Rape of Women in War

1.1 Display of victory

During sexual intercourse, men penetrate women's bodies, and at their climax, they ejaculate their seminal fluid inside them. That is to say, sexual intercourse essentially takes place within the women's bodies. While for men these moments provided only pure pleasure for hundreds of thousands of years and lasted merely a few minutes on average, women's bodies were effectively sacrificed. Since contraceptives—which were only invented in the 20th century—did not exist and abortions were not possible, they risked pregnancy every time, leading to the swelling of their bodies and turning them, in effect, into incubators. In the absence of laws protecting women, men could also abandon them while pregnant and continue with their daily lives, while the women could not even prove who the father was, as paternity tests did not exist. They bore the physical consequences alone for many long months, up to the point of risking death during childbirth, since cesarean sections and other life-saving medical procedures did not exist, nor did epidurals to alleviate the severe pain. Therefore, from time immemorial, sexual intercourse has been considered inherently and distinctly asymmetrical, wherein men are depicted as invading the women's bodies, breaching and conquering them, while women are seen as submitting to them—and this is the perception regarding consensual sex, let alone forced sex.

Thus, historically, sexual relations were essentially perceived as symbolic relations between conqueror and conquered, dominator and dominated, between the one with the upper hand and the one submitting to him, much like on the battlefield. It is therefore no wonder that the rape of the defeated's wives and daughters in wars was considered from time immemorial as the ultimate, indisputable display of victory for the conquerors, through which they illustrated to themselves the might of their army, their strength, their superiority, and their dominance, while the bodies of the unfortunate women simulated, in their amused eyes, the territory of the defeated being conquered by them. Their rape was quite literally a metonymic celebration of the territorial conquest. For what could be a more decisive and impressive proof of the defeated's absolute surrender than a spectacle in which their wives and daughters are seen spreading their legs for the victors—a physical posture burned into consciousness as the definitive symbol of absolute submission. Therefore, these spectacles, by their very nature, were intentionally held in public. In many cases, the women and girls were first dragged and gathered together (for example, in the center of the village), where they were stripped and violently forced to the ground, side by side, while opposite them stood the local male residents, including their own family members, who were forced at gunpoint to watch them being raped by the victors time and again in their display of triumph. Daughters were raped before their fathers' eyes, and mothers were raped before their children's eyes.

The spectacle sometimes lasted for many long hours, until they had been raped by all the combatants present at the scene. After the spectacle concluded, the unfortunate women were in many cases marched naked by the combatants who had raped them, in front of the crowd, so that everyone could see their conquered and defeated bodies, the results of the battle. Afterward, the combatants frequently slaughtered them, inserted into their vaginas objects that simulated, to their amused eyes, the male sexual organ—such as rods, machetes, bayonets, sharpened sticks, knives, and other objects—and left them lying in the field as exhibits of the territorial conquest. Because of the perception that sexual relations are asymmetrical, you will not find a single reverse documentation in the history of warfare where a woman forced a male captive to have sexual relations with her as a display of victory over him, even if you comb through all of history with a fine-tooth comb.

1.2 Dehumanization

One of the primary goals of the victors was to strip the defeated of their humanity (dehumanization) and present them in the collective consciousness as non-human, as beasts, and even as objects, in order to inflict crippling demoralization among them, undermine belief in their cultural and religious traditions and their leaders, collapse their ethnic and familial foundations, disrupt their ties to the region, and even eliminate their will to continue living, thereby bringing about their surrender, dismantling, fragmentation, destruction, displacement, and damaging their chances of rebuilding, to ensure that even survivors who managed to escape would never return to their lands. The practice was even simpler toward enemies with a foreign appearance, as it was easier to present them as an inferior race. While men were dehumanized through various practices, women were almost always dehumanized through rape—a practice specifically targeted at them and considered the ultimate means of degradation, and it is no wonder, for nothing is more degrading than being raped. From time immemorial, this has been considered the absolute degradation of a human being: the unfortunate women are stripped naked, and their most private parts are exposed. Afterward, the perpetrators lie on their naked bodies and essentially masturbate inside their internal organs, without any consideration for their desires, feelings, and thoughts, and in total disregard of their pleas, groans, and whimpers. They do not release the unfortunate women until they experience the climax of their pleasure and force them to receive the discharge that is consequently emitted from their testicles and seminal vesicles, as if their bodies were nothing more than a vessel devoid of intellect and consciousness.

The dehumanization endured by the unfortunate women raped in wars had an incalculably more devastating impact than criminal rape, because they were usually not raped in private quarters or a side alley far from any eye, but publicly before the eyes of many. Nor were they raped alone, but together with the female members of their family and community, side by side, while hearing each other screaming and whimpering to no avail, surrounded by the mutilated corpses of their family and community members, which led to their utter helplessness and despair. They were also usually not raped just once, but repeatedly by many men, sometimes tens or even hundreds of men, each in his turn. And as if that were not enough, they were not raped by men considered criminals, but by men considered heroes and objects of admiration, who wore official uniforms in the service and mission of the new sovereign in the region. They were, in fact, raped by them in a legal and institutionalized manner, according to the law and morality of the new regime, in whose eyes this was their natural and justified punishment. Therefore, after being raped, they had no one to complain to, and those who raped them not only did not flee the scene, but remained standing composedly over their desecrated bodies, and frequently even marched them naked so everyone could see that they had raped them.

With the intention of presenting the defeated group not as a human collective but as a herd of beasts, the combatants sometimes even forced the men (including leaders and religious clerics), at gunpoint and under torture, to rape the women of their own families and their own people themselves. Most of them could not withstand the infernal torture and raped them. There are horrifying accounts of fathers forced to rape their daughters, brothers forced to rape their sisters, and sons forced to rape their mothers, to the laughter of the combatants, and before the eyes of the rest of the family and community members who were forced to watch. In many cases, even after the unfortunate women breathed their last, the combatants continued to rape their corpses, for in their eyes, their death held no significance, serving as a direct continuation of the dehumanization that cast them as objects. After the combatants raped them, they often slaughtered those who remained alive as well, leaving no trace of their humanity even in their remains. Wartime rape scenes are horrifying sights that recurred in systematic patterns: the bodies of the unfortunate raped women were found lying side by side in degrading postures, with lower limbs spread apart and with vaginas exposed and smeared with seminal fluids.

1.3 Punishment and deterrence

Rape has been considered since time immemorial as the optimal means of punishment and deterrence against women, even in routine times, due to the absolute degradation they endure in those moments, which is designed to illustrate to them on their own flesh the superiority of men over them, as well as their place, their subordination, and their inferiority. Until the 19th century, legal systems worldwide virtually permitted men to rape their wives as a means of punishment and deterrence within the institution of marriage. Wars have been considered since time immemorial as struggles between men, while women were considered merely secondary and marginal, since for hundreds of thousands of years they were not even regarded as independent human beings, but rather as the property of men. Their coveted bodily resource was initially considered the legal property of their fathers, and after they were sold into marriage, the legal property of their husbands. Therefore, in wars, combatants raped them to essentially exact revenge primarily on their men (their family and community members) and to punish and deter them. In other words, although it was upon their flesh that the combatants unleashed their merciless cruelty, the women were usually just indirect victims to them—״property that they destroyed״—while their primary goal was to harm the property owners.

It is no wonder that the rape of men's wives and daughters was considered an ultimate means of punishment and deterrence against them, for across all cultures throughout history, and still in many cultures in contemporary history, particularly in patriarchal societies, men's honor is directly influenced by the modesty of the sexuality of the women and girls in their families, as the covering of their bodies—which are perceived as shameful in their eyes (from head to toe)—and their virginity are practically core values for them. Therefore, this means was considered an absolute humiliation for them and a trampling of their honor and status as adequate protectors, rendering it the most formidable and effective weapon of war to control the defeated population, avenge them, punish them, deter them, terrorize them, and make them submissive. Women were usually gang-raped intentionally before the eyes of their family members (including in interrogation rooms) to break them, extract information from them, and force them to cooperate. It is not without reason that the male sexual organ in warfare has been described since time immemorial as an exceptionally effective strategic weapon of war that is always within the combatants' reach and free of charge, unlike bullets and bombs.

1.4 War prizes

Until the 19th century, military circles around the world supported the notion that in warfare, the entire defeated population (including women and children) constitutes the enemy, and therefore the conquerors possess rights of conquest over it, including the right to enjoy the enticing bodily resource of its attractive women and daughters. Men have essentially fought one another over the resource of women's bodies since the dawn of history, even in routine times. The reason (aside from its primary biological role in reproduction) is that in their eyes, it is a highly enticing resource that provides them with one of the greatest pleasures in this world. Therefore, for commanders and generals, this accessible and cost-free bodily resource was practically the ultimate reward they could bestow upon their combatants after their victory in battle, in order to maintain their loyalty, lift their spirits, raise their morale, and instill motivation in them ahead of continued fighting. It also served as an incentive for men to enlist in armies and yearn to conquer as many settlements as possible. Their bodily resource was effectively the combatants' wages and a token of appreciation for their excellence in battle, and sometimes it was even the primary reward promised to them. The battle cry for centuries was To the victor go the spoils!, and the women were the spoils. They were considered the war prizes of the victors, and their bodily resource was their victory trophy. Consequently, after subduing the men and annihilating them, armies routinely declared a period during which combatants were permitted to celebrate their victory upon the bodies of the defeated's wives and daughters.

The combatants usually traversed immense distances through blood, fire, and death, and spent long periods in a harsh male environment, far from their wives and the women of their own people; thus, when young women and girls fell into their hands, they were like prey to packs of starving wolves. Since the dawn of history, the perception was that they could not be expected to restrain themselves and refrain from satisfying their raging lust. This was considered natural, virtually inevitable, and effectively the way of the world. And it is no wonder, for men since time immemorial enjoyed raping even the women of their own people and even their own wives (the mothers of their children) within the institution of marriage, which permitted the practice worldwide. Therefore, one can only imagine the pure sadistic pleasure they experienced when they managed to rape the wives and daughters of their enemies. In historical writings, combatants are documented as virtually describing this as one of the greatest pleasures men can experience. The victims were usually young women and girls (including pregnant women), particularly the attractive ones whose bodily resource was deemed enticing, but often also young girls and even elderly women around the age of 80, whether due to low supply or their own dark preference. In cases where supply was less than demand, each of them was usually raped repeatedly by many combatants who gathered around her and excitedly awaited their turn. The combatants usually raped them with extreme brutality to further intensify their thrill.

Even in cases where commanders ordered the annihilation of the entire population, while they destroyed the men immediately, they often left the women alive for a limited time in order to first seize the opportunity to enjoy their enticing bodily resource before its destruction, while simultaneously savoring their agony during their final moments alive. Therefore, in many cases, women were raped right on the brink of death pits at execution sites, moments before they were annihilated. After the combatants achieved satisfaction, they often made it a practice to specifically sever the breasts from the bodies of the women they had raped to amuse themselves with them, due to their perception as organs of pleasure intended for men. Frequently, combatants also raped the corpses of women to take pleasure in the expressions of death remaining on their faces and to enjoy the absolute degradation of even the remnants that left of them. For those with naturally psychopathic and sadistic tendencies, war zones are undoubtedly the ultimate arenas to fulfill themselves.

1.5 Genome propagation

Commanders and generals permitted their combatants and even encouraged them to rape the wives and daughters of the defeated to forcibly impregnate them as a final expression of their indisputable victory over them. It is no wonder, for if the ultimate triumph in the struggle for existence is the expansion of the genome, what victory could be more impressive than one where the genome conquers the enemy's ova? Due to the primary biological role of women in reproduction, the conquerors who managed to rape them effectively forced their bodies to replicate their own population, culture, and religion, and in a cruel irony, to birth the next generation of their own combatants—particularly in patrilineal societies where it is believed that offspring inherit their ethnicity from their father. This practice of groups of men during campaigns of conquest capturing local women and raping them was a phenomenon so pervasive that it led to changes in the composition of the global population: less stability in human Y-chromosome DNA haplogroups, which are inherited from father to son, compared to human mitochondrial DNA haplogroups, which are inherited from a mother to her children.

Pregnant women who were captured often first underwent forced abortions through kicks aimed at their abdomens and the insertion of sharp instruments into their vaginas, in order to destroy the fetuses belonging to the defeated men and clear their wombs for re-impregnation by the victorious men. Until the 20th century, emergency contraceptive pills and safe abortions were neither possible nor permitted for millions of years, and in war zones throughout contemporary history, they are also usually unavailable. Therefore, even the survivors who were released immediately after being raped could not terminate the pregnancy, and nine months later, they gave birth to the offspring of the combatants who had raped them, effectively propagating their genome through their own bodies. In other cases, the objective was the exact opposite: to ensure they would no longer propagate the genome of the group to which they belonged. Consequently, after the combatants raped them, they forcibly inserted sharp objects into their vaginas, completely mutilating their reproductive organs.

1.6 Brotherhood of warriors

Armies have been considered since time immemorial as the most exclusive club in the world, intended for men only. During battles, they required firepower and armor against their male adversaries, a factor that led to a mutual recognition of their might and courage and positioned them as equal rivals. Masculinity in the military, the power of the formidable weapon resting exclusively in their hands, the spiritual connection to it, the discipline to orders given and received, and the simple logic of the hierarchical command, positioned them as the superior sex and the combatants in the struggle for existence. Therefore, after the battles, when they turned their attention to dealing with the women who had been left behind in the rear with the children, and who by nature are immeasurably physically weaker than them, the optimal conditions and the perfect psychological background were effectively in place to feel contempt and derision toward them and to view them as inferior and marginal. And indeed, what more distilled way to illustrate this to them than to rape them? It is this dichotomy that led to words describing women and female sexual organs, such as nekva (female) or Pussy, becoming entrenched in male discourse as derogatory expressions for a person perceived in their eyes as weak and cowardly.

