having worked as an interpreter for the US troops in Iraq. ‘I was studying pharmacy at Mosul University, had saved money from my job, and was supposed to marry the girl I loved on my birthday, 4 September 2014. But one month before that, ISIS came and took her.’

Like tens of thousands of Yazidis, Shaker, his mother and five siblings fled to the mountain, scrambling up the rocks in blistering heat. ‘There was no water, no food, no shade – it was an inferno,’ he said. Shaker was desperately searching for apples and water for his family when Dil-Mir called and told him she had been abducted. Oddly ISIS had not taken the girls’ phones so they were able to contact anguished relatives from captivity.

‘The first day they raped her three times,’ he said. ‘Then she was handed on to two brothers who were fighters and made her cook and dance for them … as well as other things.’

In between escorting his sick mum to Turkey, Shaker desperately tried to find ways to get Dil-Mir out. Twice she tried to escape and failed. He even tried disguising himself as ISIS and going to a slave market near Aleppo, hoping to buy her. ‘The last time she managed to call me she told me “I wish I was dead”,’ he said. ‘She sounded so tired.’

Her last text read ‘Come find me Shaker. Hurry.’ Then the calls stopped. Eventually he learnt that she had committed suicide. He showed me the screensaver on his phone of a beautiful girl with long auburn hair, a wide smile and dancing eyes. ‘I couldn’t save her,’ he said. ‘She would have been twenty-one.’

His eyes were wet with tears. ‘That’s why I am here,’ he said after a while. ‘What I saw on the mountain and what they did to my fiancée made my heart like a rock – I no longer cared if I lived or died. First I wanted to fight the people who had done this. But then I decided the best revenge was to get to Europe and help those girls who did survive and to tell the world.’

He bade farewell to his mother and left the camp where they were living in Turkey, then crossed a river into Bulgaria and on through Serbia, Hungary and Austria to Germany, using the $4000 he had saved for his wedding to pay a people smuggler. The journey took twenty-two days during which he was detained several times. In Germany he had been granted asylum and ran a Facebook group of Yazidi activists to try and save other girls, but it was not the life he had envisaged.

The first shelter was a long drive from Stuttgart so on the way I asked Shaker about Yazidism which I had been reading up on since meeting the refugees on Leros. ‘If you Google Yazidism, only one per cent is right,’ he said.

Yazidism is an ancient and mysterious religion originally from Mesopotamia and older than Islam that comprises elements of Christianity, Sufism and Zoroastrianism. They spell it Yezidi, a name which comes from their word Ezid for God and literally means followers of God.

Some say it is not a real religion because unlike Christianity, Islam and Judaism, it has no book. But Shaker insisted this was not true. ‘We had a book called the Black Book with everything written in it but this was stolen,’ he said.

I told him I was surprised to see him wearing a blue shirt – I had read that they have an aversion to blue, as well as to lettuce. He laughed. ‘That’s the older generation like my mum – she won’t eat salad!’

He could not explain the dislike of lettuce but believed the aversion to blue originated from the days of the Ottoman ruler Ahmed Pasha, whose forces carried out one of the many genocides against the Yazidis, as they wore blue hats.

There are around one million Yazidis around the world, of whom 450,000 were in Sinjar. Aside from Germany, many Yazidis lived in the US. Followers worship the sun and a peacock angel who they believe God created before man and then sent to Earth to paint it with the colours of its feathers to create the most beautiful planet. Yazidis do not shower on Wednesdays because they believe this was the day the Peacock Angel came to Earth.

Members of ISIS were told that this peacock angel was Iblis, the Satanic figure which appears in the Koran. Yazidis, they said, were devil worshippers. They seemed to me the most gentle people I had ever met.

We stopped to buy cakes for the women in Schwäbisch Hall, a medieval village of pink and yellow timbered houses and cobbled streets, which looked as if it belonged in a fairy tale. The shelter was nearby but so discreet it took a while to find. Eventually, we drew up in a car park for a series of residential buildings, rather like student hostels, dotted around leafy lanes. To my surprise it was another mental institution. We tracked down the three-storey block where thirty-nine Yazidis were living. A few children were playing on bicycles near the door though not venturing far.

We were shown into a long bare room where the only decoration was a line of children’s colourings of birds, flowers and butterflies pinned on one wall. A group of women drifted in with haunted eyes like figures in an Edvard Munch painting. A number of doors led off to bedrooms in one of which we met Turko.

Afterwards we went upstairs to meet a much younger woman called Rojian, aged just eighteen, who greeted us with an uncertain smile from behind a curtain of mahogany hair.

She was sitting cross-legged on her bed, clad in a black T-shirt and black sweat pants, her only adornment a gold peacock angel round her neck. Like Turko’s, her room was small and bare. The only decoration was a Yazidi calendar. Next to her on the bed was her mobile phone. The word Hope was spelled out in sparkly pink letters on the case.

Rojian’s peacock angel pendant (Georgios Makkas/Panos Pictures)

Rojian told me she was the niece of Nadia Murad who had become the international face of the Yazidi tragedy. Murad had been captured at nineteen by ISIS fighters who killed six of her brothers and her mother and when she escaped, was the first to tell her story on the world stage. She had recently been appointed UN ambassador for the Dignity of Survivors of Human Trafficking.

‘Nadia and I were captured together,’ she said. ‘My father who was killed by ISIS was her brother.’

‘This is his name,’ she added, touching the inscription on her peacock pendant.

Rojian was just sixteen on 3 August 2014 when ISIS invaded her village near Kocho. Like most Yazidis in Sinjar, the family were poor and she had left school two years earlier to work in the fields growing potatoes and onions.

‘Some villagers escaped to Mount Sinjar. They thought our sacred mountain would shelter them. But it was far away and we heard that ISIS fighters would kill those who tried so we fled to the neighbouring village where my grandmother [Nadia’s mother] lived.

‘We were kept under siege for almost two weeks,’ she said. ‘All ways out were blocked by ISIS fighters, we could hear their call for prayer from their checkpoints. We stayed in the house, scared to go out. Whenever the power came on, we watched TV and could see the people on the mountain desperately trying to get on the Iraqi army helicopters sent to rescue them or grab the aid packages they dropped.

‘We didn’t know what would happen to us. After nine days an ISIS commander came and gave us an ultimatum – either convert and become a member of the Caliphate or face the consequences.

‘Three days later more fighters arrived. They climbed up onto the highest roofs and called through megaphones for everyone to gather in the primary school. The roads were full of people for the first time since the village was surrounded but we were so scared no one spoke or greeted each other.

‘The men were made to stay in the yard and we women and children were sent upstairs. They told us give us all you have then we will leave. They held out big bags and people dropped in money, phones and jewellery. My grandmother gave her wedding ring.

‘Then they loaded men and teenage boys in trucks and drove them away. A few moments later we heard gunshots. People started screaming “They are killing the men!” then we saw ISIS fighters with shovels.’

As many as 600 men from that village were killed, including her father and five of her uncles – Nadia’s brothers. Only those so young that they didn’t yet have hair on their legs or under their arms were spared and taken away for training.

‘The trucks then came back to the school to get us women and girls. We begged them what have you done to our men but they ordered us to get in. We were scared but we had no choice.

‘They drove us to another school where virgins like me and Nadia were separated from the older women or those with children like my mum. Large buses with curtained windows came to collect us virgins.’

The buses took them to Mosul. The Iraqi city had been captured by ISIS in June and the group’s leader Abu Bakr al-Baghdadi had appeared in its ancient Grand al-Nuri Mosque and proclaimed the Caliphate that he said would stretch from Iraq to Spain.

‘They put us in a three-storey building packed with hundreds of women and children and lots of fighters. A man came through and began touching our hair, breasts, backs, feeling all our body parts. He told us we were infidels and sabaya – and said “If you scream I will kill you.” I was with Nadia and when the man groped her she started screaming and all the other girls did too, so they dragged Nadia out of the room and started beating her and burning her with cigarettes.

‘We heard they were taking the most beautiful ones so we started rubbing dirt into our hair to try and look nasty but a girl told them what we were doing.

‘Then in the night a very fat ISIS soldier came and we were very scared, he had a reddish beard and was in a white dishdash and so big he was like a monster. I was with Nadia, my cousin Katrine, and Nisreen, a friend from the village. The fat man shone torches in our faces and wanted to take Nadia but we held her and refused to let him. Then ISIS fighters came with electric cables and began whipping our arms and faces and backs and took all four of us. One of them, a thin man called Haji Salman, took Nadia and me outside then put her in his car. We screamed and held each other’s hands but they pulled us apart. Then the bad fat guy who beat us at the beginning, came and said “Now you are mine.”’

Until this point she had been speaking easily. Suddenly she put her head down.

‘It was night,’ she said. ‘His name was Salwan and he was an Iraqi from Mosul. We got to his house and he kept trying to touch me and I didn’t let him so he took my belt and beat me and slapped me so hard my eye was bleeding and there was a huge mark on my face. He told me “You Yazidis are infidels so we can do what we like to you.” Then he sat on my back so I couldn’t breathe and raped me from behind. After that he came every day to rape me three or four times.

‘This went on for more than six weeks. My life was just rape.

‘Then one day he told me he was going to buy another girl. I was relieved thinking it would make my life easier. The girl he brought home was just ten years old.

‘That night they were in the room next door,’ she said. ‘I never heard anyone scream so much, crying for her mother. I cried more for that little girl than I ever did for myself.’

I hold her hand. It is cold. I asked her if she wanted to stop. She shook her head.

‘One day the man brought us hijabs and took us downtown,’ she continued. ‘I could see the black and white flags [of ISIS] everywhere. I tried to flee but another woman caught me and brought me back.

‘I’d heard the stories of how when girls were caught trying to flee they beat the shit out of them and killed the family so I told him I thought I saw my auntie in the car that’s why I was running.

‘I was almost giving up then one day I managed to steal his phone and get through to one of my uncles. He gave me the number of a contact person in Mosul who was helping Yazidi girls escape.

‘Shortly after that the fat man took me to a meeting one morning in a kind of bomb factory. He left me in another building so I spilled tea on myself and told them I am just going to change my clothes. I called the contact, put on my hijab and jumped from the roof into the street.

‘But the rescue car that was supposed to be outside was nowhere to be seen. I called again but the man told me you are being followed by three guys, it’s too dangerous. I told him this was my second attempt at escape and I would be killed if I was caught. Eventually he gave me an address to go to.

‘I got to the car and we were being followed by three guys on cars and motorbikes,’ she said. ‘But the driver called friends to come and block the way and he managed to take me to his family.’

However he had hurt his leg and ended up in hospital for six days, leaving her with his family. ‘I was very afraid,’ she said. ‘I had heard they posted photos of escaped girls at their checkpoints. His family didn’t know I was Yazidi, he told them I was his cousin and my father was in hospital.’

Finally the man got out of hospital and drove her through the checkpoints to Erbil and a rendezvous spot with her uncle. That wasn’t the end. In a camp in northern Iraq, she was reunited with Nadia who had escaped from Mosul a few months earlier. ‘I was happy to see her but where was everyone else? So many of the family were missing. My father had been killed as well as all five of his brothers and Nadia’s mother, my aunt.’

