Rape at Syrian intelligence HQ

Sexual violence in Syria leaves women living in fear. Human rights organisations have begun to detail some of the horrific stories of sexual abuse in the war-torn country. One Syrian woman, Nour, has a particularly terrifying story. Every day, for more than 60 days, she -- and other prisoners -- were systematically raped in the Palestinian branch of Syrian military intelligence in Damascus. Kept in a cell with iron bars across the door, Nour and two other women were left naked, chained to each corner of the tiny room. Two girls died in the cell, she says. Nour was stripped and handcuffed to the wall on arrival. "Our jailers had visitors in the prison who they played cards with. They would say in front of us: 'If you want sex, there are girls here,'" Nour says. Nour wrings her hands as she speaks, the only sign of distress cutting through her precise and composed memories of an ordeal she endured between December 2011 and February 2012. "This war has taken me from one world to another life," she says. "We have a saying that the wheel of life turns. But the wheel turned over on me. I used to have a normal life." Nour was arrested for the so-called crime of taking pictures of protesters in Homs one afternoon in November 2011, indulging a passion for photography. The authorities saw it differently. Another woman, Huda, tells a similar story. In the first week of March 2012, her home in Bab al-Sabaa was hit by a missile and looted. She ran out of the house with her children, taking cover from snipers. There Huda saw a line of 10 to 15 women walking in front of government tanks marked with Bashar al-Assad's name. "They (regime soldiers) raped them in front of the tanks," Huda remembers. "They made the women walk in front of the tanks first to use them as shields. They passed a resistance area and then stripped them and raped them and killed them." Nour believes she will never see her torturers serve time for their crimes. Sometimes the guards even used rats as rape instruments, Nour admits. "They would bring a rat tied with a string and put it, well, you-know-where," she says. "They did this to me too. One of the girls they did it to bled so badly that she died." And she's not free yet - the prison guards hound her still. Nour moves house every few months after a man from the Damascus detention centre found her new address in Amman and has sent heavies round to threaten her. Nour believes the intelligence guards are angry after one man from the detention centre set her free in February 2012 while everyone else was sent to quell demonstrations across Damascus. "He said as we drove away: 'I was forced to do this. I did not want to,'" Nour remembers. "I think he felt remorse because he was a rapist like the others."  "I stayed in his house in Deraa for three days with his wife and mother," she says, referring to the Syrian town close to the border with Jordan. "A Bedouin family then smuggled me to Jordan." Mohamed Abo Hilal, a Damascus psychiatrist who fled to Amman after being detained by Syrian authorities and tortured last year, treats 200 patients in two clinics he runs with a team of counsellors. Their traumas are severe but none has admitted personal experiences of rape, he says, although plenty say their neighbours or friends experienced sexual violence. Abo Hilal's wife, surgeon Hala al-Ghawi, treats patients at the Zaatari camp and says two women told her they had been raped but later recanted their stories. "One of the women was very emotional and crying to me," says al Ghawi. "But the next day, she said it did not happen. She was scared if her husband or brothers found out her husband would divorce her and her brothers would kill her after the divorce." Women trying to help rape victims are also at risk. Maimona Sayed, a Syrian citizen, opened a small shelter where she has helped 15 women, including Nour, receive medical treatment and counselling. Her network of friends and relatives in Syria sent the victims to her. Sayed, whose husband taught judo to the bodyguards of Jordan's King Abdullah, received death threats after images of the outside of the shelter were broadcast on a major Arab satellite channel. Her son now drives her to every appointment. But she is not afraid, she says. Sayed estimates at least 4,000 women and girls have been raped by government forces, based on figures from her contacts with anti-regime activists across Syria. Nour, after escaping from Damascus, now lives with three young orphaned girls and their aunt. The charitable Jordanian landlady allows them to pay the rent late. Her medical treatment was paid for by Jordanian and Saudi benefactors who offered to marry her but she refused. "I am destroyed inside," she says. "I will never marry again." But a single woman living alone is an object of scorn, she admits. "When I was in prison with the other women we dreamed that we would leave and go back to our houses and be understood and sympathised with," she says. "But when I see how I have been treated I wish I had died in that prison."