Wartime rape of women has also served since time immemorial as a primary tool for forging cohesive military groups. Combatants gang-raped captive women with the encouragement of their commanders to establish the bond between them and to create a sense of cohesion and loyalty within the units, particularly when they were forcibly conscripted into the war. Unlike routine times when men compete among themselves for women and are possessive of them, they passed them from hand to hand, thereby demonstrating their brotherhood of warriors to one another. In many armies that also conscripted young boys, commanders frequently ordered them to watch the adult combatants gang-raping a female captive and then to rape her themselves before their eyes in a rite of passage. This was done so they could prove their masculinity, which symbolizes dominance and control, as well as their yearning to penetrate, conquer, subdue, and defeat, and their cruelty even toward the helpless—traits that armies considered necessary on the battlefield—while simultaneously establishing their status and reputation.

1.7 Institutionalization of rape

The wives and daughters of the defeated were usually raped by the victors not only on the battlefields. Military and civil authorities routinely institutionalized their rape in order to achieve maximum exploitation of their coveted bodily resource, thereby maintaining the combatants' loyalty over time. The second objective was to ensure that the combatants raped women who underwent regular medical examinations, preventing their bodies from transmitting diseases and infections from warrior to warrior, thereby reducing the spread of venereal diseases and preserving the army's fitness. The third objective was to use their bodily resource as a reproductive tool. The fourth objective was to generate profits from it. They were held along the front lines within rape camps or rape stations, which were often mockingly referred to as brothels. They were not considered human, but rather military supplies, and were treated like looted cattle. Women's wings in detention facilities frequently functioned as rape stations as well, including for police officers and guards. Groups of combatants visited them regularly and the lines were long, particularly upon their return from battles. Arriving there, they selected those they desired to rape according to their taste, and raped them in designated rooms. Desperate screams of raped women were heard throughout these detention facilities routinely. Sometimes combatants were also permitted to loan them out to bases and other locations. Others were transported to rape stations in the rear, where they were raped regularly by conscripted men and by combatants before their departure to the front and upon their return from it.

In many wars, combatants were permitted to return to their homes with the female captives and turn them into their sex slaves or individually force them into pimping to derive permanent profits from their bodily resource as well. Others were sent to markets and sold as sex slaves, or forced into brothels in the rear and enslaved as prostitutes. Another practice was their forced marriage to combatants and civilians so they could rape them regularly in a manner permitted by the accepted laws and traditions of their communities. In historical records, it was sometimes not explicitly mentioned that the marriages were forced, since history has been written since time immemorial by the victors; however, what mentally stable woman would consent of her own free will to marry a man who annihilated her entire family and destroyed her home? The unfortunate women were essentially not considered human and had no rights. They were considered the chattel of the defeated and were plundered along with the cattle. They were kept alive only to make use of their coveted bodily resource, like livestock for farm owners. Whenever their captors desired to rape them, not only did they lack the right to refuse, they were ordered to be raped by them in absolute submission. Those who dared to resist, or even merely bore an expression of non-acceptance of their fate on their faces, were frequently beaten and even slaughtered. Captives who became pregnant sometimes underwent forced abortions to prevent them from giving birth to inferior offspring like themselves, thereby also ensuring continuous and prolonged use of their bodily resource.

Many female captives ended their lives in captivity and often after a short time, as a result of the brutal and frequent rape they endured. After wars ended, and particularly major wars, the proportion of men in the defeated population was greatly reduced, primarily the young and the strong. For the most part, there remained mainly defenseless women, children, and elderly whose fate was entirely at the mercy of their enemy. Consequently, many of the survivors who were not de facto held in captivity were raped regularly in their homes, in their villages, and in the fields during raids and in interrogation rooms, by the leaders, officials, soldiers, police officers, and civilians of the new regime. The unfortunate women had no one to complain to because they were raped with the support and even encouragement of the regime, which usually continued to view them as an enemy and even as an inferior sub-race destined to serve them. Concurrently, in reverse cases where men from the defeated population dared to engage in relations with the wives and daughters of the victors, most regimes took a very harsh line against them to preserve their honor and racial purity, based on the perception that sexual relations are asymmetrical.

1.8 Severe consequences

In many cases, women and girls residing in areas poised to fall into enemy hands put an end to their lives or were even put to death by their own family members ahead of time, to spare them their inevitable fate. Sometimes they were even dressed in male attire and the hair on their heads was shaved so that their bodies would appear less attractive. Those who were not annihilated after being raped in many cases were left with severe disabilities as a result of the frequent and brutal rape they endured. In many instances, they were left with broken limbs, broken pelvises, and fractures in their skulls that caused impairments in their vision and hearing. Some were left with gynecological complications such as torn vaginas and punctures between them and their adjacent colon and urinary bladder (fistulas), which cause intense pain, chronic leakage of urine and feces from them, bowel obstruction, and even an inability to stand or walk as a result of nerve damage. Many contracted sexually transmitted diseases and infections, such as syphilis, gonorrhea, and the human immunodeficiency virus (HIV), which causes AIDS. Many survivors became pregnant and gave birth to the offspring of the men who had raped them, with all the devastating psychological ramifications entailed. Young girls who became pregnant suffered from dystocia (obstructed labor) and fistulas, and they frequently died because their pelvises and birth canals had not yet developed sufficiently to accommodate a baby's head.

The psychological injuries of the victims are so profound, destructive, and lethal that rape is virtually considered the murder of the soul. The long-term injuries include prolonged trauma, post-traumatic stress disorder (PTSD), sleep disorders, eating disorders, somatic disorders, dysphoria, anxiety, nightmares, multiple somatoform disorders, flashbacks, fears, helplessness, sadness, disorientation, despair, panic attacks, stress, paranoia, depression, insomnia, and suicidal ideation. Many survivors began to develop self-hatred toward their female bodies, which they began to view as inherently soiled and shameful. Some put an end to their lives as soon as they could because death was preferable to them. In many cultures, they were even expected to put an end to their lives to erase any trace of the humiliation, while those who dared to continue living were frequently ostracized, called derogatory names such as prostitutes, and even slaughtered. Most survivors remained silent and kept what they went through as a dirty secret due to fear, disgust, and shame.

Many survivors were left with psychosocial problems, isolation, and difficulty maintaining relationships with men. In many cultures, they were considered defiled and unworthy of marriage in the eyes of men, because their bodily resource was already deemed used and dirty merchandise. Those who were married were beaten and raped by their husbands as well, or abandoned by them and rejected by their family and community members, with the support of government officials who also viewed them as a symbol of filth. Therefore, most survivors remained silent. They usually were left to live in abject poverty, mainly in rural areas and without treatment, because medical facilities such as hospitals and clinics were destroyed or partially destroyed in the war, and due to the loss of expertise of the medical personnel who were annihilated or fled the region, as well as a faulty or inadequate supply of essential resources such as running water, electricity, and medications. The condition of survivors who were on the margins of society to begin with, living in chronic poverty and in rural areas, was critical.

1.9 Male victims

Almost all the victims raped in wars waged throughout history were women and girls. The rape of men is rare, even though it may be perceived as even more humiliating, because the perpetrators thereby erase their status in society as men by turning them from conquerors into conquered, effectively treating them as they treat females, in their words, and in the eyes of men, there is no greater humiliation than this. The first reason that, despite this, in almost all cases perpetrators raped only women and girls is that the vast majority of them were heterosexual men. The second reason is that women are physically weaker, making it easier to rape them with bare hands. The third reason is the fear that the perpetrators might mistakenly be suspected of homosexuality, something considered by many men to be a taboo and a great insult. Therefore, in cases of male captives, objects were usually inserted into their bodies instead of a sexual organ, or they were forced at gunpoint to rape one another. There are many horrifying records of men in captivity forced under torture to rape one another before the amused eyes of the combatants. The rape of young boys and male adolescents in warfare, on the other hand, was more frequent; however, even then, their undeveloped bodies simulated women's bodies in the eyes of the perpetrators in places where women were unavailable, such as in detention facilities, while they even mocked them for being their females.

1.10 Rape as punishment in routine times

Rape as a means of punishment and deterrence is a practice that has effectively existed not only in wars but also in routine times and even within the institution of marriage, which permitted the custom worldwide until the 20th century. That is to say, when wars broke out and men were sent to the battlefields, it was already deeply embedded in their consciousness and perceived as an unquestionable social norm. This sub-section is a mandatory introduction to understanding the history of the phenomenon that will be reviewed in Chapter 2, for if men routinely raped the women of their own people as a means of punishment and deterrence, one can only imagine the merciless cruelty they demonstrated toward the wives and daughters of their enemies who fell into their hands. The events to be reviewed are merely the tip of the iceberg of a widespread phenomenon, to the documentation of which many thick volumes could be dedicated.

In January 1938, for instance, the General Secretary of the Communist Party of the Soviet Union, Joseph Stalin, determined that Politburo member Stanislav Vikentyevich Kosior is not doing a good job, and on May 3, he was arrested and stripped of all party positions. He was interrogated by Boris Rodos, a highly notorious torturer employed by the Soviet Ministry of Internal Affairs and Secret Police. Kosior was interrogated for 14 hours at a time and endured brutal torture; hence, it was decided to bring his 16-year-old daughter, Tamara, into the room and rape her before his eyes. Kosior, who was forced to watch his daughter being raped by them, broke and was taken to Stalin’s office, where the leader of the Communist Party in Ukraine, Grigory Petrovsky, was also present. He was seated broken on a chair and agreed to confess that he was a Polish spy so that they would be satisfied and not rape his daughter again. After he confessed, Stalin declared in triumph: There, you see, Petrovsky, and you didn't believe that Kosior had become a spy. Now do you believe he is an enemy of the people? The girl who was raped before her father's eyes put an end to her life by throwing herself in front of a train. On February 26, 1939, her father was executed. In another case, following World War II, 5,000 women in Norway suspected of collaboration with Germany were arrested and placed into forced labor camps without any legal process, where they were brutally raped for a year and a half to punish them.

In certain cultures, particularly in the Pacific Islands throughout history, men used to rape women and girls as revenge for the actions of their family or tribe members—for example, their father or brothers—sometimes within the framework of tribal warfare. The victims were usually gang-raped by several men. Their rape was termed revenge rape, punitive rape, retaliatory rape, and parallel justice. This punishment is traditional and was even institutionalized throughout history. Within its framework, councils of tribal elders known as Jirgas used to rule that members of the plaintiff’s family, and even members of the tribe, were permitted to legally rape one or more of the women and girls in the family of the man convicted of a serious crime against them—usually his virgin daughters—in order to punish him. The council selected which of his family's daughters would be raped by them and whether it would be a single occurrence or on a regular basis for the rest of her life. If on a regular basis, they are torn from their homes, transferred to the men's homes, and forced into marriage to them so they can rape them according to the law and tradition. Frequently, they become the slaves of the men, who continue to view them as belonging to the family or tribe that harmed them for the entire remainder of their lives. They are systematically raped by them.

In Pakistan, this punishment is called Vani (in Urdu: ونی) and is sometimes also spelled Wani or Wanyi. It is a Punjabi word derived from vanai, which means blood. In various regional languages in the country, it is also called Saak, Sangchatti (in Urdu: سنگ چتی), and Swara (in Urdu: سوارہ). The Law Commission of Pakistan determined that the Sharia principle of Qisas, meaning retaliatory justice, is the rationale behind the tradition. Young, virgin girls of the convicted men, aged 4 to 14, were selected as victims. Sometimes they were raped by them publicly before the eyes of residents or representatives to ensure the ruling was carried out. After they were raped, their family and tribe members frequently expected them to end their lives to erase any trace of the humiliation. This punishment was accepted throughout history and legal until 2011. It remains highly prevalent among tribal and village councils, including councils of five (Panchayats), in the provinces of Punjab, Sindh, Balochistan, Khyber Pakhtunkhwa, and tribal areas, particularly in rural regions where local police often turn a blind eye and enforcement is weak. Already nearly 400 years ago, the tradition is mentioned after two Pashtun tribes in northwestern Pakistan fought one another in a bloody war that led to hundreds of deaths. The Nawab (regional ruler) called for the establishment of a council of elders from both sides to issue rulings. The council ruled that the young girls in the families of the convicted men would be forced into marriage as Qisas to the family members of the plaintiffs.

In 2002, a 12-year-old boy, Abdul Shakoor Tatla of the Tatla tribe, from the village of Meerwala, was accused of having an affair with a woman in her late 20s, Salma Naseen, a member of the wealthier Mastoi Baloch tribe. In revenge, he was taken by three men from her tribe to a sugarcane field, where he was gang-raped by them rectally over and over again. In addition, their tribal council (the Panchayat) ruled that his punishment would be that his 28-year-old sister, Mukhtaran Bibi, would also be forced into marriage to a man from their tribe. However, village residents rejected the ruling and demanded she be raped outside of marriage, just as the woman from their tribe had been degraded outside of marriage. Therefore, the Panchayat council revised its ruling, dictating that the boy's punishment would be that his sister would be gang-raped by several men. In June 2002, she was brought before the council and forcibly dragged to a nearby hut, where she was gang-raped by four men from the tribe, before the eyes of 10 residents who watched her being raped by them to ensure the ruling was implemented. Afterward, she was marched naked through the village so that the residents would see she had been raped by them. In her village, she was expected to end her life.

