Marie Colvin in the Sunday Times reports on the use of rape as a weapon by Gadaffi's forces – We had our orders: rape all the sisters [£].
The young Libyan soldier showed almost no emotion as he described how his unit had raped four sisters, the youngest about 16, after breaking into a home in the besieged port of Misrata.
“My officer sent three of us up to the roof to guard the house while they tied up the father and mother and took the girls to two rooms, two each to a room,” said Walid Abu Bakr, 17.
“My two officers and the others raped the girls first,” he recalled in a monotone, still dressed in the camouflage uniform he was wearing when he surrendered 12 days ago.
“They were playing music. They called me down and ordered me to rape one of the girls.” […]
Misrata officials said the ruthless assaults by Abu Bakr and his unit had been repeated across the city. Gadaffi’s soldiers, they said, had engaged in an orgy of rapes that mirrored their destruction of the city’s homes and buildings.
Nothing would have prepared the women of Misrata, or their families, for the ferocity of the onslaught that occurred when they were trapped amid the fighting, mostly in districts that were controlled by Gadaffi’s forces for two months.
The brutality emerged only when the rebels broke through loyalist lines and chased Gadaffi’s troops beyond the city limits. In their wake, they found horror stories.
Doctors at Hekma hospital found that some of Gadaffi’s soldiers had recorded video footage of rapes on their mobile phones. “They made the girls identify themselves to the camera and show their faces. Then they raped them,” one doctor said. The phones were found on loyalists who had been wounded or killed.
“In one of the videos, there’s a woman. She’s moaning, ‘Oh no, no, the sixth one, God help me,’ ” said one doctor.
A video seen by The Sunday Times showed a group of Gadaffi’s soldiers in camouflage uniform breaking down a door and confronting a frightened family — a man, a woman, five girls whose ages ranged from about five to early 20s, and a boy aged about 7. The soldiers, shouting and waving their guns, stripped the four older girls in front of the family and took them into the next room, where they raped them. The girls cried for mercy, calling on Allah. A soldier at one point yells: “Gadaffi is our Allah.” The video was found on the phone of a loyalist soldier….
The stories emerging from Misrata mirrored the earlier charges of Iman al-Obeidi, 28, who burst into a Tripoli hotel in March claiming to have been gang-raped by Gadaffi loyalists.
So horrified is Misrata by its rapes that young rebel soldiers have offered to marry the victims, who face ostracism in this deeply traditional society.
“The rebels feel guilty that they did not arrive in time to save these families from Gadaffi’s men,” said Dr Ismael Fortia, an obstetrician who estimates that up to 1,000 women may have been raped.
Hardly any of those attacked have come forward because a raped woman is regarded as virtually unmarriageable if she is single, or a shame to her family if she is married.
Mick Hartley 
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