That wasn’t all. ‘When the rapist found out I’d fled, he was so angry he took my mum from Tal Afar prison and kept her as his slave with my brother who was six and baby sister. He held them nine months.’ When they finally got out the ten-year-old girl was still there being raped every day. Rojian had no idea what happened to her.

As for the other girls she was captured with, her cousin Katrine died when she eventually managed to run away with two other girls and were blown up by an IED. Nisreen, she thought, was still in captivity.

Eventually Rojian’s mum also escaped with her baby girl and little boy, and when they heard about the air bridge to Germany they applied. On 1 December 2015, Rojian, her younger siblings and their mother boarded a plane for the first time in their lives and flew to Stuttgart.

In the shelter they were receiving 320 euros a month for food and clothes and Rojian had started school. Though she was happy to be safe in Germany, she said ‘I don’t like school because there are only two of us Yazidi girls. The others are Afghans and Syrians and are always saying ISIS things or playing ISIS prayers or poetry on their phones to scare us.

‘I don’t think I will ever get over this,’ she added, ‘it will never go away.’

German social workers visited each day but the women told me they were not receiving counselling.

‘To start with we organised psychotherapy but it was not taken very well,’ explained Dr Blume, when I asked him later. ‘There was one session for example where a Yazidi woman came out and complained “She said she’s a doctor but she only talked.” In Iraq doctors give lots of pills and that’s what they wanted.

‘Also they don’t really talk about personal suffering – when you ask the women, “How do you feel?” quite often they reply, “Thank you, my children are good.”

‘What’s actually working is therapy like art, painting, yoga and being with animals such as horses to rebuild trust in their bodies and trust in other people. That’s a big problem. Many feel betrayed by everyone.’

Turko told me she often felt desperate, particularly as the hostel was situated in the grounds of a mental institution.

‘I feel like I am dying every day,’ she said. ‘I am crying every night. Those men took something from me I can’t get back. Here I get worse and worse. I have nothing to do, just my own thoughts, and we are surrounded by people with mental problems. The town is thirty minutes’ walk away and it’s expensive. I feel like the place is crowding on me.

‘Often the kids sleep with me in the night and they were in ISIS slavery too and saw people being killed and us being raped so they wake up ten times in the night screaming “The men are coming, the men are coming!”’

I asked Dr Blume why the girls had been put in such remote locations and kept secret, almost as if they were outcasts.

‘At the start they were very fearful and didn’t want to be seen by others,’ he said. ‘Some were very ashamed.

‘Also most had never left Iraq before and we didn’t know how they would react to the cultural shock. At the start they were very afraid of men, especially of Arab or African origin, so to put them in big cities with lots of refugees would have really stressed them. The psychologists told us it was important to bring them to a place where there were no triggers.’

As nothing like this had ever been done before, there was little for them to learn from. ‘There was some experience of taking traumatised people in from Rwanda and Balkans but not in this huge number, and the culture and religion were different.’

He also pointed out that because Germany had taken in so many refugees in 2015 – over a million – there were limited locations available for the Yazidi girls. ‘The places are not all ideal but the important thing was survival not beauty.

‘We couldn’t put them with other refugees as most refugees coming to Europe were male – 70 per cent of those who came to Germany – and from families who could afford the trip so very different to these women who were really traumatised and the weakest in society.’

What they had been through was so terrible that it had taken some of the women a year to speak again. But not a single one had committed suicide since arriving in Germany. Dr Blume said he had watched them improve, starting with the children. ‘For a whole year we didn’t hear children sing or make a rhythm but now we see in the kindergarten they are laughing again and playing games and of course that helps their mothers.’

Some of the women, he said, had even started learning to drive. His plan was to gradually integrate them in society, putting them in apartments.

One major boost had been getting their spiritual leader Baba Sheikh to tell the community not to reject them but welcome them back. ‘We asked Baba Sheikh to bless every group before they left and tell them you did nothing wrong, the only people who lost their honour were the perpetrators not you, you are still our daughters and our sisters and can return any time. Now we see slowly, slowly, them being accepted in the community.’

I saw this for myself at another shelter on a wooded hillside where I was welcomed into a bedsit by a couple celebrating their first anniversary.

Vian, thirty-one, and Ali, thirty-three, both wearing gold peacock-angel pendants, sat on a green mattress on the floor next to a carrycot. Inside, was a perfect tiny baby boy wrapped in swaddling, just twenty days old. On the wall was a white and red pennant with a blazing golden sun – the Yazidi flag.

Ali smiled as he recounted how he had been pestering Vian for a year to give him her photograph. The day after she finally agreed ISIS arrived and Vian was captured and taken in a bus to Mosul.

‘They had long beards and hair and no shoes and took us to Syria to a big school,’ she said. ‘I was very frightened. They told us if you don’t convert we will kill you.’

Twisting the edge of the baby blanket round and round in her fingers, she continued: ‘Every day fighters came with pieces of iron and wood and took some girls for a couple of days for pleasure. They divided us into three groups – the beautiful group, middle group and ugly group. I was in the middle group. I pretended I had mental problems, beating my head against the wall in the hope they wouldn’t take me.’

Meanwhile Ali was desperate. When Vian managed to call from Mosul, he promised her he would do everything to get her back. ‘I told her even if you marry an ISIS fighter and have kids by him, I will still marry you and you will be mine.’

She told him their location in this three-storey building and begged him, ‘Tell the airstrike people to blow it up so we won’t have to go through something worse than death.’

After that Ali heard screaming and the phone went dead. ‘I was so worried I didn’t eat for two days,’ he said.

Instead he went to Mount Sinjar to join the fight against ISIS. ‘Four of my friends were killed on the mountain and people were starving but I refused to leave because of my promise to Vian.’

Finally, when she was transferred to another village, she escaped with a small group and they managed to find their way up the mountain. Ali was overjoyed to see her but initially she didn’t recognise him with his beard and uniform and weapons.

Vian had managed to get accepted onto the German programme and had moved there in June 2015. Ali borrowed $10,000 and made his own way on the refugee trail to meet her there. Three months after she arrived they married. The ceremony was attended by many in the community, as the first marriage to one of the abducted girls.

‘These girls should be our heroes who we should be proud to marry,’ said Shaker.

Such stories take a long time to tell. Darkness had fallen and everyone was drained. Later, I would learn that Shaker was so horrified by what these girls had gone through that every time we took a break, he had gone to the bathroom and vomited.

Turko and Rojian invited us to stay for dinner. I demurred, explaining we had a three-hour drive back to our hotel, and knowing they had little money for food.

But while we had been talking, some of the other women had been busy with pots and pans in the cramped kitchen. On the long table by the children’s drawings, a feast was spread out on a plastic cover printed with pink roses.

Like many refugees cut adrift from home, recreating food is one way to connect and build a sense of community, and also remind the children of their origins. The women talked at once trying to explain each dish.

There were kibbeh parcels, fried pasties filled with bulgur, as well as onion, spices, parsley and minced lamb; dolmas – vine leaves stuffed with aubergine and rice; chicken in a tomato sauce, and mier, a sort of porridge of fried bulgur.

They asked me about English food. I explained that my country was not really famed for our cuisine and told them about ‘toad in the hole’ and fish and chips wrapped in newspaper, and that our national dish was chicken tikka masala brought by immigrants from India and Pakistan. They found this very funny and laughed for the first time, repeating the story to each other.

They told me they found German food pale and tasteless. I joked that maybe one day a Yazidi dish would be on German menus with bratwurst and sauerkraut but they looked at me uncertainly and I realised that such a suggestion of permanence was not tactful for those in such limbo between missing home and being scared to return.

A large plate of green melon was brought for dessert and the talk resumed as juice dripped down our chins. Afterwards, one after the other came and hugged me. ‘That’s the first time since all this happened that anyone has had a normal conversation with us,’ said Turko.

I wished I lived nearby to visit. In the car winding through the dark forests, I thought of her and Rojian back in their small rooms with their bad dreams and the children screaming in the night.

3

The Power of a Hashtag

Northeast Nigeria

The name Chibok is said to come from the sound of feet being sucked into swampy land. It was a small sleepy town in northeast Nigeria on the edge of the Sambisa forest with a narrow dirt road cutting through and a marketplace in the centre with a large telecom mast towering above. There was a church, a mosque, a Union Bank with a fading blue sign and door that had long been shuttered, and women and children pushing carts of yellow jerry cans, for there was no running water, and despite its name, the land around was bone dry and cracked for lack of rain. If you kept on the road to the edge of town, you would come to a large red-roofed building with the sign Government Secondary School.

On 14 April 2014, the night Boko Haram snatched her eldest daughter from this school, Esther Yakubu was in bed with her four other children in their simple concrete home. ‘Around 11 p.m. or midnight we woke to the sound of gunshots,’ she recalled. ‘My brother-in-law called and said Boko Haram is coming and we must flee. Boko Haram are butchers, everyone knows what happen when they come – they burn down homes, kill the men and take young women to be their bush wives.

‘I said I am not leaving my house but then we heard more shots and my husband insisted we must go, so we ran with the kids still in nightgowns and boxer shorts. Chibok is a rocky place and we hid among the shrubs and the crevices.

‘Boko Haram came and started setting fire to the marketplace and things till 4 a.m. We could hear them riding around on their motorbikes and see plumes of smoke but we didn’t know they had gone to the school.

‘Then my brother-in-law called again and asked “Where’s your eldest?” I told him she was at school. My Dorcas was sixteen and she was in the middle of exams and boarding there. He said the school had been attacked. I didn’t believe it but then parents started coming back and crying that the girls were gone. I still didn’t believe it – how could they take all the girls?

Esther Yakubu, mother of one of the missing Chibok girls (Justin Sutcliffe)

‘As daybreak came, around 5.30 a.m., we ran to the school. We saw the classrooms burnt, ashes everywhere and all the schoolbooks and backpacks and Bibles scattered about. I searched and searched for my Dorcas and screamed her name but she was nowhere.

‘Someone counted the missing. They had taken 276 of our girls. That day the whole community was in mourning like a tide of tears.

‘Then some of the girls started coming back. They told us that men had come into their dormitory at night and shouted to wake them up. The men were in army uniforms so they had not realised at first it was an attack. They had scrambled down from their bunk beds by flashlight. They saw the men were looting the foodstuff and were very young and scruffy and realised they were not army at all. Then they saw the buildings were on fire and screamed because they thought they were going to burn them alive. Then the men had ordered them onto open-top trucks and drove into the forest.

‘A few got away at the start and some others had managed to escape inside the forest by holding onto branches. I recognised one of the girls and I asked her, “Was Dorcas with you?” and she said “Yes, but she was tired in the truck so didn’t escape.” She was not used to running, maybe she was afraid.

‘My husband and other men went into the forest to try and search but it is huge and thick. Fifty-seven girls had managed to escape the first night but that left 219 somewhere in the forest with all the snakes and animals. Some people thought they had already taken the girls across the Gwoza Hills to Cameroon. Maybe they would sell them.

‘I kept looking at her picture on my phone, trying to will her back to me. I was thinking, How could this happen? I only just moved her from Kano to this school in Chibok because I thought it was safer.