In 2008, a prolonged and bloody conflict erupted in the western Balochistan province, which began over a dead dog and resulted in the killing of 19 people, including five women. The council ruled that the men's punishment would be that 15 of their young girls, aged 3 to 10, would be forced into marriage to the family members of the plaintiffs. In 2011, the council ruled that the punishment for a man alleged to have committed a crime would be that his 12-year-old daughter would be forced into marriage to an 85-year-old man. In 2012, a dispute broke out between two clans following an accusation of homicide. The man accused of the killing was not found, and therefore the council, led by a member of the Provincial Assembly of Balochistan, Mir Tariq Masuri Bugti, ruled that 13 young girls from the accused's clan, aged 4 to 16, would be forced into marriage to men in the second clan. The sentence was carried out, and Bugti declared that the custom is valid for resolving disputes. In July 2017, a youth was accused of raping a 12-year-old girl in the city of Multan. The Panchayat council ruled that the youth's punishment would be that his 16-year-old sister would also be raped. In June 2020, a youth was accused of having a relationship with the cousin of a 41-year-old married man without his consent. The council ruled that the youth's punishment would be that his 13-year-old sister would be forced into marriage to the plaintiff, becoming his additional wife. Many other cases go unreported.

In Afghanistan, this punishment is called Baad, within the framework of which a female family member of a convicted man is forced into marriage to one of the plaintiff's family members. It takes place in several regions, particularly among the Kuchi people. Young girls from families that have accumulated large debts are also forced into marriage to moneylenders. In 1976, Article 517 of the Penal Code was enacted, dictating that the female family members selected as victims must be under the age of 18 and cannot be widows. The punishment for violating this restriction is up to two years of imprisonment only. No council member or family member is known to have been arrested or prosecuted for this. In Ghana, in certain regions, the punishment for family members who committed an offense is sometimes to grant a virgin woman or girl to the aggrieved family members to serve them as a sex slave. In these cases, she does not receive the status of a wife and is considered a sex slave.

2.1 Wars in Judaism (1500 BC–135)

Around 1500 BC, the religion of Judaism took shape. From then on, the Jews had an intermittent fighting force until the Bar Kokhba revolt, in which they were finally defeated by the Romans in 135. The rape of women in wars is documented and described in the Bible. In Judaism, the question of whether to permit warriors to rape the wives and daughters of enemies during wartime was extensively discussed. According to the method of Maimonides and most of the poskim, a Jewish warrior who desires a captive woman is permitted to rape her right on the battlefield, but only once and thereafter must restrain himself. Rashi represented another major school of thought, according to which a warrior is prohibited from raping a woman during wartime, but he is permitted to capture her and subsequently convert and marry her by force. This school of thought is even much more cruel because the rape is not a one-time event, and it permits the warrior after the war to rape her regularly for the rest of her life. Why the delay of the rape? The accepted answer is that the warrior should know that the release is placed in his pocket like a bread roll in his basket (pat basalo) in the language of Chazal. In such a situation, the prediction is that the warrior will calm down and return to the campaign with much greater motivation. Well, it is not certain that this theory is correct, since in most cases the closer a person is to achieving his goal, the more frustrated he is if it is denied him. On the other hand, our Sages of blessed memory (Chazal) expressed reservations about the rape, but not out of their compassion for the victims, but rather because Jewish warriors come into contact with women who are not Jewish (Gentiles).

The halachic permission to rape the wives and daughters of enemies during wartime was called: the law of a beautiful woman (din eshet yifat toar). The choice of which of the captives was permitted to be raped was very permissive. Warriors were permitted to rape married women and young girls as well. They did not have to be beautiful, even though the Torah describes them as such, whether due to a meager supply or the unique taste of a warrior. Well, this is also logical, since otherwise it would have been required to attach rabbis to the warriors to judge which of the captives were beautiful enough to be kosher to be raped. Maimonides and the other poskim who permitted warriors to rape captives right on the battlefields, in effect permitted them to violate the prohibitions against coming into contact with gentile women and married women, out of the understanding that their desire to rape them was so great that it was uncontrollable. By permitting them to be raped, the Torah effectively threw up its hands in the face of the rampant lust among the warriors who were far from kosher women and came to terms with this reality. In Kabbalah, the view is brought forth that God looked into the Torah and according to it He created the world, meaning the Torah preceded the world, but here the position of the poskim is very permissive. It is the Torah that must adapt itself to the lust of men.

The permission to rape captives during wartime nevertheless contained restrictions: in each area that the warriors conquered, every warrior was permitted to rape only one woman. A warrior who desired to rape 10 women was required to conquer 10 cities. This restriction was also intended to instill motivation in the warriors to conquer more and more territories. The warriors were also prohibited from raping the captives in public so that there would be no appearance of a license to violate the prohibition against coming into contact with gentile women and married women when it is not wartime. Therefore, after a warrior chose the captive he wished to rape, he first had to take her to a place where there was no one but them and rape her there. According to one opinion, warriors are also permitted to rape captives only in wars that ended in a decisive victory, because in wars where the balance of power is equal, there is a concern that the enemy's warriors will also rape their family members, and therefore it is better to avoid entering a cycle of rape and counter-rape.

The permission in Judaism to rape the wives and daughters of the enemy during wartime was valid during periods when the warriors stayed on their land and possessed military power, a situation that in fact did not exist for thousands of years and returned only after the establishment of the State of Israel; however, the practice was not ratified again in halachic rulings. Rabbis even today agree with the principle that permits warriors to rape women during wartime, except that in their eyes this law does not belong to this time because the resource of Arab women's bodies is not tempting enough to Jewish warriors, and therefore it would not bring them pleasure anyway, as long as they are fighting in the Middle East and not, for example, in Scandinavia. Nonetheless, Rabbi Eyal Karim, who served as the Chief Military Rabbi of the Israel Defense Forces, defended the Halacha and stated that as part of maintaining the army's fighting fitness and the soldiers' morale, one may breach the boundaries of modesty and kosherness, so that it is permitted to satisfy the evil inclination by lying with good-looking gentile women against their will, out of consideration for the warriors' hardships and for the success of the collective. The Rabbi of Safed, Rabbi Shmuel Eliyahu, stated: The moral principles standing behind this law definitely belong to our days as well.

2.2 Wars in Islam (610-present)

In the Middle Ages, in the year 610, the religion of Islam was founded. From the time of Muhammad, who was the last prophet, many Muslim states and empires were involved in wars and anti-colonial military campaigns. The concept of jihad has long been associated with the religious duty to fight in order to bring about the spread of the religion. In the name of jihad, Muslim men were permitted to rape the wives and daughters of the infidels (transliterated: kuffār) and turn them into their sex slaves. This was a very widespread phenomenon, and no age limit was set, and they were permitted to rape little girls as well. According to Islamic law, they were permitted to rape them only to enjoy the resource of their bodies, even if they did not desire offspring from them. Every warrior was entitled to take the captives he chose to his home and continue to rape them as he pleased on a permanent basis. Captives who were not distributed to the warriors on the battlefields themselves were transported to markets and sold as sex slaves at symbolic prices to Muslim men. Every man was permitted to hold an unlimited number of captives and permanently rape a different captive each time as he pleased. To each of the warriors who fell in battle and did not get to rape the wives and daughters of the infidels, 72 virgin girls were promised in paradise in their place.

The rape of the wives and daughters of the infidels was considered their absolute humiliation in the eyes of men in Muslim societies. This can be gauged from the obsession with which they, by contrast, zealously guard the modesty of their family members, for example by covering their bodies from head to toe, to ensure that no foreign man will defile them even with his gaze. In light of the permission to rape captives, the number of women and girls taken into captivity far exceeded the number of men and male children taken into Islamic captivity. And while the men were taken for manual labor and warfare, or enslaved in palaces (after being castrated), the women and girls were mostly forced to become the sex slaves of Muslim men (transliterated: Surriyyāt). The resource of their bodies was considered their property, and they were completely subordinate to their authority. They were ordered to be ready to be raped by them in submission at any moment. Those who dared to refuse experienced the heavy hand of their masters and were even slaughtered by them. The trade in captives as sex slaves is known from an early stage in history. The tradition was taken from a pre-Islamic custom that underwent a reform that permitted it only toward non-Muslim captives. The Prophet did not express a shred of mercy toward them. In his eyes, like plundered cattle, they had to forget their destroyed family members and submissively satisfy the lust of their new masters. In the book of Sunan Abu Dawud at number 31:4006, the Prophet even explicitly declared that married Muslim men are also permitted to show the male genitalia to their female slaves.

The Prophet was aware that his believers rape the captives in order to enjoy their bodies, but they feared that as a result they would give birth to inferior offspring like themselves. Therefore, he dealt in great detail with the question of how they should behave when they rape them, when they reached the moment when they felt that they could no longer hold back and were about to ejaculate from pleasure: should they immediately exit their bodies and ejaculate outside so as not to make them pregnant, or should they remain inside their bodies and ejaculate inside them? Well, the Prophet believed that it made no sense that they would not experience the most pleasurable moment for men, and therefore he ruled that he even recommended that they ejaculate inside their bodies. He added that if they became pregnant, that was their fate and his believers were not responsible. As for married captives who might give birth to bastards, he ruled that because they were infidels, their marriage was null and void even if their husbands were still alive, and therefore it was permissible to rape them as if they were single and ejaculate inside their bodies as well. He also urged his married believers to ejaculate inside their bodies, stating that if as a result they gave birth to bastards, it was Allah's will. However, the Prophet ruled that since their bodies were the spoils of war, they were free to decide as they wished whether to ejaculate inside them. His ruling was enshrined in Islamic law in the Muslim world and this practice is called in the hadith al-'Azl (transliterated: Al-׳Azl and in Arabic: العزل).

In the book of Al-Muwatta at number 29:100, it is even emphasized that a man who rapes a slave-girl owned by another man is permitted to exit her body before he ejaculates if he has received his permission. Furthermore, it is emphasized that the practice is permitted only toward female slaves. In the book of Sahih al-Bukhari at numbers 3:34:432, 3:46:718, 5:59:459, 7:62:137, and 9:93:506 (and also in the book of Sahih Muslim at numbers 8:3371, 8:3372, and 8:3373, and in the book of Al-Muwatta at number 29:95), the Prophet's companion, Abu Sa'id al-Khudri, narrated that they went out with the Prophet to battle against Banu al-Mustaliq and received excellent Arab captives, in his words, as spoils of war. He testified that their bodies tempted them, and because they had not enjoyed women's bodies for a long time and were far from their wives, they were full of lust and could not restrain themselves, but at the same time, they also demanded ransom for them. Therefore, every time they rape them, they exited their bodies before they ejaculated. Afterward, they said to themselves that the Prophet was among them, so why should they not ask him about the practice. The Prophet answered them in wonder: Do you really do that (exit their bodies before you ejaculate)? He repeated this question three times and added, It is better for you not to do so, but they were permitted to act as they pleased, and if they became pregnant as a result, that was what was decreed for them.

At number 8:77:600, it is narrated about a man from the Ansar (the residents of the city of Yathrib who supported the Prophet) who came to the Prophet and told him: We get captive-girls and we love property, in his words. He asked him what his opinion was about the fact that while they raped them, they exited their bodies before they ejaculated. The Prophet replied in wonder: Do you do that (exit their bodies before you ejaculate)? It is better for you not to do that. He added that if they became pregnant as a result, that was what was decreed for them. In the book of Sunan Abu Dawud at number 11:2166, it is narrated about a man who came to the Prophet and said to him: Messenger of Allah, I have a slave-girl and I remove the penis from her (every time I am about to ejaculate). I do not like her becoming pregnant. He explained that he raped her just as men intend by that, in his words, meaning only to enjoy her body while having no other interest in her besides that. The Prophet replied to him that he was permitted to exit her body before he ejaculated, but if she nevertheless became pregnant, that was what was decreed for her.

In the book of Sahih Muslim at numbers 8:3377, 8:3378, and 8:3379, the practice was mentioned in the presence of the Prophet, who said: Why do you act thus (exit their bodies before you ejaculate)? They replied to him that there is, for example, a man who has a slave-girl and he rapes her, but he does not desire that she consequently become pregnant and become the mother of his children. The Prophet rebuked them and said that there is no wrong in his ejaculating inside her body, and if she becomes pregnant, that is what was decreed for her. At numbers 8:3383 and 8:3384, it is narrated about a man who came to the Prophet and told him that he has a slave-girl who is his servant and he rapes her, but he does not desire that she consequently become pregnant. The Prophet replied to him that he is permitted to exit her body before he ejaculates if that is his wish, but what was decreed for her will come upon her. After some time, the man returned to him and told him that the girl became pregnant after he ejaculated inside her body. The Prophet replied to him: I told you, what was decreed for her will come upon her.

In the book of Al-Muwatta at number 29:99, it is narrated about a man from Yemen named Ibn Fahd, who approached the Prophet's companions, Zayd ibn Thabit and Al-Hajjaj ibn 'Amr ibn Ghaziyah. He told them that he has slave-girls in his possession and some of them he rapes only to enjoy the resource of their bodies, and he does not desire that they consequently give birth to his children; therefore, he asked if he is permitted, every time he rapes them, to exit their bodies before he ejaculates. Al-Hajjaj ibn 'Amr replied to him: She is your field; if you wish, water it (ejaculate inside her body), and if you wish, leave it thirsty. Ibn Thabit agreed with him. At number 29:100, it is narrated that the Prophet's cousin, Abdullah ibn Abbas, was asked about the practice. Ibn Abbas, who himself used to rape his slave-girl and exit her body before he ejaculated, chose to admit it but thought there was no better way to prove it than through the direct testimony of the girl. He called her and ordered her to tell it herself. The girl was ashamed to testify, and he finally said to them: It is fine, I do it myself.

The Quran (in Surah 4, verse 25) even recommends that men who do not have the means to marry regular Muslim women should marry captives who were forcibly converted to Islam, and it even permits married men to purchase captives and rape them on a permanent basis alongside marriage. This was actually the only permission in Islam that allowed men to have sexual contact with women outside of marriage. The law even permitted men to pimp them out as prostitutes within a legal and accepted practice in the Islamic world, through which the captives were sold by them for a limited period of time in markets for selling sex slaves. After they were raped by the buyers a few times, over the course of a day or two, they were returned to the sellers under the pretext of supposed dissatisfaction with them. In many Muslim societies, captives were raped on a permanent basis not only by their masters, but by all members of the household, and it was even permitted for relatives, neighbors, and other guests to rape them in one of the bedrooms in the house as part of hospitality customs. The most beautiful were intended primarily for members of the upper class. Those who were transported to palaces were kept in the harem (a secluded wing in palaces intended for the residence of women and girls), which was sometimes built to contain thousands of sex slaves at the same time. They were raped on a permanent basis by the rulers themselves, and many of them were also raped by their family members, courtiers and nobility, military personnel, commanders, and guests.

Sex slaves were also in constant danger of being raped later by rival factions when they reconquered the areas where they were held. Frequently, Muslim women and girls were also raped by conquerors in the wars of Islam due to their affiliation with a community that was considered not Muslim enough. The Almohads, for example, viewed those who did not support Almohadism as infidels, and therefore they saw turning their wives and daughters into their sex slaves as a legitimate act. In the 12th century, during the conquest of the Almoravid Empire, Muslim men who did not support Almohadism were annihilated by them, while women and girls were forced to become their sex slaves. Two women were captured by the founder of Almohadism himself, Abd al-Mu'min, when he conquered the fortress of Day, and they were forced to become his sex slaves. One of them, after she was raped by him, became pregnant and gave birth to his son, Abu Sa'id Uthman. While the law permitted Muslim men to rape non-Muslim women, Muslim women were prohibited from having sexual relations with non-Muslim men. In Islamic culture, there is no greater disgrace than a female family member who was raped, and therefore even captives who were eventually released were frequently slaughtered by their relatives to erase any trace of the humiliation.

2.2.1 The Battle of Khaybar (628)

In March 628, the army of the Prophet Muhammad began to march toward the Khaybar oasis in order to conquer it. The area is located about 150 kilometers northwest of the city of Medina and was home to a large community of Jewish tribes. The battle is called the Battle of Khaybar (Arabic: غَزْوَة خَيْבَر). It was an armed conflict between the early Muslims and the Jewish community of the oasis. When the Prophet's army began to march toward the area, the Banu Ghatafan tribe and allied Jewish Arab tribes did not send or were unable to send the reinforcements that were supposed to arrive to defend the area, which further endangered the meager fortifications of the Jewish force. After a short battle, the area fell to the Muslims, and the Jewish commander, Marhab ibn al-Harith, was executed by the Prophet's cousin and son-in-law, Ali ibn Abi Talib. The terms of surrender dictated that the property of the Jews would be confiscated and anyone who was non-Muslim would pay Jizya to the Muslims in exchange for neutrality and protection or be exiled from the area. The terms of surrender led to the strengthening of the Muslim army and a significant development in the Prophet's military career.

Men and boys were annihilated, while women and girls were captured and forced to become the sex slaves of the conquerors. The Prophet's companions told him that among the captives was also a 17-year-old Jewish girl, exceptionally beautiful, named Safiyya, who was the daughter of Huyayy ibn Akhtab, who had been beheaded by his order on the night of the massacre in the city of Medina, but she had already been forced to become the slave-girl of his companion, Dihyah al-Kalbi. The Prophet summoned him and ordered him to hand the girl over to him, and as compensation, he would take other captive girls as slaves in her place, anyone he desired. Al-Kalbi complied in exchange for seven other captives in her place due to Safiyya's beauty. The Prophet ordered his cousin, Az-Zubayr ibn al-Awwam, to first torture the girl's husband, Kinana ibn ar-Rabi'. Later, his head was also severed. Before the Prophet raped the girl, he forced her on her way to him to view the headless bodies of the men, residents of the oasis. Afterward, he took her to his bed and raped her on the very night her family members were annihilated. Later, she was taken by him as spoils and forcibly married to him as one of his wives (Hadith collection Sahih al-Bukhari, number 2:14:68).

2.3 Jingkang Incident (1127)

In the year 1127, during the wars that raged between the Jin dynasty and the Song dynasty, the Jin dynasty forces, led by the Jurchens, carried out a series of invasions into the city of Bianjing (now the city of Kaifeng in Henan Province), the capital of the Northern Song dynasty led by the Hans. They besieged the imperial palaces in the area and plundered them. The Jin forces captured the ruler of the Northern Song, Emperor Qinzong, along with his father, the retired Emperor Huizong, and many members descended from the imperial family of Emperor Taizong, as well as officials in the imperial court of the Song dynasty. The ordinary Song citizens in the area who resided in the non-imperial quarter were left to themselves after being forced to pay a massive ransom to the Jin dynasty. The invasion was called the Jingkang Incident (Chinese: 靖康事變, Pinyin: Jìngkāng shì biàn), because it occurred during the Jingkang era during the reign of Emperor Qinzong. It is also called the Disorders of the Jingkang Period (Chinese: 靖康之亂, Pinyin: Jìngkāng zhī luàn), and also the Humiliation of Jingkang (Chinese: 靖康之恥, Pinyin: Jìngkāng zhī chǐ). This event marked the collapse of the Northern Song dynasty, which originally ruled over most of China itself.

Women who were in the palaces, including princesses, imperial musicians, and maidservants, were distributed as spoils and raped by the invaders en masse in a systematic manner. The wretched women were ordered under threats of death to be raped in submission by the nobility of the Jin dynasty, regardless of their previous social status. Princesses who dared not to be raped by them in submission were destroyed. Many women, including princesses, ended their own lives so as not to be raped. The daughter of the defeated Emperor Huizong, Princess Zhao Fujin, who was the wife of another man, was forcibly married to a Jin dynasty prince who desired her. Emperor Taizong issued a decree ordering that the defeated emperor's three additional wives, whose names were Xu Shengying, Yang Diao'er, and Chen Wennuan, also be granted to the prince as sex slaves. Other women were forced to become the sex slaves of additional princes. The granddaughter of one of the princes from the defeated dynasty, who was the daughter-in-law of the prime minister and the wife of a minister, was purchased for less than ten ounces of gold.

The Jurchens, who at that time held Khitan captives from the Liao dynasty whom they had defeated in Mongolia in 1125, decided to take revenge on them because during their reign, they used to rape Jurchen women and girls. They exploited the hostility between themselves and the Song dynasty and devised a particularly cruel plan: they took from the captive princes of the Song dynasty their wives and granted them Khitan women in their place so that they would rape them in captivity on a permanent basis. One of the captive sons of the defeated Song emperor, Huizong, received a Khitan captive, and another son received a Khitan princess in the Supreme Capital of the Jin dynasty in the city of Shangjing (now the city of Harbin). The Jurchens continued to grant new Khitan women to the captive royalty (the sons and grandsons of the emperor) after their wives were taken from them. The Jurchens told the royalty of the Song dynasty that they were fortunate for the good treatment they received from them as captives, including the privilege given to them to rape Khitan women in captivity. Due to the disgrace that the female members of the imperial family from the Song dynasty were captured and sold as sex slaves to the conquerors, Chinese rulers in later dynasties ruled that a woman who was raped or is about to be raped is commanded to end her own lives, because continuing to live is not an option for her.

2.4 Mongol Invasions and Conquests (1206–1368)

In the years 1206–1368, the Mongols invaded the supercontinent of Eurasia. By the year 1260, they had conquered large parts of it, thereby creating the largest contiguous empire. At its peak, the empire stretched across present-day Mongolia, Iran, Iraq, Belarus, Burma, North and South Korea, Afghanistan, Azerbaijan, Central Asia, Georgia, Armenia, Siberia, Turkey, China, Ukraine, and most of Russia. The destruction these conquests brought was extremely lethal. During them, women and girls were systematically raped by them. The earliest case of mass rape attributed to the Mongols occurred after his son, Ögedei Khan, sent an army of 25,000 soldiers to conquer northern China. By his order, the surviving defeated soldiers were raped by his soldiers. In the year 1202, Ögedei and his ally, the military commander Toghrul Khan, joined forces to conquer the areas where the Tatars resided. After their conquest, Ögedei ordered the annihilation of every Tatar man and boy taller than a linchpin, in his words, and the capture of Tatar women in order to rape them. After Ögedei conquered the lands of the Oirats, his soldiers raped 4,000 Oirat girls aged 7 and older by his order. Afterward, some of them were captured by them and transported to his harem. The remaining ones were given to caravanserais throughout the Mongol Empire to enslave them as prostitutes.

In March 1241, the empire invaded the Kingdom of Hungary for the first time, where its warriors raped Hungarian women en masse. The monk, Rogerius of Apulia, who survived, documented them being raped by them and wrote that they derived pleasure from the humiliation they underwent at those moments. In the years 1241–1242, Mongol soldiers also invaded Austria and reached the town of Wiener Neustadt, where they slaughtered residents and ate their bodies, while particularly enjoying eating the bodies of women and young children. However, while old and deformed women were slaughtered and eaten immediately, virgin girls and beautiful women were first raped to death by them, and only afterward were their bodies eaten. The breasts of the women were considered particularly prized, and therefore in cases where there were more bodies around than required, they were sometimes the only part of their bodies that was eaten. Furthermore, their breasts were severed and served to the leaders as special delicacies.

2.5 Destruction of Aleppo (1400)

In the year 1400, Mongol forces of the Timurid Empire (Tatars) invaded the city of Aleppo within the territory of the Mamluk Sultanate during the war between them. Upon the invasion of the city, the women and children fled to the Great Mosque in the city in a desperate attempt to find shelter. The soldiers entered the mosque and massacred all the children, while they stripped the women and bound them with ropes in preparation for their public and gang-rape. Noblewomen and virgins were also stripped and bound in this mosque and in the smaller mosques. Concurrently, soldiers led their fathers and brothers to the mosques and forced them to watch their female family members being gang-raped by them. Each one was gang-raped repeatedly by many soldiers. After they were raped by soldiers, they were left naked and bound for the next soldiers in line. Many residents were annihilated by the forces, and the dynasty ordered to behead them and cast them into a pile outside the city until a tower of 20,000 skulls was created. The bodies were not buried, but were left lying like carcasses in the streets and mosques, and they fouled the city with stench.

2.6 Imjin War (1592–1598)

In the years 1592–1598, the Imjin War took place, which included two Japanese invasions of Korea under the command of the Japanese samurai Toyotomi Hideyoshi. The first invasion was called the Imjin War (Korean: 임진왜란, Hanja: 壬辰倭亂). Its purpose was to conquer the Korean Peninsula and China itself, which were ruled by the Joseon and Ming dynasties, respectively. Japan quickly succeeded in conquering large parts of the Korean Peninsula, and its occupation lasted until the year 1596. In the year 1597, Japan invaded Korea for the second time. The offensive was called the War of Jeongyu (Korean: 정유재란, Hanja: 丁酉再亂). The pattern of the invasion largely mirrored that of the first. The Japanese had initial successes on land after capturing several cities and fortresses. The forces of the Chinese Ming dynasty and the Korean Joseon dynasty were unable to dislodge the Japanese from the southern coastal areas of the peninsula.

During the war, Korean women and girls were frequently raped brutally and mercilessly by Japanese, Chinese, and Korean soldiers. They did not care what their age was. Descriptions reveal that Japanese soldiers defined three primary needs for soldiers during wartime: granaries of grain, understanding of local geography, and beautiful women (to rape). The heads of all the young men in the area were often severed by Japanese soldiers, while all the good-looking women, along with the goods they plundered, were loaded onto the backs of horses and oxen. A captured Korean girl was transported to one of the Japanese warships, where she was forced to become the sex slave of the soldiers stationed on its deck. She testified: I remained motionless from fear at the bottom of the boat for long hours, so that I did not know what was happening in the outside world. Another Korean girl was forced to become the sex slave of the Japanese samurai, Kurushima Michifusa. Women were raped brutally and indiscriminately also by the Chinese forces of the Ming dynasty and the Korean forces of the Joseon dynasty. After Japan's victory in the war, it published the victors' demands, and the first was that the daughter of the defeated Ming dynasty emperor be sent to them and forcibly married to the Emperor of Japan.

2.7 Destruction of the Seven Cities (c. 1600)

In the year 1598, the Mapuches and the Huilliches launched a rebellion in seven major Spanish outposts in southern Chile, which led around the year 1600 to the Destruction of the Seven Cities war (Spanish: Destrucción de las siete ciudades). The name of the war describes the destruction and abandonment of the cities. In traditional historiography, the Destruction of the Seven Cities marks the end of the conquest period and the beginning of the colonial period. It had a long-term impact on the history of Chile and the Mapuche people, determining the nature of future relations between Spain and colonial Mapuche, and even led to the establishment of a border between the Spanish residents and the Mapuches. The women were mostly left alive by the Mapuches. The goal, in the words of the Spanish soldier Alonso González de Nájera, was to exploit them (Spanish: aprovecharse de ellas), meaning to rape them. They captured 500 women and raped them repeatedly, and as a result, they gave birth to many of their Mestizo children. It is possible that these children had a significant demographic impact on the Mapuche society, which had been affected by the war and epidemics. In the year 1641, some of the women were released in Spanish raids and in deals between various Mapuche groups and Spanish authorities that took place in the fields of Quillín. The Spanish men disowned the offspring born to the women who were raped. Several women did not return, and they remained with the Mapuche men. The Spanish men understood this phenomenon as stemming from their shame at having been raped by them, and from the weak character of the women.