‘Some people in the village said this was what happens when girls were educated too much. [Girls like Dorcas were an exception in northern Nigeria where only 4 per cent of girls finish secondary education and two thirds are married by sixteen.] But she was always a bright one and I really wanted her to be educated so she could have a better life.

‘“Boko Haram” means “western education is forbidden”. Not long before they attacked a boys’ school at Buni Yadi and burnt fifty-nine boys alive. But we never heard anything like this.

‘It seems like they weren’t planning it as they didn’t have enough vehicles for all the girls so broke into some houses and took some. Some of those girls who came back said the fighters actually came into the school looking for cement and a brick-making machine to build their base. They said they were arguing about what to do with the girls and even suggested burning them.

‘You know some people say it’s a conspiracy. We usually have a hundred soldiers on duty in Chibok because of all the attacks in the area but that night there were only fifteen as some had been sent elsewhere, and there were only twenty-seven police, most of them were drunk. The school had no light that night as the generator had run out of diesel. The headmistress was a Muslim and just two weeks earlier the school had a drill because of warnings of an attack and the principal told the girls to stay together in one place if anything happened. If they had run away they might have escaped.’

In his big white villa in the modern capital Abuja, the Nigerian president Goodluck Jonathan did nothing. Thousands of girls had been disappearing from villages across northeast Nigeria. The capture of the Chibok girls might have just been one more in a catalogue of Boko Haram atrocities, except for one thing. On 23 April 2014, nine days after the abduction, a commercial lawyer called Ibrahim Abdullahi was in his hotel room in Port Harcourt, packing to go home to Abuja, and switched on the TV. A live broadcast was underway from Port Harcourt Book Festival and Oby Ezekwesili, a former education minister, was speaking. She told the audience about the abduction of the girls, urging them to demand the government to ‘bring back our daughters’.

Abdullahi was a regular user of Twitter so tweeted Oby’s words and added two hashtags #BringBackOurDaughters and #BringBackOurGirls. He then rushed to catch his plane, thinking how devastated he would be as a father, were he to lose a child.

Across the world in Los Angeles, a film producer picked up the tweet. Within three weeks, the BBOG hashtag had been retweeted more than a million times worldwide. Supermodel Naomi Campbell, celebrity Kim Kardashian, US Secretary of State Hillary Clinton and First Lady Michelle Obama were among scores of high-profile people posting selfies of themselves holding placards bearing the words Bring Back Our Girls. With two teenage daughters of her own, Mrs Obama took over the president’s weekly radio slot to express her outrage. ‘In these girls, Barack and I see our own daughters,’ she said, adding that her husband had directed his government to do everything possible to help find them. In London, prime minister David Cameron told the House of Commons ‘this is an act of pure evil’ and pledged Britain would ‘do all it can’.

The US flew in CIA analysts and FBI hostage negotiators as well as Predator Drones they called ‘eyes in the sky’. An Intelligence Fusion Cell was set up with Britain and France sending in military advisors and satellite specialists, though a promised RAF Sentinel spy plane was delayed after it broke down.

Like journalists all over the world, I was told by my editor to get a visa and jump on a plane. Suddenly the Nigerian Foreign Ministry was inundated with requests from media outlets apparently falling over each other to cover the World Economic Forum on Africa taking place that week in Abuja. I felt the familiar rush of breaking news as we piled off the plane into the sticky airless heat, then jumped into taxis into the strange modern capital to find a forest of satellite dishes marked CNN, ABC, CBS, BBC, ITN, Sky, Nippon TV … For the next ten days the abduction of the Chibok girls led news bulletins the world over.

At sundown every day, crowds of journalists would emerge from the Hilton and cross the road to Unity Fountain, a dusty traffic island with a non-running fountain inscribed with the names of Nigeria’s thirty-six states. As flocks of birds silhouetted in black V-shapes against a reddening sky, campaigners dressed in red would gather to applaud the bustling Mrs Ezekwesili as she and others protested the lack of government action.

After each speaker a chorus would start up:

What are we chanting?

Bring back our Girls!

What are we asking?

Bring Back Our Girls! Now and Alive!

As people drifted off into the velvety darkness, I went for coffee in a nearby hotel with Mrs Ezekwesili who had gone from being a government minister to Vice President of the World Bank and was a co-founder of Transparency International. She was very angry, even more so when part of the hotel ceiling came down onto her dress. ‘Without education I’d be just one more girl child forgotten and trapped in poverty,’ she told me. ‘How did we fail so badly as a society that we can have this wholesale abduction of our girls? This needs to be an awakening call.’

Oil-rich Nigeria had just overtaken South Africa as Africa’s biggest economy, something its government had been planning to show off in the heavily guarded Economic Forum. Instead, all the world seemed interested in was the missing girls. This must have been extremely annoying for President Goodluck, a former zoologist with a penchant for fedora hats. He spent the next nineteen days holed up in his official residence in Aso Rock and said not a word about the kidnappings nor did he call a meeting to plan a rescue. His military denied it had even happened. His wife accused the protesters of ‘playing games’. When the president was photographed dancing at a party rally, he was pilloried in an editorial in the New York Times as ‘shockingly slow and inept at addressing this monstrous crime’.* The plight of the Chibok girls and his apparent indifference seemed to exemplify a government only interested in enriching itself.

Occasionally some of the parents of the missing schoolgirls would be at the Unity Fountain vigil. It was there I met Esther, a smartly dressed woman of forty-two, who worked as a finance officer for Chibok local government. She showed me a picture on her phone of her daughter Dorcas, radiant in a turquoise long-sleeved dress that shimmered like a mermaid tail. The photo had been taken the very week of her disappearance.

‘You can see she loved fashion,’ said Esther. ‘We used to say she would tie her hair as nicely as the Yorubas – they are famous for it.

A photo of Dorcas on Esther’s phone (Justin Sutcliffe)

‘She’s like a little bit of my heartbeat,’ she added. ‘She’s a nice friendly girl, she is my main pillar. She always takes care of her younger siblings without being asked and cooks. She likes singing praises in the church choir and has a voice like honey.’

The family were all devout churchgoers. ‘Most of the people in Chibok were Christians and we lived in peace with our Muslim brothers until Boko Haram came.’

Like most of the girls at the school, Dorcas had been doing her exams. ‘She had done five papers. She always got good grades and studied hard. She wants to study business administration and be a lecturer.’

Four weeks after the abduction, a video was released by Boko Haram. It showed around 130 girls in black and grey hijabs under tamarind trees, holding their palms upward in prayer and reciting from the Koran. Although northern Nigeria is mostly Muslim, Chibok was a mixed community as Esther had told me, and many of the girls were Christian.

‘I abducted your girls,’ crowed Boko Haram leader Abubakar Shekau, cackling manically like an evil clown. ‘I will sell them in the market, by Allah. I will sell them off and marry them off.’

Esther scanned the video in vain for her shimmering daughter. What were they doing to her?

Any mother would be terrified. Boko Haram was the world’s deadliest terrorist group according to the Global Terrorism index, even if it did not receive the international attention of Al Qaeda and ISIS.

When I spoke to Nigerians there seemed considerable confusion about Boko Haram’s objectives. In Abuja I met a former MP who headed an anti-corruption network, but turned up in an Audi R10 supercar and sported a gold and diamond Rolex. He described Boko Haram as ‘a demonic sect capitalising on ignorance of religious beliefs to perpetrate Satanic activities’ and ‘mixed up with banditry and brigandry’.

Others claimed it was actually set up by the army or by northern politicians to create anarchy and derail Goodluck Jonathan, a southern Christian, and attain power for themselves. Or by southern Christian politicians to wrest power from the north.

Boko Haram was actually the movement’s nickname – its real name was the rather less catchy Jama’atu Ahlus wa-Sunna Lida’awati wal-Jihad or the People Committed to the Propagation of the Prophet’s Teaching and Jihad. But when the group started it had no name, leading some to call it the Nigerian Taliban.

Its founder was a baby-faced Salafist cleric called Mohammad Yusuf who in 2002 set up a madrassa in Maiduguri, the capital of Borno state, and named it after Ibn Taymiyyah, a Syrian who had advocated jihad against the Mongols in the thirteenth century. There, Yusuf taught that the earth was flat and denounced western education (boko) as haram.

Nigeria is Africa’s most populous country with around 200 million people and hundreds of languages and tribes. Almost half are Muslim, mostly in the north, which is dirt poor compared to the booming south, following years of unequal distribution of the country’s oil wealth compounded with economic mismanagement and looting by corrupt rulers.

It is also one of the world’s youngest populations, more than half under thirty. Among thousands of young men without jobs or hope, Yusuf’s preaching of radical Islam began to attract a following, particularly with fellow members of the Kanuri tribe. He and his acolytes toured the region in pick-ups stacked high with loudspeakers urging Muslims to ignore the Christian-dominated ‘government of thieves’ and follow Sharia law. The font of all this corruption, he raged, was the education system implanted by British colonialists.

Yet it was a law over motorbike helmets that really turned this into full-blown insurgency. Nigeria’s roads were among the most dangerous in the world so, in January 2009, the government made helmets compulsory in a bid to reduce the death toll. But many people refused to wear them, claiming they caused head lice, could damage women’s expensive hair weaves, or might even be used to cast magic spells on the wearer. Most thought it was yet another way for police to extort bribes.

The following month some of Yusuf’s members were at a funeral procession in another northeastern town called Bauchi when they were stopped by police for not wearing helmets. The confrontation quickly escalated and security forces opened fire, injuring seventeen people.

Yusuf called on his members to respond with jihad and launched attacks across the five northern states. These were brutally crushed by government forces, leaving around a thousand dead and many more imprisoned, including many of the group’s family members. In Maiduguri there were running battles in the streets. The military eventually caught Yusuf and handed him over to police custody where he was shot in the chest while ‘trying to escape’, they claimed. His bullet-ridden body was displayed to journalists.

The remaining leadership went underground and many thought the movement finished. But some ended up in jihadist training camps in Somalia, Mali and even Afghanistan, and around 2010 they re-emerged as a terrorist group under Yusuf’s former deputy, Shekau.

Shekau looked terrifying to me in the video with the hijab-clad Chibok girls. People used words like ‘psychopath’ and ‘delusional’ but nobody seemed to know much about him other than that he had married Yusuf’s widow. ‘He is Stalin to Yusuf’s Lenin,’ one British diplomat in Abuja told me. ‘He has walked the revolution and taken it in a particularly violent direction.’

Like Osama bin Laden, his preferred medium of communication to the world was through videos in which he usually cradled a Kalashnikov. Surrounded by masked lieutenants, he went off on hour-long tirades about anything from Abraham Lincoln to Queen Elizabeth II. ‘I enjoy killing anyone that God commands me to kill the way I enjoy killing chickens and sheep,’ he declared in one in 2012. ‘We will kill whoever practises democracy … Kill, kill, kill!’

The first to be killed were moderate Muslim leaders shot dead by teams of gunmen on motorbikes. Most of the group’s initial attacks focused on getting their members and families freed through jailbreaks, replenishing their ranks. They also began bombing churches, starting with two in Maiduguri on Christmas Eve 2010, then throughout the region, and they demanded all Christians leave the north. The following year they moved on the capital, bombing the police headquarters in Abuja then the United Nations building.