2.8 Sack of Magdeburg (1631)

On May 20, 1631, the Imperial Army and the forces of the Catholic League destroyed the Protestant city of Magdeburg in Germany. Its destruction was also called the Wedding of Magdeburg (German: Magdeburger Hochzeit), to describe it as a great event, and Magdeburg's Sacrifice (German: Magdeburgs Opfergang). About 20,000 people were annihilated, including defenders and non-combatants. The city, which had been one of the largest cities in Germany with over 25,000 residents, did not regain its importance until the 18th century. After the capture of the city, the soldiers resented that they had not received payment for their service. They began to break into every household they encountered and demanded valuables from its occupants. A surviving city council member, Otto von Guericke, testified: After the residents had nothing left to give the soldiers, the misery truly began. Women and girls were gang-raped by them. The destruction was so immense that the term Magdeburgization (German: Magdeburgisieren), derived from the name of the city, became for decades a common term to describe an area whose residents were plundered and annihilated, their wives and daughters raped, and which was destroyed to its foundations. Additional terms that were originally used by the Protestants when Roman Catholic residents were ruthlessly annihilated by them were Magdeburg justice, Magdeburg mercy, and Magdeburg quarter.

2.9 Siege of Fort Zeelandia (1661–1662)

In the years 1661–1662, the Chinese Kingdom of Tungning besieged and captured Fort Zeelandia (Chinese: 熱蘭遮城包圍戰, Pinyin: Jia̍t-lân-jia Siâⁿ Pau-ûi-chiàn), belonging to the Dutch Formosa and the Dutch East India Company on the island of Taiwan, bringing an end to its rule on the island. Prior to this, Dutch men routinely ordered the native Aboriginal residents in nearby villages to deliver their women to them so that they could rape them. In December 1652, the Aboriginals launched a rebellion in response, but the Dutch forces suppressed it. In the year 1662, the Chinese Ming loyalists and the Aboriginal residents under the command of General Koxinga besieged the fort and captured the island of Taiwan. During the conquest and after it, the Chinese annihilated Dutch men and exiled the rest from the island, while they kept the women and girls in captivity in order to rape them and turn them into their sex slaves. Koxinga chose as his sex slave a girl who was the daughter of the Dutch missionary Antonius Hambroek, who had been beheaded by his order. She was described by the Dutch commander Caeuw as a very sweet and pleasing maiden. The remaining women and girls were sold as sex slaves to the soldiers or forcibly married to them as their secondary wives. In the daily log of the fort, it was written: The best were kept for the use of the commanders, and afterward they were sold to the common soldiers. In the year 1684, some of the captives were still alive, but they were not released until their deaths.

2.10 The Manchu Occupation of Xinjiang (1759–1912)

In the years 1759–1912, the Qing dynasty of China, led by the Manchus, ruled the Xinjiang region. The Qing rule was established in the final stage of the Dzungar–Qing Wars, after it conquered the Dzungar Khanate. The post of General of Ili was established to administer the entire Xinjiang region and report to the Lifan Yuan, a Qing dynasty government agency that supervised the peripheral regions of the empire. In the years 1757–1759, during the Altishahr Khojas rebellion, after supplies became scarce, Manchu soldiers stationed in a military camp in Yarkand County under the command of General Zhaohui slaughtered Uyghur Muslims who resided in the area and subsequently cooked and ate them. In cases where a married couple was captured by them, the man was eaten immediately, while the woman was first gang-raped by them and only cooked and eaten the following day. In the year 1765, Uyghur Muslim women were gang-raped by the Manchu servants, the Manchu official Su-cheng, and his son for months, which led to the Ush rebellion. In response to the rebellion, the Emperor ordered to massacre their town. All the men were annihilated by them, while all the women were captured. In captivity, they were raped by Manchu soldiers and officials on a permanent basis. In the years 1818–1820, the daughter of the patriarch of the Muslim community, the Aqsaqal from the Khanate of Kokand, was also raped by a Manchu official on a permanent basis.

2.11 Batak Massacre (1876)

In the year 1876, at the beginning of the April Uprising, the Batak massacre took place. It was an indiscriminate massacre of Bulgarian non-combatant residents in the town of Batak in Bulgaria, by irregular Ottoman cavalry. The number of residents annihilated ranged between 1,200 and 8,000, while the most common estimate is 5,000. Women were first stripped to their chemises in order to plunder their valuable clothes and jewelry, and afterward they were gang-raped by them. After a woman was raped by the last man in line, she was in many cases slaughtered by him. After the massacre, the Ottoman commander Ahmed Aga ordered all the surviving residents to come out and announced that it was to prepare a list of the dead and the widows. Most of the survivors complied and came out because anyone who did not comply would be executed. They were divided into two groups, women and men. The commander placed the women in the back and massacred all 300 men who were still alive. Women who dared to protest were first raped by them and only afterward were they also annihilated.

The American journalist Januarius MacGahan testified: There was not a roof left, not a whole wall standing. It was all a mass of ruins. We looked again at the heap of skulls and skeletons before us and noticed that they were all small, and that the articles of clothing mixed with them and lying around were all women's apparel. All women and girls. From my saddle, I counted about 100 skulls, not including those hidden beneath others in the pile, nor those scattered far and wide in the fields. The skulls were almost all separated from the rest of the bones. The skeletons were nearly all headless. The heads of all these women were severed, and it appears that the procedure was as follows: they seized a woman, stripped her carefully to her underwear, set aside any valuable clothing along with all ornaments and jewelry she had on her, and afterward as many as possible of them raped her, and the last man killed her, or not, as the humor took him.

2.12 Boxer Rebellion (1899–1901)

In the years 1899–1901, toward the end of the Qing dynasty, the Boxer Rebellion took place. It was named as such because many of its members in the Militia United in Righteousness practiced Chinese martial arts, which were then called Chinese boxing. The rebellion was anti-foreign, anti-imperialist, and anti-Christian in northern China. Following the First Sino-Japanese War, village residents in northern China feared the expansion of foreign spheres of influence and resented the extension of privileges to Christian missionaries, who used them to protect their followers. In the year 1898, northern China experienced several natural disasters, including the flooding of the Yellow River and droughts, which the rebels blamed on foreign and Christian influence. Starting in 1899, the movement spread across Shandong Province and the North China Plain, destroying foreign property such as railroads, and attacking or murdering Christian missionaries and Chinese Christians. In June 1900, the events culminated when the rebel fighters, convinced they were invulnerable to foreign weapons, gathered in the city of Peking (Beijing) with the slogan Support the Qing government and destroy the foreigners. Diplomats, missionaries, soldiers, and some Chinese Christians found refuge in the Legation Quarter, which the rebels besieged. The Eight-Nation Alliance, which included American, Austro-Hungarian, British, French, German, Italian, Japanese, and Russian soldiers, invaded China to lift the siege.

The Empress Dowager of China, Cixi, who initially hesitated, supported the rebels and on June 21 issued an imperial decree effectively declaring war on the invading powers. The Eight-Nation Alliance, after initially being repulsed by the Imperial Chinese Army and the rebel militia, brought 20,000 armed soldiers to China, and on August 14 they reached the city of Peking. They defeated the Imperial Army in the city of Tianjin, and on June 17 stormed the Dagu Forts, easing the 55-day siege of the international legations. Plunder and pillage of the capital and the surrounding countryside spread along with summary executions of suspected rebels as retribution. On September 7, 101, the Boxer Protocol dictated that government officials who supported the rebels would be executed and foreign soldiers would be stationed in the city of Peking. In addition, the Qing dynasty would pay 450,000,000 taels, more than the government's annual tax revenue, to be paid as compensation over the next 39 years to the eight invading nations.

During the rebellion, Chinese, Manchu, and Mongol-Banner women and girls were raped by the soldiers of the eight nations en masse. Many women were raped in the city of Peking. Chinese women and girls were raped by German and Italian soldiers, before their villages were burned and their bodies were thrown into wells. Mutilated bodies of Chinese women were found, who had been raped by the Allied soldiers and subsequently destroyed. In Juoye County, Chinese women were raped on a permanent basis by the German Catholic priest Georg Stenz himself. The French commander justified the rape of the victims by his soldiers, stating that by doing so, the French soldier was effectively demonstrating his superiority. Thousands of women and girls ended their own lives so as not to be raped by brutal Russian and Japanese fighters. It was common for the Allied forces to frequently capture women in order to rape them on a permanent basis and turn them into their sex slaves, regardless of their status or belief, and whether they were virtuous, wretched, young, or old. For this purpose, they established rape estates in the hutongs (alleys formed by siheyuan-style residences) in the city of Peking, and imprisoned them inside them. Among other places, they were transported to Biaobei Alley and imprisoned in row houses as prostitutes for the soldiers. The path at the western end of the alley was blocked to prevent escape, while the eastern end was the only way to enter or exit. This path was guarded, and any man from the Allied forces could enter and rape them at will.

The daughters of the Manchu Banner-bearer and Viceroy of Chihli Province (now Hebei Province), Yulu (Chinese: 裕禄) of the Hitara clan, were targeted and raped by the Allied soldiers. Following the capture of the city of Peking, all seven of his daughters were captured and transported to the Temple of Heaven, where they were raped by them repeatedly. Afterward, they were transported to one of the rape estates and held there as sex slaves for the soldiers. The wife and one of the daughters of the Mongol Banner nobleman of the Alute clan, Chongqi—who was a scholar of high standing in the Manchu court and also the father-in-law of the previous emperor—were also gang-raped by the Allied soldiers. Afterward, they were captured and transported to the Temple of Heaven, where they were gang-raped brutally by dozens of them during the entire period of the occupation of the city of Peking. Only after the withdrawal of the Eight-Nation Alliance did they return home, only to hang themselves from the beams. On August 26, 1900, upon the discovery, her father out of despair also hanged himself. His son Baochu and many other family members also ended their own lives shortly thereafter.

2.13 Greek Genocide (1913–1923)

In the years 1913–1923, the Greek genocide of the Pontic Greeks took place (Greek: Γενοκτονία των Ελλήνων, transliterated: Genoktonía ton Ellínon), by the government of the Ottoman Empire led by the triumvirate of the Three Pashas, and the government of the Grand National Assembly led by Mustafa Kemal Atatürk. It was a systematic annihilation of the Christian Greek population in the Ottoman Empire in the Anatolian peninsula, due to its religion and ethnic origin, primarily during World War I and its aftermath in the years 1914–1922, and during the Turkish War of Independence in the years 1919–1923. The annihilation included massacres, forced deportations, including death marches through the Syrian Desert, summary executions, and the destruction of Eastern cultural, historical, and religious monuments. Most of the displaced persons and survivors fled to Greece, increasing its population by more than a quarter. Some of them, particularly those in the eastern provinces, fled to the neighboring Russian Empire. By the end of 1922, most of the Greeks in the Asia Minor peninsula were annihilated or had fled. In the year 1923, the remaining ones were transported to Greece under the terms of the population exchange between Greece and Turkey, which prohibited the return of the displaced persons. Additional ethnic groups were attacked in a similar manner by the Ottoman Empire during this period, including Assyrians and Armenians, as part of the same policy of genocide.

During the annihilation, thousands of women and girls were raped by Turkish soldiers and civilians in a systematic manner. It was common for Turkish forces to massacre the men and rape the women. They were trapped in Greek villages and raped by them for hours and even days. Some of them were raped by their Muslim neighbors and some by members of the security forces. In one of the cases, a woman was raped by Turkish village men for 8 consecutive days. She died shortly thereafter. Subsequently, the women and children were sent on the long death marches to Syria, and during them, many women and girls were raped by them. Frequently, the women died afterward. In the Pontus region, gangs of bandits under the command of Topal Osman moved from village to village. Residents were annihilated while women were raped by them at will. In the Vazelon Monastery, a Greek Orthodox monastery, women were raped by Turkish fighters before they were destroyed. In one of the Pontic Greek villages, dozens of women and girls threw themselves into the river so as not to be raped by soldiers. In addition, the Turks opened markets where Christian girls were sold by them as sex slaves.

2.14 Assyrian Genocide (1914–1918)

In the years 1914–1918, during World War I, the Assyrian genocide took place, also known as the Seyfo (Hebrew: חרב, Syriac: ܣܲܝܦܵܐ). It involved the mass deportation of Assyrian and Syriac Christians in the southeastern Anatolian peninsula and the Azerbaijan Province of Persia, by Ottoman forces and several Kurdish tribes. Before World War I, the Assyrians lived in mountainous and remote areas of the Ottoman Empire, and some were effectively stateless. The empire's centralization efforts during the 19th century increased violence against them. The motives for the genocide included accusing several Assyrian communities of lacking loyalty to the Ottoman Empire and wishing to appropriate its land. Between January and May 1915, during the Ottoman occupation of Azerbaijan, masses of Assyrian civilians were annihilated by Ottoman and pro-Ottoman Kurdish forces. In Bitlis Province, Ottoman forces returning from Persia joined local Kurdish tribes to massacre the local Christian population, Armenians and Assyrians. From mid-1915, Ottoman and Kurdish forces attacked the Assyrian tribes in the Hakkar region, and by September deported them, even though they had established a coordinated military defense. Additionally, Governor Mehmed Reshid initiated a genocide of all Christian communities in the Diyarbekir Vilayet, including Syriac Christians who put up sporadic armed resistance in certain parts of the Tur Abdin region. Local militias took part in the genocide by order of the Ottoman government. About 275,000 people were annihilated.

Men were annihilated while women and children were deported in a regular pattern. At the time of the deportation, women and girls were raped by the Turkish soldiers. Women were raped by irregular fighters even while they were dying. Many women died afterward. Women were also sold as sex slaves to Muslim men. In the city of Urmia, where a large Assyrian population resided, Assyrian girls were raped by Turkish and Kurdish men. In the large Syriac village of Gulpashan, men were annihilated while women and children were captured and raped. In one of the villages, girls about 8 years old were raped. In another village, girls aged 6 or 7 who tried in vain to hide on a roof so as not to be raped, were caught and raped. In early 1915, in Azerbaijan, several massacres occurred during which hundreds of Christians were annihilated while women were captured and raped. On July 1, 1915, the village of Tel Armen was attacked by a militia and Kurds. All the women who were in the village were first raped by them, and only afterward everyone, including women and children, was annihilated indiscriminately.