The 2011 collapse of the Gaddafi regime in Libya, memorably described in a British intelligence report as the ‘Tesco of the illegal arms-trade’, provided a ready source of weapons which poured into Niger and beyond.

By 2012, Boko Haram had become more indiscriminate, carrying out suicide bombings of mosques, bus stations, markets and hospitals across the region. True to their name they also burnt down schools and killed teachers, sometimes conscripting the boys to serve as lookouts and recruits. Other times they simply slaughtered them. Teenage boys were forced to dig trenches then line up to have their throats slit and fall in. One of their members was known as the Butcher, apparently because he could sever a spinal cord in one slice.

So ruthless were they that even Al Qaeda apparently saw them as too extreme. A letter from Shekau was among papers seized in the May 2011 raid by US Navy Seals on Abbottabad, in which Osama bin Laden was killed. In it he had requested a meeting with Ayman al-Zawahiri, bin Laden’s deputy, and to be ‘under one banner’. There was no reply.

To raise funds, Boko Haram raided banks, stuffing the cash into big chequered nylon holdalls known as Ghana-Must-Go bags. To arm themselves, they seized army guns, trucks and even tanks – some said these were sold to them by corrupt military. Soon they were focusing on territorial control, annexing towns and villages across the north to control 70 per cent of Borno state and create a Caliphate, as ISIS would later, though even more brutal. They killed and captured thousands and sent hundreds of thousands fleeing.

Attacking schools, particularly girls’ schools, was not unique to Boko Haram. Hundreds of schools had been bombed or attacked by the Taliban in Afghanistan and northern Pakistan, where, in October 2012, fifteen-year-old Malala Yousafazi had been shot on her school bus for campaigning for the right to study.

But one of Boko Haram’s particular trademarks was seizing young girls and forcing them to marry fighters. This was partly to secure loyalty from followers by providing wives for unemployed youth who had no prospect of paying traditional bride price. It was also to provide future members of the Caliphate, the girls treated as incubators to produce Muslim offspring. Women who were already pregnant with Christian babies faced having their bellies slit with a machete and the foetus ripped out.

It may also have been revenge for the detention by Nigerian authorities of their own female relatives. There were some reports that Shekau’s own wife and three daughters had been captured in September 2012 while attending a naming ceremony which was attacked by the military. Shortly after he issued another video warning: ‘Since you are seizing our women, you wait and see what will happen to your women …’

He added, ‘I would like you to know there is slavery in Islam, even during the battle of Badr the Prophet Mohammad took slaves,’ referring to the first military victory by Muslims in the seventh century over Meccans who outnumbered them.

Boko Haram was complicated and media attention-span short and the satellites were soon being packed up and journalists moving on to a new story, ISIS capturing great swathes of Iraq and Syria. The British Sentinel spy plane sent by Cameron was quietly moved on elsewhere. The FBI pulled out its hostage negotiators.

As for the girls, it was as if they had vanished off the face of the earth. The following year, in March 2015, President Goodluck Jonathan ran out of luck and became the first sitting president in Nigerian history to lose an election. His failure to find the Chibok girls and end the insurgency was one of the reasons.

The victor was Muhammadu Buhari who had ruled as a military dictator back in the 1980s. He had nine daughters of his own and told his troops that finding the Chibok girls was a priority of his first hundred days. But the deadline passed, Boko Haram attacks continued and attempts at negotiations with Shekau stalled. On 14 January 2016, President Buhari met with around 300 of the parents and told them his government had ‘no credible intelligence’ on the girls’ whereabouts or indeed whether they were even alive.

Esther often sent me devotional messages and I couldn’t get those girls out of my head. I knew that feeling of butterflies in my stomach when I woke in the early hours to find my teenage son’s bed still empty. Imagine knowing your daughter was in the hands of brutal killers and rapists.

A spate of suicide bombings across northern Nigeria by young women had started in June 2014, two months after the abduction. Many believed these were Chibok girls who had been brainwashed and trained to be killers or forced to become suicide bombers, their vests triggered remotely, though others argued the girls were too valuable to Boko Haram given their international profile.

I met a man in London who flipped open his Macbook Air to show me stomach-churning videos of three of them being raped over and over until their screams became silent Os.

‘Boko Haram make ISIS look like playtime,’ I was told by Dr Stephen Davis, a former canon at Coventry Cathedral, who was living in Perth, Australia, and had spent several years negotiating with Boko Haram members. ‘I met one girl who was gang-raped every day for a year.’

Between 2009 and 2016 they had killed more than 15,000 people, razed villages and forced more than two million to flee their homes. According to Unicef, they had also forced more than one million children from school, burning their buildings, killing hundreds of teachers and abducting thousands of boys and girls to work as cooks, lookouts and sex slaves. After being rebuffed by Al Qaeda, Boko Haram had affiliated with ISIS in 2015, becoming Islamic State West Africa.

And yet how could 219 girls be abducted and simply disappear? Dr Davis, who was himself a father of three daughters, was apoplectic. ‘I couldn’t believe you take so many girls and leave no trace,’ he said. ‘Think how many vehicles that means, yet they didn’t even leave a single wheel track and not one villager saw them pass. It’s totally beyond belief.’

Two years after the abduction of the girls, the dusk vigil still continued every evening in Unity Square. The swallows still came out in their V formations but the protesters had shrunk to a small huddle of perhaps a dozen, wearing red Bring Back Our Girls badges, and a stack of plastic chairs stood untouched. A few more drifted in from work and some passing motorists honked in solidarity.

‘No one is giving up,’ insisted Yusuf Abubakar, the sit-out coordinator. His megaphone wasn’t working so he shouted the usual chant:

When shall we stop?

Not until our girls are back and alive!

When shall we stop?

Not without our daughters!

Various matters were discussed such as who could provide refreshments for a forthcoming candlelit vigil in memory of the slain Buni Yadi boys. As always the session ended with everyone singing John Lennon’s ‘Give Peace a Chance’ reworded to say ‘All we are saying – bring back our girls. Now and alive!’

Among those gathered was a teenage girl, Maryam, slim and still as a tulip, and her mother Fatima, their faces stricken. Maryam told me she had been at Buni Yadi school along with her beloved sixteen-year-old elder brother Shoaib on the night of 24 February 2014 when Boko Haram attacked. ‘They herded all the girls into the mosque and told us that going to such school was wrong and if they caught us again they wouldn’t spare us. Then they started shooting boys in the head in front of us.’

Others had their throats slit and they heard the screams. She never saw her brother again. ‘He wanted to be an architect,’ said her mother Fatima. ‘I fainted when I heard the news.’

Fatima was paying for Maryam to go to school in Kaduna which she thought was safer. But Maryam cried as she told me, ‘I can’t concentrate because I keep thinking of my brother and what they did to those boys. I know my mum is sacrificing for me to go to school and I didn’t want my education to stop but I don’t know what to do. I have nightmares every night and they fill my mind.’

The next morning I met up with Esther Yakubu. She looked as if she had aged ten years in the past two and told me she felt as if she was living in a kind of limbo. ‘I can’t sleep, I can’t breathe,’ she said. ‘My other daughter refuses to go back to school because she is scared.’ Some of the Chibok parents had committed suicide, she said. No one had offered them counselling. ‘The government just gave us dress material and rice,’ she shrugged. ‘What good is that?’

She still had faith her daughter would be returned. ‘I believe she’s alive,’ she said. ‘I used to dream that she was back. Once her sister woke in the night and screamed “Dorcas is here!” She dreamt she came back and was making herself up. She loved to do that.

‘If she’s dead I would know,’ she added.

The international attention had surprised them and given them hope the girls would be quickly recovered, so they were mystified at the failure. ‘We heard the Americans have satellites that could see even a man walking in a street in Baghdad or a goat on a hill in Afghanistan,’ said Esther. ‘How would they not see all those girls?

‘What I think is the government was not serious. If they had been the children of the elite, they would have been found.’

The military checkpoint just outside Maiduguri airport had a large Wanted poster covered with menacing faces of dozens of armed Boko Haram fighters, in the centre of which was the leering face of Shekau. The soldiers standing behind piles of sandbags looked surly, not surprisingly perhaps as they were poorly paid and equipped – partly it was said because their commanders were pocketing the funds or selling off their equipment to the terrorist group.

I had flown to the birthplace of Boko Haram to meet some of their former hostages to learn what it was like to be a girl like Dorcas in their captivity. On the flight I sat next to Professor Abba Gambo who was head of the crop-production department at the university. He told me all eleven of his brothers had been killed, including one who was shot in front of him. He blamed Boko Haram on high levels of poverty, illiteracy and climate change, which meant the area was getting just three months of rain, with Lake Chad shrinking and crops declining. He pointed outside the window at the parched brown land.

I was not the only foreigner on board. Denise Ritchie was a feisty blonde barrister and anti-sexual-violence campaigner from New Zealand who told me she was carrying suitcases of bras and knickers she had collected to give to the abducted women. First, I thought she was mad then I felt humbled that someone would save their money to fly halfway round the world to try to bring a little dignity to women she had never met.

We both checked into Satus guesthouse which had been recommended as safe because an army unit was stationed there, though this may have been a questionable advantage given they were the main target. The website showed Scandinavian-style rooms of stripped wood and white Egyptian cotton duvets – but the rooms were brown and dank with stained candlewick bedspreads. I accosted the manager and he laughed and told me those were pictures of another hotel which he had liked so had cut and pasted.

Maiduguri was much livelier than on my previous visit two years earlier in 2014. Then it was under curfew having recently been attacked. Now everyone seemed to be selling something. On the street young men were playing table football and people grilling skewers of river fish and tiny sparrow-like birds with red beaks called quelea, which were sold in paper and crunched whole.

Hundreds of thousands of people from surrounding villages and towns that had been taken over by Boko Haram had fled into the city. Twenty-five camps had sprung up to house them all. Among them were thousands of girls who had escaped or been rescued from Boko Haram. While all the international focus was on the Chibok girls, it soon became clear that their abduction was just the tip of the iceberg.

‘They put their dirty hands over our mouths and made us show them our breasts,’ said Ba Amsa, who, like Esther’s daughter Dorcas, had been sixteen when she was taken prisoner by Boko Haram. ‘You couldn’t resist because they had guns and if you did, they took you to the bush and killed you.’

She was from a small town called Bama which had been attacked several times by Boko Haram then captured in September 2014, five months after the Chibok abductions.

Even by their murderous standards it was bloody. Afterwards Boko Haram put out a video showing their gunmen mowing down civilians lying face down in a local school dormitory lined with bunk beds. Most appeared to be adult men. There were so many corpses that the gunmen had difficulty stepping between them to finish off those still twitching.

‘We have turned the floor of this hall red with blood, and this is how it is going to be in all future attacks and arrests of infidels,’ said the group leader in a message. ‘From now killing, slaughtering, destructions and bombing will be our religious duty anywhere we invade.’

As Boko Haram moved in, people tried to flee. Ba Amsa had a limp because of childhood polio so could not run fast. ‘They caught me and my sister and took us to a kind of prison of women where they kept us three months, making us do lessons on Islam.

‘It was a place for Boko Haram fighters to choose wives. They would tell us men are coming to look at you and made us stand up and show our breasts then they would pick five or ten of us. More than twenty girls had been taken away before they came for me.

‘The man who picked me was someone I knew from Bama and we stayed in a house of people they had killed. He was young and didn’t seem to know anything about religion. He told me anyone who joined Boko Haram would go to Paradise.’

When I asked how he treated her, she looked down at the ground. ‘I couldn’t resist him,’ she replied. ‘He was armed. One day the army came and bombed the village and I managed to run away even though I was pregnant.’

I met Ba Amsa at Dalori camp which was based in a former technical college on the edge of town on dusty ground dotted with bare baobab trees. Dalori was the largest camp with around 22,000 people and also the oldest. It was said to be the best equipped and had rows of white tents, but it seemed a miserable place, with just one tap where barefoot people were queuing to get water. The tents were no escape from the 40-degree heat. Rations were just rice and a monthly bar of soap – I later spotted the flour, cooking oil and beans they were supposed to get on sale in the market just down the road.

Camps were organised by place to try and keep communities together and most people in Dalori were from Bama. Ba Amsa was attending a workshop organised by a local group for women and girls who had escaped Boko Haram and wanted to speak out. It was in a small trailer set up with rows of desks at which sat forty women and girls, several holding babies even though they looked like children themselves. It was sweltering.

Ba Amsa, who was by then eighteen, was nursing a baby boy – her four-month-old son Abuya who had been born in the camp. She had been reunited with her parents who were also in the camp. Her other siblings – two elder brothers, one younger and a younger sister – were all still missing.

Ba Amsa said she was lucky because her family still supported her. But she worried about the future of her son. One day the elder sister of her Boko Haram husband came to find her, wanting to give the boy a name.

‘In our tradition the husband names the baby but I told her he had no right after what he did. This baby is a reminder of all the pain but this child doesn’t even know of its own existence so it has no blame,’ she said. ‘All the bad things that happened to me are because of the father not him. This child is innocent.’

It didn’t seem so to me at first but as I met more girls I realised she was right about being lucky. Most of the girls in the workshop were ostracised by their community and made to stay in a separate tent for what they called Sambisa wives.

Among them was Raqaya al Haji, who at thirteen was already four months pregnant by a Boko Haram terrorist she had been forced to marry.

When Boko Haram came for her, she was just eleven and about to start high school. ‘I was asleep in my parents’ house in Bama when two men with guns forced their way in and took me,’ she said. ‘I knew who they were as they were from the neighbourhood and everyone knew they were members of Boko Haram.’

They took her to a village called Bu Nafe and made her one of three wives of a young fighter called Khumoro even though she was so young she had not yet started her periods.

‘If I refused they would make me a concubine,’ she said. ‘I knew if I ran away there were people on the roads who would take us back and kill us.

‘He was a troublesome man,’ she added. ‘If I resisted him he forced me to drink blood. Often they made us gather and to watch women be lashed or have their heads broken with rocks for adultery.

‘Sometimes Khumoro went off to fight and I thought about running away but I knew Boko Haram had people on the roads and would kill me if they found me.’

Eventually she became so desperate that in December, after more than a year and a half of captivity, she pleaded with him to let her go to visit her sick grandmother.

‘I fled. I walked at night so they wouldn’t see me then hid in the day. I was dizzy from no food or drink. It took me three nights to get back to Bama. It was under the control of the Nigerian army and they kept me for a while … Then in January they brought me here to the camp. I was so happy at first then I realised no one would talk to me. They call us annova which means epidemic or bad blood.’

‘People believe the women who were abducted have become sympathisers and had a spell cast over them,’ explained Dr Yagana Bugar, a lecturer at Maiduguri University who also came from Bama and had researched a report on the stigmatisation of these women. ‘Because camps are organised by village, everyone knows your story and no one wants to associate with those taken by Boko Haram. So after everything else they have been through they end up ostracised in camps and can’t go back to their original places.’

In other words they were victims twice over. Or maybe three times if you included what happened in military custody.

Some had been so brutally raped they had fistula, a tear in the walls between the vagina and the bladder or rectum which meant they leaked urine or faeces and could barely leave their tent because they reeked. Others had been infected with HIV by their captors and some had tried to abort their own babies or been forced to by their families. What they were going through mentally, I couldn’t begin to imagine.

Then another girl came forward. Zara Shetima, at eighteen, had a fine-boned beauty, carefully plaited hair, and an adorable twenty-month-old baby girl she had named Kellu Kariye.

‘The insurgents came to my village in Bama and told my father they wanted to marry me,’ she said. ‘I refused so they came back with guns and said they would kill me and my father unless I agreed. They brought 2000 naira [£7] as dowry.’

When the village was captured and others ran away, the man kept her there in her family house. ‘He was short and dark in complexion,’ she said.

Asked how he treated her, first she said fine. But there was a hollowness in her eyes. ‘He forced himself on me, they all did,’ she added, looking down. ‘It was very hard.’

Tears started streaming down her face. Little Kellu took the end of her mum’s red scarf and dabbed at the tears. ‘If I resisted they made me watch him slaughter other people.’

That was not the end of the story. ‘Some others came and said we should move and he refused so they shot him,’ she said. ‘Then they told me to marry another one. When I refused they took my sister.’

Later, when a military jet bombed the villages, she took the opportunity to flee, scrambling through thorny scrubland. She had no idea what had happened to her sister and the rest of her family.

‘Nobody is taking care of me,’ she said. ‘I am alone here. Often I think it would be better to die but who would look after Kellu?’

Apart from the twice-daily ration of rice, and monthly bar of soap, she got no other food or help. To supplement it, she weaved traditional prayer caps which took a month to complete and sold for just 2–3000 naira (£7–10) each.

There was only one other way girls like Zara could afford any more food. All the aid workers told me sexual abuse in the camps was rife. The superintendent of one camp was on trial for raping children.

Some women found the conditions in the camps so unbearable they preferred to live outside, begging on the streets.

Back in Abuja, I went to see Brigadier General Rabe Abubakar, spokesman for the Nigerian military. There was a power-cut and his office was sweltering. He told me that Boko Haram was now ‘extremely weak because our military activities are really punching on them’ and that the army had rescued ‘thousands of girls’ – more than a thousand that January alone. It seemed surprising that none of them were Chibok girls, particularly given all the international resources deployed to find them.

He suggested that the international attention had made things worse for the girls. ‘You have turned those girls into their crown jewels,’ he shrugged.

Dr Andrew Pocock, who had been British High Commissioner in Nigeria at the time of their abduction, later admitted to me that one large group of girls had been located early on in the search. ‘A couple of months after the kidnapping, fly-bys and American eye-in-the-sky spotted a group of up to eighty girls in a particular spot on the Sambisa forest around a very large tree they were calling the Tree of Life, along with evidence of vehicular movement and a large encampment.

‘They were there for a while – six weeks – and the question to Whitehall and Washington was what to do about them and answer came there none.’

Despite all the fervour western leaders had shown round the BBOG hashtag, there was no appetite to send in their own boots on the ground. ‘A land-based attack would have been seen coming miles away and had the girls killed,’ explained Pocock. ‘An air-based rescue such as flying in helicopters or Hercules would have required large numbers and meant a significant risk to the rescuers and even more so to the girls. You might have rescued a few but many would have been killed.

‘My personal fear always was what about the girls not in that encampment?’ he added. ‘Eighty were there but more than two hundred were taken. What would have happened to them?

‘It’s perfectly conceivable that Shekau would have appeared on one of his videos a week later, saying “Who told you you could try and free these girls? Let me show you what I’ve done to them …”

‘So you were damned if you did, damned if you didn’t,’ he said. ‘They were beyond rescue in practical terms.’

Far away in Australia, Dr Stephen Davis could not believe it was so hard to find more than 200 girls. He had been involved in hostage negotiations in the oil-rich Delta area as well as previous peace negotiations with Boko Haram so made some calls to commanders he had got to know.

‘Three calls, three commanders,’ he said. ‘They said, “Of course we know who has the girls.” So they spoke to some of those who had them and they said they might be prepared to release them.’

On the strength of that Davis went to Nigeria in April 2015 and spent three months in Boko Haram territory in the north, his white skin making him ‘stand out like a lighthouse’.

He asked for proof of life. They gave him videos of girls being raped – the ones I had seen. They also told him that eighteen of the girls were ill so he suggested taking them off their hands. Three times a deal was almost concluded. ‘Once it got as far as them taking some of the girls to a village for a handover but then another group took them, sensing a money-making opportunity.’

Frustrated and facing threats, eventually Davis had to leave for medical reasons – he had terminal cancer.

He insisted that the Boko Haram camps were easy to spot. ‘It’s not hard to see where the five or six main camps are,’ he said. ‘I can see them on Google Earth. You tell me the Americans, British and French can’t see them from satellite tracking or drones?

‘Meanwhile every week Boko Haram set off from those camps to slaughter and kidnap hundreds more girls and young boys,’ he added in frustration. ‘How many girls have to be raped and abducted before the West will do anything?’

In June 2016, shortly after my second trip, another video of the girls was released. In front of several rows of girls in floor-length robes, some seated and others standing, stood a masked militant in camouflage holding a Kalashnikov. ‘We still have your girls,’ he declared. ‘The Nigerian government knows what we want – the release of our jailed brethren.’

He pulled out a girl in faded black abaya and tattered yellow headscarf and held the small microphone to her lips. Speaking nervously and looking down, clutching her robe to her neck, she explained who she was and read a scripted plea for the Nigerian government to free them by releasing Boko Haram prisoners in exchange. The girl was Dorcas.

Esther was relieved to see her daughter still alive but horrified at what she was enduring. ‘Seeing my baby next to a terrorist with ammunition round his neck is not easy,’ she said.

Dorcas in the Boko Haram video

One of the girls standing behind Dorcas was clearly pregnant and another was carrying a baby. ‘I have nightmares about her being raped,’ she added. ‘But in those nightmares I embrace her. For me it’s not a problem if she’s been raped, pregnant or converted to Islam. We just want our daughters back, no matter what the condition.’

The video ended disturbingly. The camera panned over a number of dead girls lying in pools of blood. Some of the bodies were yanked over by soldiers so their faces were visible. The militant said they had been killed in a government airstrike and warned, ‘We cannot keep protecting these girls.’

One Saturday in October 2016, a few months later, came unexpected news. Twenty-one of the Chibok girls had been released. Then in May 2017, three years after their capture, eighty-two more were handed over near the Cameroon border. A photograph shows them standing in a line in floor-length hijabs, guarded by seven militants, one of whom asked if anyone had been raped or touched in captivity. ‘No,’ came the answer.

Excited by the news, Esther scanned the pictures in vain, looking for her daughter. ‘I really hoped Dorcas would be among them because someone called me and said she had been let out. But eventually, we saw the picture of the freed girls meeting President Buhari and she wasn’t among them.

‘Later I heard she had been in the group – she was supposed to be the eighty-third girl – but they decided not to free her and took her back to the forest.’

The releases were the result of negotiations involving the Swiss government and the Red Cross and facilitated by Zannah Mustapha, a barrister in Maiduguri who had represented Boko Haram families in court and set up an orphanage and widows’ school sheltering victims from both sides. ‘Even dogs don’t eat their own children,’ he said, explaining the trust he had built up.