In the city of Siirt, all the men were annihilated and 400 remaining women and children were deported and forced to march westward toward the city of Mardin or southward toward the city of Mosul, while being attacked by the police. As they marched, their property, including their clothes, was plundered by local Kurds and Turks. Those who failed to keep up were annihilated. Women who were considered good-looking were pulled from the march by police officers or Kurds, raped by them, and subsequently destroyed. No one reached the city of Mardin, and only between 50 and 100 Chaldean Assyrians (out of a population of 7,000–8,000) reached the city of Mosul.

2.15 Armenian Genocide (1915–1917)

In the years 1915–1917, during World War I, the Armenian genocide and the destruction of its identity took place in the Ottoman Empire. Led by the Committee of Union and Progress (CUP), it was implemented primarily through the mass annihilation of approximately 1,000,000 Armenians during death marches to the Syrian Desert and the forced Islamization of others, particularly women and children. Before World War I, Armenians held an inferior status in Ottoman society. In the 1890s and in 1909, widespread massacres of Armenians occurred. The Ottoman Empire suffered a series of military defeats and territorial losses, particularly during the Balkan Wars of 1912–1913, leading to fears among CUP leaders that the Armenians would seek independence. In 1914, during their invasion of Russian and Persian territory, local Armenians were annihilated by Ottoman auxiliary forces.

On April 24, 1915, Ottoman authorities captured and deported hundreds of Armenian intellectuals and leaders from the city of Istanbul. In the years 1915–1916, between 800,000 and 1,200,000 Armenians were sent on death marches in the Syrian Desert by order of the de facto leader of the Ottoman Empire, Talaat Pasha. They were driven forward by paramilitary escorts. The deportees were denied access to food and water and were subjected to massacres and plunder. In the Syrian Desert, the survivors were dispersed into concentration camps. Their mass deportation was designed to permanently prevent the possibility of Armenian self-governance or independence. In 1916, another wave of massacres left only about 200,000 deportees alive by the end of the year. Between 100,000 and 200,000 Armenian women and children were forcibly Islamized and placed into Muslim households. During the Turkish War of Independence that occurred after World War I, massacres and ethnic cleansing of Armenian survivors by Turkish nationalists continued. The annihilation ended more than 2,000 years of Armenian culture in Eastern Anatolia. Along with the mass murder and deportation of Syriac Assyrian and Orthodox Greek Christians, it enabled the establishment of an ethnically nationalist Turkish state, the Republic of Turkey. The Turkish government declared that the deportation of the Armenians was a legitimate action.

Even before the annihilation, the Ottoman legal system permitted the rape of Armenian women and girls. Armenian women and girls were raped by Turkish and Kurdish men on a permanent basis. Men were annihilated immediately, while the women and children were brutally raped and their genitalia were mutilated. Women and girls were forced to become prostitutes or were forcibly married. Kurdish and Turkish men could enter the homes of Armenians and rape all the women and girls residing in them, and even abduct them without any punishment. These numerous instances placed them in constant danger of being raped. In one case, between 60 and 160 women were imprisoned inside a church along with children and infants, and the soldiers were released among them. Many women were raped to death by them. The remaining women were slaughtered with swords or bayonets, along with the children and infants. In the years 1850–1870, the Patriarch of Armenia submitted 537 letters to the Sublime Porte in which the Armenians pleaded for protection against the rape and abduction of their women and children.

During the annihilation, Armenian women and girls were raped en masse by militiamen, Turkish armed forces, public officials, and other Turkish and Kurdish men. They were brutally and systematically raped by them. Army commanders simply told their men, do to them whatever you wish. The practice of raping them was universal. Armenians were frequently annihilated during cruel celebrations during which women were first raped by them. Some were gang-raped on a daily basis. The systematic rape of young girls was well documented. The systematic rape of the victims during the annihilation was witnessed and testified to by Turkish, American, Austrian, and German officials and witnesses. The only alternative for women to avoid being raped was to end their own lives. Many women who were raped were subsequently slaughtered with bayonets or died as a result of the prolonged rape they endured. After women were gang-raped, they frequently ended their own lives. Many young women and girls were enslaved as prostitutes, or forcibly married to Muslim men, including those who were already married. The genitalia of young women and girls were mutilated, and women's breasts were severed. In the city of Deir ez-Zor, members of the German armed forces even assisted in opening a brothel where Armenian women were enslaved as prostitutes. The wives, daughters, and other female relatives of prominent Armenian men were publicly and targetedly raped by Turkish men. Male children were also raped.

In attacks on villages, the men and boys were first separated from the women and children and immediately annihilated en masse, while the women and children were first raped by them and only afterward were they annihilated together or displaced. The women were systematically raped by them. In 1915, women and young children were sent on death marches through the Anatolian peninsula into the desert, escorted by gendarmes (military forces with authority to operate among the civilian population). During the march, the women, young girls (and even young boys) were brutally and systematically raped by Turkish soldiers. Their bodies were additionally mutilated. Many of them were subsequently annihilated by them. An eyewitness testified: It was a regular thing for them to rape our girls in our presence. Very often they raped girls aged 8 or 10, and as a result, many of them were unable to walk, and were shot. The German consul in the city of Aleppo, Walter Rössler, reported that about a quarter of the young women whose bodily appearance was fairly handsome, in his words, were raped on a permanent basis by the gendarmes, and even more beautiful ones were gang-raped each time by 10–15 men. As a result, raped women and girls were left behind naked and dying. Captives imprisoned in camps were raped on a permanent basis by the guards, who also allowed Bedouins to raid them at night and rape them. Hundreds of thousands were annihilated on these death marches.

Additionally, women and girls were selected by soldiers and gendarmes for trafficking as sex slaves, which constituted a significant source of income for them. They were transported to the city of Damascus, where they were stripped by the Turkish soldiers, displayed naked at public auction, and sold as sex slaves in certain areas. Some were sold in Arab slave markets to Muslim pilgrims of the Hajj and transported as far as Tunisia or Algeria. In Arab areas, Armenian women were sold at low prices. The maximum price of an Armenian woman was five piastres (about 20 pence sterling at the time).

In the city of Trabzon, many women and girls were raped. The city's police chief, Nuri, testified that the governor-general granted him young girls to rape, as a gift to the central committee of the Committee of Union and Progress. The merchant Muhammad Ali testified that children were annihilated in the Red Crescent hospital, but young girls were first raped by them. He also testified that the governor-general imprisoned 15 girls there in order to rape them. An army officer, Hasan Maruf, testified: Government officials in the city of Trabzon selected some of the most beautiful Armenian women and from the best families. After they raped them in the cruelest manner, they killed them. The German soldier Armin Wegner testified: The Armenian women and girls are mostly very beautiful. They severed their breasts, mutilated their organs, and their bodies lie naked, defiled, or blackened from the heat in the fields. He testified regarding the appearance of the body of one of the wretched women who was raped: Staring at you is the dark and beautiful face of Babschi, who was plundered by Kurdish men, raped, and released only after 10 days. Like wild beasts, the Turkish soldiers, officers, troops, and gendarmes pounced on this blessed prey. An eyewitness testified that all the girls in her village from the age of 12 and older, and some even younger, were raped.

After the annihilation, women and girls who had been forcibly married were frequently unable to return to their former lives because they had no family or source of income left, and out of the shame of having been raped by Turkish men. Karen Jeppe, who worked for the League of Nations in the city of Aleppo, testified that out of thousands of women with whom she spoke, only one of them had not undergone sexual abuse. Many surviving Armenian children also suffered from sexual abuse.

2.16 Spanish Civil War (1936–1939)

In the years 1936–1939, the Spanish Civil War (Spanish: guerra civil española) took place, which was a military conflict between the Republicans and the Nationalists. The Republicans were loyal to the left-leaning Popular Front government of the Second Spanish Republic. The opposing Nationalists were an alliance of Falangists, monarchists, conservatives, and traditionalists led by a military junta, among whose members was General Francisco Franco. Due to the international political climate at the time, the war was perceived as a class struggle, a religious struggle, and a struggle between dictatorship and republican democracy, between revolution and counter-revolution, and between fascism and communism. The war broke out following the partial failure of the July 1936 coup against the Republican government by a group of generals from the Spanish Republican Armed Forces. General Emilio Mola was the primary planner and leader, and General José Sanjurjo was a public figure. The Nationalist faction was supported by several conservative groups, including the Spanish Confederation of Autonomous Right-Wing Groups (CEDA), monarchists, opposing Alphonsists, religious conservative Carlists, and the Falange Española de las JONS as a fascist political party. The coup was supported by military units in Morocco and in the cities of Pamplona, Burgos, Zaragoza, Valladolid, Cádiz, Córdoba, Málaga, and Seville. Rebel units in almost all the important cities failed to gain control. These cities remained in the hands of the government, leaving Spain militarily and politically divided.

The Nationalist forces received weaponry, soldiers, and air assistance from Fascist Italy and Nazi Germany, while the Republican side received support from the Soviet Union and Mexico. Other countries, such as the United Kingdom, France, and the United States, continued to recognize the Republican government, but they adopted an official policy of non-intervention. Despite this policy, tens of thousands of citizens from these countries participated directly in the conflict, particularly in the pro-Republican International Brigades. Franco gradually emerged as the primary and decisive leader of the Nationalist side. The Nationalists advanced from their strongholds in the south and west, and in 1937 captured most of Spain's northern coastline. They besieged the city of Madrid and the area to its south and west. After they captured most of the Catalonia region in the years 1938–1939 and cut off the city of Madrid from the city of Barcelona, the Republican military position became hopeless.

On March 5, 1939, in response to the growing communist dominance of the Republican government and the deterioration of the military situation, Colonel Segismundo Casado led a military coup against the Republican government, with the intention of reconciling with the Nationalists, but the reconciliation was rejected by Franco. Exploiting an internal conflict between the Republican factions in the city of Madrid that same month, Franco entered the capital and declared victory. Hundreds of thousands of Spaniards fled to refugee camps in southern France. Those associated with the defeated Republicans who remained were persecuted by the victorious Nationalists. The war became prominent for its political passion and division due to the inspiration it aroused around the world and the numerous atrocities that occurred during its course. Franco's forces carried out organized purges in the territories they captured so they could consolidate their future regime. Mass executions also occurred in areas controlled by the Republicans, with the participation of local authorities that varied from region to region.

During the war, Republican women and girls were raped en masse by the Nationalist forces and their allies, not as a result of soldiers disobeying orders, but as part of an official Nationalist policy and as a central and widespread objective. The Nationalist army promoted a targeted campaign encouraging the rape of these women. Fighters who raped them were even rewarded, such as Civil Guard corporal Juan Vadillo and the Falangist Fernando Zamacola, who were decorated by Nationalist forces after they raped women in the town of Benamahoma. Nationalist soldiers sometimes remained to stay inside the homes of poor people where no men were present, in order to rape women residing in them on a permanent basis. A total of 283 nuns were annihilated, while many of them were first raped. Nationalist forces advancing at the front wrote on the walls of captured buildings that the daughters of the Republicans would give birth to fascists for them after they raped them.

Young women and girls, including medical nurses and female militia members, were brutally raped by Falangist rear-guard soldiers. Women were first raped by them and only afterward annihilated in cemeteries, hospitals, farmhouses, and prisons. Women were brutally raped also by Nationalist forces and regular troops, such as in the towns of Caillos and Maials and in the village of Cantalapiedra, and they were also raped by Catholic Nationalist soldiers. Girls about 12 years old were raped by Nationalist forces, sometimes repeatedly, such as in the city of Moguer. Sometimes after women were raped by the Falangists, the symbol of their Falangism—the yoke and arrows of the Falange—was branded onto their breasts. Additionally, many women who were raped were also forcefully fed castor oil, a powerful laxative, and afterward they were publicly paraded naked, including through their towns, while uncontrollably defecating on themselves in full view of everyone. Afterward, many of them were annihilated. This tactic for punishment, suppression, and humiliation targeted at women was particularly prominent. Women paraded through the streets, dressed in very little clothing, were sometimes forced at the same time to sing the anthem Cara al Sol of the Nationalist Spanish Falange.

Women (including pregnant women) were first raped and only afterward annihilated, such as in the Pallars Sobirà district, in the city of Almendralejo, in the towns of Fuente de Cantos, Zafra, Fuente del Maestre, and Zufre, in the town of Boecillo, in the village of Valdediós, and on the Aguacho farm. In the village of Peguerinos, two medical nurses and additional local women were raped by Falangists. In another case, a Falangist slaughtered a woman named Frasquita Avilés, and afterward he raped her corpse in a cemetery. In the town of Maials, at least four women were raped by regular Nationalist soldiers. In the town of Caillos, a woman, her daughter, and her cousin were raped by another group of regular Nationalist soldiers. Afterward, all three were stabbed by them with bayonets. In the same jurisdiction, a man was forced to watch his wife, his daughter, and his cousin being raped by regular soldiers and subsequently stabbed with bayonets. In the village of Margenat, two women were raped by regular soldiers. Afterward, they were annihilated by placing grenades between their legs. In the village of Cantalapiedra, young women were raped by regular soldiers. Near the city of Seville, a truck transported female captives to Nationalist soldiers. All of them were raped by them before they were annihilated. Afterward, their bodies were cast into a well, and the soldiers marched throughout the city with their rifles wrapped in the women's underwear like flags. In the village of Valdediós, 14 medical nurses and a 15-year-old girl were raped by a group of regular soldiers led by General Emilio Mola, and subsequently annihilated by them.