The first handover of girls, he said, had been ‘a confidence building measure’, the second the main deal.

In return, five Boko Haram prisoners were released and the group was said to have received a black duffel bag containing three million euros. Mustapha said he knew nothing about that. ‘I am a son of the soil, brought up in Maiduguri who just wants to bring peace to my area,’ he insisted. ‘I don’t know if any money was paid.’

He claimed that more girls could have been freed but they didn’t want to come, which he attributed to Stockholm syndrome. ‘I met one of the girls who told me she and others didn’t want to because they had converted and married Boko Haram men. The parents don’t want to hear this but I heard it for myself.’

A week after the second handover, another video was released of girls in black hijab sitting on the floor saying they were not coming back because they had got married and converted. Once again Dorcas was speaking, her face covered. Once again an AK47 was in shot.

‘She looked taller and slimmer than when she lived with me,’ said Esther.

She insisted Mustapha was wrong about the Stockholm syndrome. ‘Everything the girls say on these videos is being fed to them by Boko Haram. I know my daughter. She would not say the things she said unless she’d been forced to. If presented with the opportunity to come home, she would take it. Her mind cannot be at rest there, in the forest, miles away from her mum.’

The returned Chibok girls were kept in a secret location in Abuja for a deradicalisation programme and counselling, and only allowed back to their families in Chibok at Christmas. Some were then enrolled at the American University in Adamawa, housed away from the other students in a dormitory named after Malala, and highly protected.

Esther desperately tried to meet them but the authorities refused. Finally, in October 2018, she managed to speak on the phone to one of the girls. ‘She used to plait Dorcas’s hair. She told me that Dorcas is alive, that she is fine, that the terrorists used to teach them Arabic and that some of the girls are married, though not Dorcas.

‘I used to dream she was back and I’d wake with a start, but now sometimes I have nightmares in which Dorcas says she will never come back.’

She had given up her job and left Chibok. ‘Chibok is a sad place,’ she said. ‘I used to keep all my daughter’s belongings in her room in Chibok but I cast her things out as I don’t want to see them anymore.

‘If she could, I know my Dorcas would have contacted me. She has my phone number in her head. I’ve been calling and calling her old mobile for five years now, but she never answers. I don’t care if she’s converted to Islam or not, if she’s had a baby or not, I just want her to come back.

‘They say some of the girls have died, but I’m sure Dorcas is alive. I go to church every day and pray for her to come back. I hope one day God will answer.’

* ‘Nigeria’s Stolen Girls’, New York Times, 6 May 2014.

4

Queue Here for the Rape Victim

Cox’s Bazar, Bangladesh

How do you decide which child to save when Burmese soldiers are pointing guns at you? That was the impossible dilemma of Shahida, a Rohingya mother I met in December 2017 shortly after arriving in Kutupalong camp to which she and hundreds of thousands of others had fled. And how do you live with the decision?

Afterwards, when I think about that camp, I think about noise. And children everywhere. With uncertain faces and inappropriate clothes from well-meaning donations, a boy in a belted woman’s cardigan of cream wool with a fur collar, a girl in a fairy dress with pink tutu and high heels like boats for her tiny feet. Someone had been teaching them a few words of English. ‘Bye-bye!’ they shouted as they passed by.

It was all a bit overwhelming after the long series of flights from London to Doha then Dhaka then Cox’s Bazar in northeast Bangladesh, where the airport terminal carried the unlikely message ‘Welcome to the Honeymoon Resort’, and the Mermaid Beach hotel greeted me with a green coconut adorned with a cocktail umbrella and an invitation to sign up for a romantic candlelit dinner on what was apparently the world’s longest beach.

I dumped my stuff in one of the small thatched cottages with psychedelic names amid a grove of palm and papaya trees, watched by an audience of chattering monkeys, and set off along the coast road.

Dotted along the way were piles of concrete pyramids stamped disconcertingly with the words Tsunami Protection. ‘Like the Venus of Willendorf,’ said my interpreter Reza, who turned out to be an artist.

Banners hung across the road emblazoned with large photographs of Prime Minister Sheikh Hasina under the words ‘Mother of Humanity’. The title might surprise minorities or opponents abducted, tortured or locked up by her regime. Human rights organisations had recorded at least 1300 extrajudicial killings by state forces since she came to power in 2009 as well as an election in 2014 in which almost half of MPs won seats without anyone voting for them.

The banners referred to her opening of the border to fellow Muslims from neighbouring Burma. The refugees were Rohingya, a name few outside had heard of until the last few days of August 2017. People started pouring into Bangladesh from Rakhine state in western Burma, crossing the Naf river by boats or makeshift rafts or even swimming. Soon as many as 10,000 a day were coming.

It was monsoon season so they were arriving bedraggled and muddy, some bloodied from knife or gunshot wounds, and many starving after days or weeks in the jungle with nothing to eat but leaves. Most were mothers and children and they came with unimaginable stories of Burmese soldiers and Buddhist mobs moving into their villages, slaughtering the men, setting fire to their huts, then raping the women and girls often in front of their family.

Within three months more than 650,000 had been driven out – two thirds of the Rohingya population. The UN called it a ‘textbook example’ of ethnic cleansing.

As we turned off through emerald paddy fields where women in colourful wraps were standing among the rice shoots, and into what aid workers called a ‘mega camp’, I feared that I might have become a bit jaded after all the refugees I had spoken to over the previous few years,

Raped, beaten and widowed – Madina, Munira and Shahida (Paula Bronstein)

Then I met Shahida, wrapped in a raven-grey scarf, and batting away flies, inside a flimsy shelter of black plastic over bamboo poles on a muddy path. Across the path was a leaking latrine and the stench was overpowering, as was the screeching from two cocks scrapping outside. A boy who looked about five passed by carrying a bundle of firewood almost the size of himself, occasionally stopping to put it down and look at it, as if astonished by the absurdity.

She was one of three young widows staying together from the same village in Rakhine state. Each wore a different-coloured scarf and each had lost a husband and a child.

Munira, the eldest at thirty and brightest in canary yellow, was the most anxious to speak. ‘First they came for the men,’ she said, recalling the night a few months earlier in late September when Burmese soldiers burst into their homes in Borochora in Maungdaw. ‘Then two days later they came for us.

‘It was around 2 a.m. and I was breastfeeding my baby when I heard the first shot. Then there were so many it was as if it was raining fire. I could see flames in the distance from all villages around burning and rockets flying overhead.

‘That’s when the soldiers took the men, tying their hands with bind. Then two days later they came back, again after midnight, shouting, “Come out and see what happened to your husbands!” They entered our homes, pointed guns at our hearts and dragged us out.

‘They took all the girls and women of the village to a rice field and lined us all up – maybe forty or so – and forced themselves on us. To start with we were all screaming but in the end it was quiet, we could cry no more.

‘I was raped by five men, first one then the next. They beat me and slapped me and kicked me and bit me. I was too terrified to move. I saw two girls dead near me. By the time the sun came up I was barely conscious.

‘When I came to, I couldn’t walk but only crawl. There were bodies all around. I tried to find my children. Then I saw a small boy lying face down, shot in the back. It was Subat Alam, my eldest. He had been running towards me. He was eight.’

Also in the paddy field that night was Shahida, twenty-five, the lady in grey. She had grabbed her six-month-old baby son and two-year-old daughter when the soldiers burst into her hut. Tears spilled from her eyes as she told me how desperately she tried to shield them.

‘They were in my arms and soldiers came to snatch them away,’ she said. ‘I tried to hold them but I could only protect one. They grabbed my baby boy and threw him to the ground then I heard a shot as I was running. I didn’t look back as I worried I would lose my daughter too.’

Pushed into the line of women at gunpoint, her heart was pounding so much she could barely stand. ‘I’d heard about women being raped in other villages,’ she said. ‘Then they bound my wrists against a banana tree and raped me.

‘I was raped by one solder and was crying and shouting as he assaulted me. Afterwards he wanted to shoot or knife me but it was too dark.’

Somehow she escaped to the jungle where she found her three remaining children huddled together in terror.

‘As the sun rose, we saw everything,’ she said. ‘All the cattle, chicken and goats killed and our houses burnt down. People beheaded, their limbs cut off, or shot.’

The call for prayers from the mosque on the hill started up, making it hard to hear, as the third widow Madina, in a dusky pink scarf, recounted her tale, particularly as the little boy she was nursing had joined in with his own wailing. His left hand was swollen and badly infected.

‘I was sleeping when the soldiers burst in,’ she said. ‘I managed to flee with my three children to the hill behind. I was very scared because I was five months pregnant. If a woman is pregnant they cut out the foetus from her belly. They think Rohingya are not humans. They want to wipe us out.

‘Then one soldier saw me and grabbed me. I was terrified he would feel my swollen belly. They had big knives and machetes.’

As he raped her in the forest, she repeatedly prayed for the baby she was carrying. ‘I was shouting so my children cried,’ she said. ‘They were scared. That’s when they took my eldest.

‘I never saw him again. We know if the children are taken they are killed.

‘I think the Burmese army are the worst people in the world,’ she added, using her scarf to wipe away her tears.

‘If we had knives we would kill them,’ said Shahida.

The three women eventually managed to escape, passing a graveyard east of the village then hiding for a month in the jungle with other rape survivors as well as elderly and children from the village.

‘We were hiding under bushes, moving from one place to another,’ said Munira. ‘It was raining day and night and we had no hope. We women had lost our appetite because of all the horror but our children were crying for food. All we could give them was fruits and leaves. Some days all we had was water from streams. We had to keep moving as the military were searching everywhere. Some people had managed to bury their crops before fleeing so after a week they went back to the village to dig up some millet but the soldiers saw them and shot them in the head. We kept seeing dead bodies. Some had died a few days before. Others were fresh.’

‘It was hard to sleep,’ said Shahida. ‘I would see those soldiers on me and pray for help.’

Eventually they crossed the river to Bangladesh and safety. But their torment was not over and perhaps never would be.

Apart from the ghosts in their heads, the slaughter of their husbands had left the women as sole providers and protectors of their children, not easy anywhere but particularly in this conservative Muslim society, and they were struggling. ‘The children have no sweaters or warm clothes and the babies have diarrhoea,’ said Madina.

‘We just get basic needs, rice, lentils and oil but we have no mat to sit on or pillow or utensils or jerry can to collect water,’ said Shahida. ‘And no one will marry us after what happened and with all these children.’

Even the most conflict-weary of aid workers and journalists seemed shocked by the Rohingya. It was not that their individual stories were worse than anything we had heard before, though many were, but it was more the sheer scale of what had happened. Every single shack had terrible stories and I had never come across such widespread violation of women and girls.

It was also the conditions. The camp was filthy with pools of green fetid water dotted along the path. There were lots of latrines – 30,000, the relief commissioner informed me later. But these had been erected so hastily that many were already blocked and none seemed to have locks. Many were next to wells where children were collecting water from a tap. These had been dug so shallow that aid workers told me that more than three quarters of the wells were contaminated by faeces. Not surprisingly most people were suffering from diarrhoea. A quarter of the children were suffering malnutrition. Many of the women with babies were so stressed that their breast milk had dried up.

Nor was there any privacy. Bangladesh was already the world’s most overcrowded country, and its 165 million people among the poorest, so finding space for hundreds of thousands more was not easy. It was, said one aid worker, as if the whole population of Manchester had suddenly turned up on your doorstep.

Around half a million had been put into Kutupalong. If you climbed a hill the area looked like one of those relief maps in museums, dotted with makeshift dwellings up and down the hills as far as the eye could see. It was hard to believe that a few months earlier this area had been mostly forest. Some of it used to be an elephant reserve, which meant in the early days some refugees were trampled to death, though soon there were so many refugees even the elephants had been driven back.

The camp covered ten square miles and was divided into sections from AA to OO. There were signs for every aid organisation under the sun, some of which were marked ‘Child friendly spaces’ as if other places were not. The mosques seemed to command the best spots on the hills.

Tents stretching in every direction – Kutupalong houses more than 600,000 Rohingya refugees (Christina Lamb)

Through it all was an endless stream of people. A bearded man passed with a plastic bag of fish and an air of purpose. Pathways were lined with stalls of people selling things. A young man stood at a table with digital scales on which he was trying to weigh live chickens. A makeshift barber’s had a mirror and a painted board of hair styles, including the footballers Neymar and Cristiano Ronaldo. I marvelled at the resilience of people who lost everything. What would we in the West do if we lost our homes and were dumped in a place with no electricity?

The refugees were living so on top of each other that they had less than half the internationally recommended minimum space. In other words all the conditions in which disease can thrive. There had already been an outbreak of measles and while I was there diphtheria broke out. António Guterres, the UN Secretary General, called it a ‘human rights nightmare’.

Every evening as dusk fell, the air darkened with smoke from thousands of campfires and made my eyes sting. There was so much coughing going on it was almost like a soundtrack to the camp, that and the cries of ‘Bye-bye’.

Foreigners were not allowed to stay after 5 p.m. I would often hear rumours of what happened then, how men on motorbikes would appear to snatch girls for prostitution. Refugees told me that at night they heard screams of children being taken. I never managed to find anyone who had lost a daughter this way but I did see scantily clad young Rohingya girls on the long beach in Cox’s Bazar touting their trade. Some said they were sold by their own families, desperate to supplement the rations of rice and lentils.

Yet talking to Rohingya it soon became clear that what was happening to them was nothing new. On a muddy island in the river where 6000 Rohingya had been stranded, I was greeted by Din Mohammad, a community leader in pebble-lensed glasses held together with tape, who presented me with a green bottle of fizzy drink. ‘We may be refugees but can still offer something to guests,’ he said and smiled.

I commented on his fluent English and he told me he had a psychology degree from Rangoon University. ‘I graduated in 1994, just before they barred Rohingya from higher education,’ he said. ‘Now I am fifty-one and I have never been allowed to practise. I scraped a living growing subsistence crops.

‘To the Burmese regime we are non-people. For decades they harassed us every day, sent our people to jail, didn’t give us citizen rights but alien cards as if we were foreigners. We had no rights, no education – there were primary schools in our villages but no teachers. We weren’t allowed to travel to another village without permission, which they refused, or even to get married, and they demanded more and more money for a licence.’

Nor were these the first to flee. Kutupalong was first established in 1992 when 300,000 Rohingya fled an earlier wave of repression. On the main road into the camp were shelters that looked more permanent made from corrugated iron.

Inside one I met Shahida Begum, a mother of five, who had arrived in that earlier wave twenty-five years earlier, when her village was burnt down. ‘In Burma the Buddhists are the majority and so have all the power and they don’t like the Muslim people,’ she explained. ‘I think they will not stop till they make all the Rohingya leave.’

She had taken in a Rohingya girl of fourteen called Yasmin who was sitting on a bed, wrapped in a marigold orange shawl patterned with red flowers. Above her was knotted a green mosquito net.

Yasmin never smiled and her small hands kneaded over and over as she explained how she ended up there. Her voice was so quiet I had to lean in to hear, straining to understand the unfamiliar place names which over the coming days I would hear over and over again. The noise of the children outside was soon lost.

‘I grew up in Chali Para village in Maungdaw district,’ she began. ‘We lived on rice and fish from the river. I was the breadwinner as my parents became too old and sick to farm, and we had to beg for food, which made me cry. I was the eldest – I had two little brothers aged three and four. I told my parents if I was a boy I would work then a neighbour taught me to sew teak leaves into garlands on bamboo rods for the thatched roofs of our huts. It took long but if I sewed a hundred garlands I would get 1000 myanmar kyat [about 47p] which was enough for a kilo of rice.

‘I would like to have learnt to read and write but we had no school: the Burmese authorities didn’t allow us. There was just a madrassa to study Koran.

‘The morning the Tatmadaw [the Burmese military] came, it was about 10 a.m. and I was taking a break from stitching leaves and playing outside our house with some friends. We didn’t hear the trucks as there is no road to our village so the soldiers had stopped on the main road and walked.

‘Five or six of them came to our house. They were in uniform with black masks and rucksacks. One soldier took a grenade from his rucksack and threw it inside where my mum and dad and two little brothers were. Immediately there were flames and I could hear them screaming.

‘I tried to run in but my friends pulled me back. Before our eyes the house burnt to ashes. We tried to run away as we knew the soldiers often took girls to rape. But they caught us. They took us to the jungle. I was scared and crying and screaming but one of the men put his hand over my mouth to stop me. They ripped my clothes, tied my hands behind me then two soldiers raped me, one after another.

‘The second one was saying “kill her” but I pleaded with them not to. I told them I already lost all my family, why kill me? Two of my friends bled so much they died, I don’t know what happened to the other. I can’t say what they did to me because when I think about those incidents I cry.’

She fell silent. Eventually she resumed the thread. ‘They left me naked. I just had a yellow scarf which I wrapped around me then I made my way very slowly to the river bank as I couldn’t walk well.

‘In the jungle I met a lady with her sons and she saw I was bleeding down my leg and asked me what happened. She gave me cloth to wrap round it and helped me to the river bank. It was full of people trying to cross. Boatmen wanted money and I had nothing. I told them all I have is this nose ring so they took that. It was the only thing I had from my parents.

‘We were about thirty people crowded into the boat. It had an engine but no roof against the rain and it took long, from dawn to early afternoon, maybe eight hours. Still, it was our good luck to find one as lots of people were on makeshift rafts which were very risky.

‘The boat took us to the island on the Bangladesh side. When we got there I left the lady because I was afraid. She had two sons about my age and I was scared they could also harm me so I said to her, “I will find my own way, Allah will be with me.”

‘Then I sat down and I was crying so hard that people of the island asked me what happened. They gave me rice cake and water and also some money to cross to Teknaf [on the Bangladesh mainland].

‘After that I walked ten minutes along the broken road and saw some Bangladesh army. They could see I was Rohingya and gave me biscuits and water then put me in a bus to the transit centre. I stayed there two days and was so tired I couldn’t talk. I was lying on the ground, my foot and stomach all swollen. Someone said she has no one and took me to Balukali camp.’

It was there that Shahida Begum found her. ‘I had gone to the camp with some food to meet relatives who had just arrived but when I got out of the tuk-tuk I saw a crowd of people round a girl so I went to see what had happened,’ Shahida explained. ‘She was so sick and weak and dressed only in a shirt on so I put her in the tuk-tuk and took her to the UNHCR clinic. They treated her for an infected thorn and also gave her a pregnancy test.

‘I thought I have four girls already, why can’t I look after her too? It’s difficult but by the grace of Allah we can manage. She has no one.’

She showed me around the small dwelling of four rooms with a cooking area in an outside lean-to. They had electricity in the form of a bulb but water had to be fetched from a pump. Yasmin shared a room with Shahida and one of her daughters. It was extremely cramped as another of her daughters was married with a son and husband who also lived there, making ten altogether. And things had become more difficult as Shahida’s husband had just lost his job as a schoolteacher. I wondered how many of us in the West would just take a girl in like that.

‘For the first few weeks I had nightmares every day about my family burning but I sleep with my auntie and sister and now they are fewer,’ said Yasmin. ‘They don’t make me do anything – I don’t go outside yet and stay inside helping with the cooking. Only occasionally I go to collect water from the tube well.

‘I’d like to go to school and learn to read and write. I know I am lucky that some girls who were raped died but I survived. I think those soldiers are the worst people in the world. Don’t they have daughters or sisters?’

Before I left she fixed her eyes on mine. ‘What happened to me was really bad and I don’t think any boy will marry me,’ she said. ‘Who can marry me now?’

The question was heartbreaking. Of course, life was never easy for Rohingya girls in their villages where they were often married off by her age. At least Yasmin was not pregnant and had found a caring family. But how do you get over something like this? There was little to distract them in the camps for once girls hit puberty most were rarely allowed out of the huts.

I have to admit I find all these stories not only shocking but disorienting. I had grown up associating Buddhists with peace, lotus flowers and meditation, and admiring Aung San Suu Kyi as a beacon of courage against tyranny. Awarded the Nobel Peace Prize for her years of struggle, she had spent fifteen years under house arrest, separated from her British husband Michael Aris and their two sons. Even when he was dying of cancer back in Oxford, all she could do was send him a farewell video, dressed in his favourite colour with a rose in her hair. It arrived two days after his death.

Yet Aung San Suu Kyi was now Burma’s de facto head of state and had stayed silent as all these Rohingya were made stateless by her government and the appalling atrocities wreaked on them by the military.

The Burmese authorities did not even use the word Rohingya, instead calling them Bengalis as if they were migrants from Bangladesh, or demonising them as ‘maggots’, invaders or ‘a black tsunami’.

In fact, the Rohingyas had lived in Burma for centuries. Rakhine state, the rice-growing area where they live, used to be the Kingdom of Arakan and some reports had Muslims living there since the eighth century.

Persecution and rape were nothing new. Arakan was plundered by the Burmese monarchy after they conquered it in 1784. Francis Buchanan, a Scottish surgeon with the East India Company, who travelled there afterwards, wrote ‘The Burmans put 40,000 to death; whenever they found a pretty woman they took her after killing the husband and the young girls they took without any consideration.’*

It was plundered again by the British when it came under their rule in 1826 as part of the Indian Empire, later to be joined by the whole of Burma. Colonial authorities encouraged many more Muslims to come from Bengal as cheap labour in the paddy fields which caused resentment among the Buddhists.

During the Second World War, when Burma’s nationalists supported the Japanese occupiers, the Rohingya sided with the British who had promised them a separate land. Afterwards, the British rewarded the Rohingya with prestigious government posts. But when partition of British Indian territories in 1947 etched a line between what is now Rakhine state and what was then East Pakistan, now Bangladesh, the promised autonomous state never materialised.

After Burmese independence in 1948, some Rohingya mounted a rebellion but this was crushed. When the military seized power in 1962, their situation deteriorated. The junta in Rangoon saw minority groups as a threat to Buddhist nationalist identity. They were disenfranchised, denied citizenship, corralled into slave labour, banned even from travelling outside their villages or marrying without permission.