In the city of Oviedo, women were raped by Falangists in the hospital courtyard. In the city of Melilla, women were raped by Falangists in the prison. On the island of Mallorca, five Republican medical nurses from the city of Barcelona were captured following the Republican retreat. Falangists inserted their fingers into their vaginas to check if a hymen was still present inside them, and afterward gang-raped them in the town of Mancor. The following day, all of them were annihilated at the Son Coletes cemetery. The Falangists justified their actions by stating that they were prostitutes, in their words. In the year 1936, two sisters from the city of Barcelona, Daria and Mercedes Buxadé, were captured by Falangist forces on the island of Mallorca. They inserted their fingers into their vaginas to check if a hymen was still present inside them, and afterward they brutally raped them repeatedly. The wife of a Socialist party member, Pilar Sánchez, who was hiding from the Falangists, was also discovered by a group of four Falangists. She was beaten and raped by them. Afterward, she was transported to a cemetery and raped by them once more before she was executed. A woman named Margalida Jaume, who was also on the island at that time, was also raped by a Falangist. Afterward, the four of them were cast into mass burial pits and buried together inside them.

During the night between August 15 and 16, a group consisting of Civil Guards, a Falangist, and a local from the Nationalist faction arrived at the home of Vicente Lamberto Martínez in the town of Larraga, who was a peasant member of the General Union of Workers, as part of a severe crackdown against pro-Republican leaders, sympathizers, and their families. The officers of the Civil Guard, which was a gendarmerie force, had aligned themselves with the Nationalists. They threatened to break down the door of the house. After the door was opened, they placed Lamberto into a truck, along with his 14-year-old daughter who was at home with him, Maravillas Lamberto. The truck transported them to the town hall, where the girl was raped by them during the night. Local witnesses heard her screams throughout the town. Afterward, she and her father were transported to the settlement of Ibiricu, 40 kilometers from the town of Larraga, where she was raped by them once more before her father's eyes. Afterward, both were shot to death, and the body of the girl was cast off. A week later, a local peasant found her body, and the peasants decided to burn it.

On August 27, 1936, five young women aged 16–22 were forcefully given alcohol in the town of Fuentes de Andalucía, and were subsequently forced to rape before being paraded through the streets in only their underwear. Their names were María León Becerril, María Jesús Caro González, Joaquina Lora Muñoz, Coral García Lora, and Josefa García Lora. Afterward, they were raped by them and their bodies were cast into a well. The Falangists marched through the town with the women's underwear hanging from their rifles and shotguns like flags. In the summer of 1937, when Nationalist forces captured the Biscay province, their supporters engaged in widespread sexual harassment. Women were publicly beaten by them in front of their families while half-naked. On December 24, 1938, in the town of Maials, four women were raped, one of them in front of her husband and her 7-year-old son, who were forced to watch at gunpoint. At the end of 1938, in the village of Onaer, a 17-year-old girl was forced first to watch her mother being executed, and afterward she was brutally gang-raped, before she was also executed.

Women and young girls held in Nationalist prisons were systematically raped on a frequent basis. Women were ordered to submit to being raped by their captors. Those who dared to refuse were often annihilated. In the spring of 1936, women in the Extremadura region who worked in the homes of the wealthy as seamstresses attempted to establish a union. Following the outbreak of the war, they were judged, and their official sentence was to undergo sexual abuse. The rape of women was widespread in the Las Salesas prison. Falangists used to visit routinely to select women to rape. Those chosen were taken out and transported to their barracks. In the Albacete prison, 30 women were raped over a period of 3 months by two officials. The screams of the women being raped were heard throughout the prison. Women in prisons constantly faced guards who demanded sexual satisfaction in exchange for improvements in their conditions or the conditions of other imprisoned relatives. At the end of 1937, several female prisoners in the Biscay province dared to refuse to submit to being raped by their Nationalist military captors, even though they were told that their punishment would be execution. During the night, many of them were shot.

Nationalist supporters characterized Republican women as immoral, tempting men with their tight clothing and flaunting their bare arms to emphasize their shape. Nationalists, including Army General Gonzalo Queipo de Llano, ruled that they must be raped so that they would experience firsthand the consequence of being prostitutes, in their words. Queipo de Llano had a radio program where, among other things, he bragged that Republican women were being raped en masse in the city of Seville. According to him, the legionnaires and brave regular soldiers who raped them demonstrated their masculinity, thereby teaching their cowardly and red men what it means to be men. Regarding the raped women themselves, he stated that these communists and anarchists, in his words, deserved to be raped, arguing that they were already promiscuous women who engaged in sexual relations with men freely. He declared: Now at least they will know what real men are, and not effeminate militia men. In addition, he mocked them for being so weak and helpless as women that they had no chance of escaping real men who came to rape them. They would be raped by them no matter how much they struggle or kick, in his words.

2.16.1 Foreign Legionnaires (1936–1939)

Moroccan soldiers (Foreign Legionnaires) who were referred to as Moors fought alongside the Nationalists. Francoist officers and commanders promised them that they would be able to rape white women upon their entry into the city of Madrid. Officers selected Moroccan soldiers to rape them because they were known to rape women with great brutality. The practice of using Moroccan Legion soldiers to rape local women was a direct continuation of the Spanish army's military operations in its colonial territories. Nationalist soldiers directed them to rape specific women and groups of women in the villages. Many working-class women were raped by them. Women were often raped by them with such extreme brutality that they died within a few hours at most afterward. Army General Gonzalo Queipo de Llano even warned several times on his radio program that women with Republican sympathies, whom he described as not modest, would be raped by his Moroccan soldiers. One of the cases occurred in the village of Navalcarnero, where many others were also annihilated. In the town of San Roque, for example, a woman was raped and subsequently shot by a firing squad. Additional cases occurred in the city of Seville. German soldiers who offered their support to the Nationalists gleefully took photographs of women while they were being raped by Moroccan soldiers, and of the amputation of their breasts.

In October 1942, a journalist from the journal Foreign Affairs testified that he sat with the officers in a field camp and heard them discussing their promise to the Moroccan soldiers to rape Republican women, and that there was widespread agreement. He related that the only Moroccan officer, Mohamed Meziane, bragged about it. While he was with him at the crossroads of the village of Navalcarnero, two Spanish girls who appeared to be under 20 years old were brought before him. One of them worked in a textile factory in the city of Barcelona, and a union card was found on her jacket. The second was from the city of Valencia; she swore she had no political views. After being interrogated to obtain military information, they were transported by him to a small building that served as the village schoolhouse. About 40 Moroccan soldiers were resting there. When they reached the door, howling screams were heard from the throats of the excited soldiers who saw the girls brought to them to rape. He testified that Meziane smiled at him affectionately and said, Ah, they won't live more than 4 hours.

2.16.2 Francoist Spain (1939–1975)

After the war, until at least the 1960s, thousands of women with Republican connections were frequently raped with the social acceptance of the practice, in order to punish their men. The authorities generally granted the men who raped them immunity from prosecution. Everyone was brought up to ignore and look the other way when they saw Republican women being raped. These women often tried to move to cities to become more anonymous. Women were forcefully fed laxative castor oil and paraded naked in public while soiling themselves in front of everyone. Women were also raped in prisons. Anita Sirgo and Tina Pérez were both raped in prison due to their involvement in the mining strikes in the Asturias region in 1962. Lidia Falcón O'Neill was imprisoned in the Yeserías prison in the city of Madrid and in the Trinidad prison in the city of Barcelona during the years 1960–1974. She spoke about women who were imprisoned with her and were raped. She testified: They stripped them... (out of shame she did not continue with the description). She added that macho men enjoy using a woman to satisfy their sadistic instincts. In many cases, the homes and goods of the widows of Republican men were confiscated by the government, and many of them who lived in absolute poverty were forced to become prostitutes to earn a living. This phenomenon also served the Francoist men because, in their eyes, it cemented the image of Republican women as inherently dirty prostitutes.

2.17 Nanjing Massacre (1937)

In early December 1937, the Battle of Nanjing (or Nanking) took place between the National Revolutionary Army of China and the Imperial Japanese Army for control of the city of Nanjing (Chinese: 南京; pinyin: Nánjīng), the capital of the Republic of China, during the Second Sino-Japanese War. Following the outbreak of the war between the two countries in July 1937, Japanese and Chinese forces engaged in a brutal 3-month battle over the city of Shanghai, where both sides sustained heavy casualties. The mission to capture Nanjing was assigned to the commander of Japan's Central China Area Army, General Iwane Matsui, who believed that the capture of the city would force China to surrender and thereby end the war. China's leader, Chiang Kai-shek, ultimately decided to defend the city and appointed Tang Shengzhi to command the city's garrison force—an army hastily assembled from local conscripts and remnants of the Chinese units that had fought in Shanghai.

Between November 11 and December 9, the Japanese Army marched from Shanghai to Nanjing at a rapid pace, pursuing the retreating Chinese Army and overcoming all Chinese resistance along the way. The campaign was characterized by immense brutality and destruction, with growing levels of atrocities committed by Japanese forces against the local population, while Chinese forces implemented scorched-earth tactics to slow their advance. By December 9, Japanese forces reached the final line of defense, the Fukuo Line, behind which stood the fortified walls of the city. On December 10, Matsui ordered an all-out assault on the city, and after two days of intense fighting, Chiang decided to abandon the city. Before fleeing, Tang ordered his men to launch a coordinated breakthrough of the Japanese siege; however, by this point, the city was largely surrounded and its defenses were at a breaking point. Most of Tang's soldiers collapsed into a disorganized rout. While some units managed to escape, many were caught in the death trap the city had become. By December 13, the city fell to the Japanese. Based on their victory, the Japanese officially authorized the campaign to occupy the city. Following its capture, Chinese prisoners of war and civilians, among others, were tortured, looted, and annihilated by Japanese forces.

The reason the 10th Army advanced to the city so rapidly was actually due to the agreement between the officers and their men that following the city's capture, they would be free to rape the Chinese women and girls residing there as they pleased. Following the capture of the city, during the first six weeks, men were annihilated while between 20,000 and 80,000 Chinese women and girls of all ages captured in the city, including infants and the elderly, were gang-raped by soldiers before they were annihilated. They were raped by them brutally and systematically. Tens of thousands of women were first gang-raped and only then were they annihilated. At least 1,000 women and girls were raped every night, and many more during the day.

The soldiers went door to door searching for young girls to rape. Many women were captured and gang-raped by them. Those who dared to resist or showed any expression that resembled dissent were bayoneted or shot. Husbands or brothers who attempted to protect them were shot. Hundreds of men and women who stayed in the safety zone under the management of the United States, believing they had found a safe place, were periodically dragged away by the soldiers who entered at will. Men were annihilated immediately, while women were first raped by them and only then annihilated. Often, mothers were forced to watch the decapitation of their infants before they were raped. Pregnant women were targeted and raped, and their abdomens were frequently bayoneted afterward. Young children were not exempt. Their bodies were cut open to allow the soldiers to rape them as well.

After the women were raped, they were often slaughtered and their bodies were immediately mutilated with stabbings and the insertion of bayonets, long bamboo sticks, or other objects into their vaginas. During the massacre in the villages, while men were mostly annihilated immediately, the women and children were first brutally raped by them and only then annihilated. The soldiers raped them also due to their fundamental contempt toward other Asians, which was deeply rooted in Japanese society before the war. An illustration of this during the war in southern China was, for example, a sergeant who raped and slaughtered many Chinese women but was shocked the moment he discovered that one of the women he had raped was a Japanese woman who had married a Chinese man and immigrated to China. Chinese men were also forced by soldiers to rape their own family members. Sons were forced to rape their mothers, fathers were forced to rape their daughters, and brothers were forced to rape their sisters, before the eyes of other family members who were forced to watch. On December 19, 1937, the American reverend James M. McCallum, who lived in the city, wrote in his diary: I have never heard or read of such brutality. rape! rape! rape! We estimate at least 1,000 cases a night and many by day. In case of resistance or anything that looks like disapproval, there is a bayonet stab or a bullet. People are hysterical. Women are being dragged off every morning, afternoon, and evening. The whole Japanese army seems to be free to go and come as it pleases, and to do as it pleases.

The soldier Kurusu Tadanobu from the 13th Division testified: We took all the men behind the houses and killed them with bayonets and knives. Afterward, we locked the women and children in an isolated house and raped them during the night. Before we left the next morning, we killed all the women and all the children. The soldier Tadokoro Kozo testified: Women suffered more than anyone. No matter how young or old, none could escape their fate of being raped. We sent coal trucks to the city streets and villages to capture many women. Afterward, each of them was allocated to 15–20 soldiers for intercourse and abuse. After the rape, we killed them too. On November 23, the village of Nanchiantou was set on fire. While many of its residents were locked inside the burning houses, a 17-year-old girl and a pregnant woman were raped repeatedly by soldiers until they could not walk. Afterward, the soldiers forcefully pushed a broom into the girl's vagina and she was bayoneted, and as for the pregnant woman, they cut her abdomen and tore out her fetus. A 15-year-old girl was locked naked in a barracks where about 200–300 soldiers stayed and was raped by them several times a day. A woman in her sixth month of pregnancy was raped and subsequently stabbed 16 times in her face and body. One stab penetrated her uterus and killed her fetus. In another case, a young woman was raped, and subsequently a beer bottle was forcefully pushed into her vagina before she was shot.

Former soldier Shiro Azuma testified openly about the derisive terms they used when choosing which women to rape before slaughtering them: At first, we used some kinky words like Pikankan. 'Pi' means 'buttocks' and 'kankan' means 'look.' Pikankan means 'let's see a woman open her legs.' Chinese women wore pants tied with a cord. There was no belt. Every time we pulled the cord, the buttocks were exposed. We Pikankan. We looked. After a while, we said something like 'it's my day to take a bath' (a phrase describing their rape as a necessary and daily action like bathing), and we raped them each in turn. We always stabbed and killed them because dead bodies do not talk. We were taught that we are a superior race. But the Chinese were not, and therefore there were many acts of rape, and the women were always executed. When they were being raped, the women were human. But the moment the rape ended, they became pork.