The first exodus was in 1978 and there were waves again after further attacks, such as the one which had sent Shahida fleeing in 1992, and others in 2012 and 2016. Inside Burma, more than 100,000 Rohingya had been picked up and put into what were basically internment camps near Sittwe, the capital of Rakhine. A conference at Harvard in 2014 described their situation as a ‘slow-burning genocide’.†

One might have thought things would change with the 2015 elections which swept Suu Kyi and her National League for Democracy to an overwhelming majority in Parliament. Burma was welcomed back into the international community and sanctions lifted.

She had after all told the Nobel Women’s Initiative in 2011: ‘Rape is used in my country as a weapon against those who only want to live in peace, who only want to assert their basic human rights. Especially in the areas of ethnic nationalities, rape is rife. It is used as a weapon by armed forces to intimidate the ethnic nationalities and to divide our country.’

A year after that, however, she took a very different line when Samantha Power, then US ambassador to the UN, used a visit to bring up the issue of state violence against the Rohingya, and appealed to her to raise her voice. ‘Do not forget there is violence on both sides,’ Suu Kyi replied, adding, ‘you should not rely on propaganda for your information. Muslim countries are hyping events.’‡

In October 2016, a year after her election, security forces conducted what they termed ‘a clearance operation’ in northern Rakhine state. Villages were burnt down, hundreds killed, including children, and women gang-raped. Around 90,000 were forced to flee.

A UN report said 52 per cent of women had been raped and told of children as young as eight months having their throats slit. ‘The devastating cruelty to which these Rohingya children have been subjected is unbearable,’ commented Zeid Ra’ad al Hussein, the Jordanian diplomat who was then UN High Commissioner for Human Rights, which put out the report. ‘What kind of hatred could make a man stab a baby crying out for his mother’s milk? And for the mother to witness this murder while she is being gang-raped by the very security forces who should be protecting her.’§

Once again they got away with it. Indeed the campaign saw the regime increase its popularity at home as defender of Buddhist values in the face of ‘invading Muslim hordes’. They used Facebook, which is very popular in Burma, to incite hatred against the Rohingya, posing as fans of pop stars and creating celebrity pages full of incendiary comments that portray Islam as a global threat to Buddhism and the Rohingya as a threat to national identity, even though they made up only 5 per cent of its population of 54 million.

Meanwhile they prepared for what some called ‘the Final Solution’. The 2017 onslaught was the worst of all. It was apparently triggered by an attack by the Arakan Rohingya Salvation Army (ARSA), a small militant group, on a series of border posts on 25 August. But the retaliation was unforgiving and clearly pre-planned.

Within three months more than 350 villages were wiped off the map and 700,000 people driven out – the largest forced human migration in recent history. A report by a UN fact-finding mission published in September 2019 stated that at least 10,000 Rohingya had been killed. Based on interviews with nearly 1300 victims, it included graphic accounts of women tied by their hair or hands to trees then raped, and villages scattered with bodies of women with blood between their legs, in a regime campaign to ‘erase their identity and remove them from the country’, and warned that the 600,000 still in Burma ‘remain the target’. The investigators said they had a confidential list of 100 names involved in war crimes and called for the international community to act and for the prosecution of senior generals.¶

Pramila Patten, the UN’s Special Representative on Sexual Violence, accused the Burmese military of using rape as a ‘calculated tool of terror to force targeted populations to flee’.

The Burmese government dismissed the reports as ‘Fake Rape’. Colonel Phone Tint, Rakhine’s minister for border affairs, even told journalists: ‘These women were claiming they were raped, but look at their appearances – do you think they are attractive enough to be raped?’

We could not independently check these stories as Burmese authorities would not let journalists into Rakhine state. But satellite images taken by Human Rights Watch clearly showed 345 villages destroyed. And in the accounts of rape of the women I was interviewing there was a sickening similarity. Some of the women showed me bite marks on their hands or cheeks and shyly lifted trousers to reveal scars from shot wounds or bruises. Their eyes spoke pain.

Why had the international community turned a blind eye? Were they so dazzled by the lady with the flowers in her hair and story of courage that they ignored the attacks? Did they care more about not wanting to rock the transition than the fate of the poor Rohingyas?

Azeem Ibrahim, a Scottish academic who had written a book on the Rohingya as well as endless newspaper columns warning of impending genocide, had another view. ‘The problem is the Rohingya are right at the bottom of the global ladder,’ he said. ‘No one can name a single Rohingya, they have no leadership, no office on K Street. They are mostly rickshaw pullers, fishermen and subsistence farmers.’

Were anyone to take action, they would need evidence and I kept asking if anyone was gathering it. The difficulties of such an enterprise became clear one morning when I was taken to OO section of the camp by a Save the Children press officer to meet a woman who had been raped and shot and apparently was very keen to tell her story.

Sanoara Begum, thirty-five, was about to have lunch when we arrived at her shelter so we left her and went for a walk. Along the way was a washing area where men and boys in lungis were shampooing and soaping themselves from buckets filled from a tap.

What did women do? I wondered. Some told me they were hardly eating so they could avoid using the latrine.

When we got back to Sanoara’s shelter there was a queue. The New York Times and a local journalist were waiting outside. An NBC crew was hovering nearby.

‘Can we do it as quickly as possible?’ Sanoara asked me. ‘You can see there are others.’

I wondered about leaving. But having hung around that long, it seemed churlish not to at least hear her story, so I squatted inside on the jute matting marked UNHCR. Her husband and son sat behind me by the entrance, which was not ideal given the nature of the discussion.

She told me she was from Boli Bazaar, in Maungdaw, a village which had already been targeted in 2016. ‘First the military came to our village and burnt all the houses so we fled to another village called Leda. But then the next night they came there about 9 p.m. and shouted all you people must leave Myanmar, why are you still here? Then they started killing the men. They took my older son Mohammad Shaufiq and shot him in the chest and slit his throat. He was fifteen.

‘After that around midnight they seized younger girls and married women and took us to a school. There were six of us, four young girls and two married women and me. Two of us were pregnant. I was eight months pregnant.

‘They bound my hands and legs and threw me on the ground. I was raped by twelve soldiers, three at a time. I kept thinking about the baby and what would happen. They bit me. When I tried to resist they beat me with the gun, look I lost two teeth.’

She pulled back her top lip to show me a gap.

‘After a while I was senseless then three more men came. One of them told me if you tell anyone we will kill you. Then another came in and shot me – they shot me twice, in my right knee and by my vagina.’ She lifted up her trousers to show me. ‘Once with a pistol and once a big gun.

‘I lay so still I didn’t even dare move my eyeballs. Then I can’t remember anything. My husband and brother came to me and carried me. They thought I was dead but my fingers were moving a little so they realised I was alive.

‘They sold my daughter’s gold nose ring and took me to a doctor who gave me some medicine. I gave birth to the baby on the banks of the river but it was dead so we buried it there. I was a mother of four but now there are only two.’

She started crying then gestured around the small black plastic shelter, barely larger than a disabled toilet cubicle, with its mud floor and a fire at one side for cooking, which was surely a fire hazard.

‘Look how we live,’ she said. ‘In Boli Bazaar we had lots of property. Our bathroom was bigger than this shelter. My husband had a tuk-tuk and my elder children had bicycles to go to school. My husband had magical healing powers. We had fourteen cattle and sixteen goats. I had a good bed, good food. Now we are in this nasty place. We have no money, we can’t even buy a fish.’

At that point I sensed a movement near my rucksack just behind me. My interpreter Sonali had also noticed and suggested I moved it in front of us. I vaguely noticed the husband and son had gone. We continued.

‘My husband and brother carried me the whole journey on a blanket because I couldn’t walk. It was six days walking to the river and we had to stop three days on a hill so they could rest.

‘We crossed by boat then we got to the border at Utipara. I was bleeding from the shot wounds so they took me in a tuk-tuk to Kutupalong camp and I was treated. I feel very much pain.

‘Now I don’t want to have sex. But my husband beats me. He says if I don’t cooperate he will take another wife.’

She began weeping. Then she said it was time for the next interview.

It wasn’t something I normally did but I asked if I could take her photograph, not for publication but to remember. I slid my hand into the rucksack pocket for my iPhone. I noticed a fleeting moment of panic cross her face. The phone wasn’t there. I was baffled – I’d been using it just before we went in the tent and tucked it in the pocket when we got in so I knew I had it.

‘You shouldn’t have left it by the entrance!’ she scolded. ‘A beggar took it.’

‘But your husband and son were sitting there,’ I replied. ‘Where have they gone?’

She started yelling. Soon a beggar was produced. She was an old woman with a string bag that Sonoara demanded she empty out. There was no iPhone, just a woollen hat.

‘This poor woman is nothing to do with this,’ I told Sonoara. ‘Where is your husband?’

The Save the Children representative told her that we would have to call the camp police and suggested she might like to find her husband. I waited outside the tent and the husband was fetched.

‘He knows black magic so maybe he can find it,’ said Sonoara.

After a heated discussion between her and her husband, the phone was miraculously produced and thrust at me by the husband. ‘He found it from a boy using his black magic and beat him,’ said Sonoara.

‘Black magic,’ I nodded.

I stepped over a cesspit outside and walked away. That evening at Mermaid Beach, a raucous group of fellow journalists and aid workers had gathered on a table on the grey sand, ordering spicy lime prawns and drinking beer. Holding court was an enthusiastic American from something called the Institute of the Future in Palo Alto, explaining his plan to erect towers throughout the camp from which to beam Bollywood movies to bored refugees. I asked if he realised the Rohingya were Muslims and there was no way the imams would agree. Then I felt mean – he just wanted to give them something to do in a place where there was nothing to do and nowhere to go, just wait and remember.

I was sitting next to Hannah Beech, a New York Times journalist whose work I greatly admired. She asked about my day so I recounted the story of the rape victim and the phone. She told me that she had spent the day with three unaccompanied children she had met and their uncle in order to write a profile. She had gradually become suspicious that something didn’t stack up. It turned out they were not unaccompanied at all but the children of the man who had presented himself as the kindly uncle.

We were both annoyed. But we also wondered how desperate must people be to do such things or make up such stories. Or were they so traumatised they didn’t know what was real anymore? The refugee commissioner had told me some Rohingyas were so disoriented that they were confusing antiseptic liquids for milk and drinking them. And what of us, the beast we were encouraging them to feed, endlessly looking to devour ever more horrific accounts. Were we really any different to that perhaps apocryphal TV reporter who shouted ‘Anyone here been raped and speaks English?’ to a planeload of Belgian nuns who had just been rescued from a siege in eastern Congo?

* Willem van Schendel (ed.), Francis Buchanan in Southeast Bengal (1798): His Journey to Chittagong, the Chittagong Hill Tracts, Noakhali and Comilla (Dhaka: Dhaka University Press, 1992).

† Dr Maung Zarni and Alice Cowley in Pacific Rim Law & Policy Journal, University of Washington, June 2014.

‡ Samantha Power, The Education of an Idealist (London: William Collins, 2019), pp. 315–16.

§ Flash Report of OCHCR mission to Bangladesh, 3 February 2017.

¶ Report of Independent International Fact-Finding Mission on Myanmar, 16 September 2019.

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