In one of the cases, a 5-month-old infant cried while his mother was being raped by a soldier. In response, the soldier intentionally suffocated him so that he could no longer cry while he was raping his mother. In another case, survivor Tang Junshan testified: The seventh and final person in the first row was a pregnant woman. The soldier thought he should rape her before killing her, so he pulled her out of the group to a place about 10 meters away. As he attempted to rape her, the woman resisted fiercely. The soldier suddenly stabbed her in the abdomen with a bayonet. She let out a final scream as her intestines spilled out. Afterward, the soldier stabbed the fetus, whose umbilical cord was clearly visible, and threw it aside. In another case, a 19-year-old pregnant girl, in the middle of her sixth month of pregnancy with her first son, refused to submit to being raped by a soldier, and consequently, she was stabbed multiple times and was left with 19 cuts on her face, eight on her legs, and a deep cut on her abdomen, which led to the killing of her fetus.

On December 15 and 18, a surgeon at the university hospital in the safety zone managed by the United States, Robert O. Wilson, wrote in letters to his family: I could go on and tell of acts of rape and brutality that are almost beyond belief. Last night the home of one of our Chinese university staff members was broken into and two of the women, his relatives, were raped. Two girls about 16 years old were raped to death in one of the refugee camps. At the university middle school, where there are 8,000 people, the Japanese entered ten times last night over the wall, stole food, clothing, and raped until they were satisfied. On December 17, German diplomat John Rabe recorded in his diary: In one of the houses on the narrow street behind my garden wall, a woman was raped and subsequently wounded in the neck with a bayonet. You hear of nothing but rape. Women are carried off every morning, afternoon, and evening. The whole Japanese army seems to be free to go and come as it pleases, and to do whatever it desires.

On December 13, about 30 soldiers arrived at a house on Xing Lu Road, number 5, in the southeastern part of the city of Nanjing, and demanded entry. The door was opened by the homeowner, a Muslim named Ha. He was immediately executed by a pistol shot. The woman, Xia, was dragged out from under a table in the guest hall where she had tried to hide with her one-year-old infant. After she was stripped by them and raped by one or more men, she was bayoneted in the chest, and subsequently a bottle and a stick were pushed into her vagina. The infant was bayoneted to death. Afterward, several soldiers went to the adjacent room, where her parents, aged 76 and 74, and her two daughters, aged 16 and 14, were staying. They were about to rape the girls. The grandmother tried to protect them to no avail. The soldiers executed her and also the grandfather. Afterward, both girls were stripped by them. The elder was raped by two or three soldiers, while the younger was raped by three soldiers. Afterward, the older girl was stabbed, and a stick was forcefully pushed into her vagina. The younger girl was also bayoneted.

On the night of December 14, women in many houses were raped by soldiers on the spot or taken away by them. On the night of December 15, several soldiers entered the buildings of Nanjing University in Tao Yuan and raped 30 women on the spot. Some of them were gang-raped, each of them by six men. On December 16, seven women and girls aged 16–21 were taken from the Military College. Each girl was raped six to seven times a day. Only five of them returned. On January 30, at approximately 17:00, about 540 refugees crowded into buildings number 83 and 85 on Canton Road. More than 30 women and girls were raped there. The women and children cried all through the nights. In another case, a 62-year-old elderly woman went to her home near the Hanzhongmen area, and soldiers came at night wanting to rape her. She told them she was too old, and in response, a stick was forcefully pushed into her body. On December 16, up to 1,000 women and girls were raped, including about 100 girls at Ginling College alone.

2.18 World War II in Europe (1939–1945)

Between September 1939 and May 1945, World War II took place in the European theater. The Allied Powers (including the United Kingdom, the United States, the Soviet Union, and France) fought the Axis Powers (including Nazi Germany and Fascist Italy) on both sides of the continent on the Western and Eastern Fronts. Conflict also existed in the areas of Scandinavia, the Mediterranean, and the Balkans. The war led to the annihilation of at least 39,000,000 human beings and a dramatic shift in the balance of power on the continent. During the 1930s, the leader of Nazi Germany, Adolf Hitler, expanded German territory by annexing all of Austria and the Sudetenland of Czechoslovakia in 1938. The reason for this was, among other things, Germany's racial policy, which believed that the country needed to expand in order for the pseudo-scientific Aryan race to survive. They were aided by Italy, another fascist state led by Benito Mussolini.

On September 1, 1939, the war broke out with the German invasion of Poland. The Soviet Union, led by Joseph Stalin, joined the invasion later that month. They partitioned Poland so that the country was split between the two nations. Days after the invasion of Poland, Poland's allies, France and the United Kingdom, declared war on Germany, but they did not want to enter the actual conflict. This changed only after Germany also invaded Norway, Denmark, France, the Netherlands, Belgium, and Luxembourg. The six countries were occupied, and Germany began two successive aerial bombings of the United Kingdom, known as the Battle of Britain and the Blitz. British Prime Minister Winston Churchill led his country's war effort. Germany also began to carry out the widespread extermination of the Jewish people, known as the Holocaust. In 1940, Italy invaded Greece, and in 1941, Germany invaded Yugoslavia and Greece. Afterward, Germany began to invade the Soviet Union, violating the countries' non-aggression pact, and it declared war on the United States after the Japanese Empire did so. The United States was led by President Franklin Delano Roosevelt.

In 1942, the Soviets stopped another invasion of their country at the Battle of Stalingrad. Meanwhile, the Allies engaged in a campaign of mass bombing of German industrial targets. In 1943, the Allied powers began invading Italy, which led to the fall of Mussolini's regime, but the Germans and Italians loyal to the Axis continued to fight. In 1944, the Allies liberated Rome. In June 1944, the Allied powers began invading German-occupied Western Europe, while the Soviets launched a massive counteroffensive in Eastern Europe in Operation Bagration. Both campaigns were successful for the Allies. In 1945, Roosevelt died and was succeeded by Harry S. Truman. The Soviet Union occupied most of Eastern Europe, including the German capital, Berlin, while Mussolini was hanged and Hitler committed suicide. On May 8, Germany surrendered unconditionally, although fighting continued elsewhere until May 25. On June 5, the Berlin Declaration was signed, declaring Germany's unconditional surrender to the four victorious powers. Capitalist governments were established in Western European countries and Eastern Europe became communist, beginning the Cold War among the former Allied countries. Germany was divided into capitalist West Germany and communist East Germany.

2.18.1 The German Occupation (1939–1945)

During the war, women and girls from the occupied nations were raped en masse by Wehrmacht soldiers (the name of the German army) on a very large scale, particularly among the Slavic peoples in Eastern and Southeastern Europe and among other minorities considered inferior under the racial laws. The army effectively permitted them to rape them. Before partisan women and other women were raped by soldiers, the inscription Whore for Hitler's forces was stamped on their bodies. Soldiers used to brag in detail about how their victims were raped and subsequently annihilated by them. In September 1939, during the invasion of Poland, Jewish women and girls were raped by Wehrmacht soldiers. During the military campaign in Poland, only one soldier was prosecuted by a German court for a case in which women from the Jewish Kaufmann family in the town of Busko-Zdrój were gang-raped by three soldiers, and even then, the German judge did not sentence him for the rape of the women, but for the pollution of the German race called Rassenschande (race defilement), due to his contact with a subhuman, which was considered shameful for the German race as defined by Germany's racial policy. During mass executions carried out mainly by Volksdeutsche Selbstschutz units, and accompanied by Wehrmacht soldiers with the assistance and management of the German military administration, male captives were shot immediately, while female captives (Polish, Ukrainian, Belarusian, and Russian) were first raped and only then shot.

In the Soviet Union, up to 10,000,000 Soviet women were raped by German soldiers. As a result, many of them became pregnant and gave birth to over 1,000,000 children. In the city of Borisov, 36 women and girls were raped by German soldiers and subsequently annihilated by them. Among them was a 16-year-old girl, A. I. Malchukova, who was brutally raped, and subsequently her breasts were amputated, and she was nailed to planks and slaughtered. In the city of Lviv, 32 women who worked in a clothing factory were raped by German soldiers and subsequently annihilated by them in a public park. A priest who attempted to stop them was executed. In another case in the city, Jewish girls were raped by German soldiers, and after they became pregnant, they were annihilated. During the occupation of Serbia by the Axis powers, 772 women were raped by German soldiers. Women were also raped by German soldiers in Yugoslavia. On the Croatian island of Brač, women were raped by German soldiers alongside arson and massacres, as punitive actions for casualties among their soldiers. During the massacre in the village of Distomo in Greece, crowds of local Greek women and girls were brutally raped by German soldiers, and their bodies were mutilated.

During the war, millions of Jews were annihilated by the Germans. One of the primary risks for Jewish women was also being raped. This was a widespread phenomenon. Many of them were brutally raped by them and often subsequently annihilated. They were particularly vulnerable to sexual abuse by their captors. Between half and 80% of the SS (Defense Squadron) soldiers and police units operating in Eastern Europe sexually assaulted Jewish women. There were cases where they were gang-raped repeatedly by groups of SS men until they collapsed on the floor bleeding. Jewish female prisoners underwent sexual abuse by guards in the Auschwitz concentration camp and elsewhere. SS men of all ranks used to push their fingers into the vaginas of beautiful young women. An SS officer, for example, used to stand at the entrance of the gas chamber through which Jews were annihilated and grope the genitalia of the young women who were put into it. Some of the women who were raped became pregnant and underwent forced abortions. Even among those who managed to escape to the forests to seek rescue in partisan units, many were aware that due to being women, they might be raped there as well. The social cohesion within these units sometimes reflected societal perceptions regarding the destination of women, and the roles they received were influenced by this. Consequently, women who were accepted into the partisans were mostly excluded from combat or leadership roles, and they were frequently forced to provide sexual satisfaction to men in these units as retribution for the protection they granted them.

Also on the Western Front, non-Slavic women and girls from Western and Northern nations were raped by German soldiers during the war, even though under the racial laws they were considered less inferior. Many women, including French and Italian women, were raped by them in Czechia, France, Denmark, the Netherlands, and Belgium. In 1940, immediately following the invasion of France, women were raped by Wehrmacht soldiers. From 1944 onward, the number of cases rose, occurring alongside massacres. During the Battle of the Bulge, a 15-year-old Belgian girl was raped by a German soldier from the 2nd Panzer Division in the small town of Hachy in Belgium, while the town's residents were being annihilated by other soldiers. He brutally beat her with a helmet to suppress her resistance. With the German invasion and occupation of Norway, many Norwegian women were raped by German soldiers at gunpoint. During the German occupation of the Netherlands, a woman testified that a Dutch girl was raped before her eyes by a German soldier. Polish girls around the age of 15 who were classified as suitable for forced labor and transported to Germany were raped by German men. Two Polish girls who were subjected to forced labor in the state of Brandenburg in Germany and returned to the city of Kraków in Poland, already in advanced stages of pregnancy, testified that they were raped by German soldiers so frequently that they were unable to perform any of the labor intended for them.

Women were also raped by soldiers of the Italian Army, which was part of the German Axis and participated in the war on the Eastern Front. During the occupation of Greece by the Axis powers, many Greek women were raped by soldiers of the Royal Italian Army, including soldiers from the 24th Infantry Division Pinerolo. Women were also raped by Italian soldiers in Yugoslavia and France. During the war, there was also a phenomenon of women who, in a desperate move, consented to submit to being raped on a permanent basis by a casual man from the occupying forces in order to survive. In November 1941, in accordance with the new racial laws issued by the Nazis, the commander of the 18th Panzer Division ordered that any Russian woman, a subhuman in his words, who came into sexual contact with German soldiers—whether she was raped by them or not—must be transferred to the SS to be executed. Conversely, on February 20, 1942, a decree was issued declaring that any Russian worker or prisoner of war who dared to engage in sexual relations with a German woman would receive the death penalty. During the war, hundreds of Polish and Russian men who maintained relations with German women were found guilty of race defilement and executed. After the war, veterans of the armed forces expressed a rationalization of the rape of women as part of what soldiers were expected to do.

2.18.2 Military German rape Stations (1942–1945)

In 1942, Germany began to establish an extensive system of rape stations throughout most of occupied Europe for the soldiers and officers of the Wehrmacht and the SS moving to and from the front. Women and girls from the occupied nations, particularly from Poland, were forcefully placed in the stations and imprisoned in them so that they could not escape. They were derisively called military brothels (German: Militärbordelle), Wehrmacht brothels (German: Wehrmachtsbordelle), and soldiers' brothels (German: Soldatenbordelle). The leaders of the Wehrmacht decided to establish them to allow soldiers to achieve sexual release. The fear was that if the resource of women's bodies was not available to them, they would be forced to masturbate instead, an action considered unmasculine. The chief field doctor of the Wehrmacht even drew attention to the danger of the spread of homosexuality if they were not established. The second reason was the officials' fear of the continued spread of venereal diseases among the soldiers as a result of the rape of random women. Despite the deep fear of mixing the Aryan race with inferior races, the justification for establishing the stations was based on the claim that Aryan men were anyway already interacting with naked women from inferior races held in the Nazi camps, and they were anyway already raping them, so it was preferable that they rape them in an organized manner. In September 1941, Field Marshal Walther von Brauchitsch even proposed that weekly visits to the stations for all young soldiers should be considered mandatory to allow them to discharge upon their bodies the excess sexual impulses they had accumulated.

The stations were managed by the Wehrmacht. They were mostly established in new buildings, but in the West, they were sometimes established in existing brothels and their extensions, and frequently in hotels confiscated by the Wehrmacht and other buildings. In Eastern Europe, the German army and police began to capture women and girls in the streets of the occupied cities during raids and patrols, in order to imprison them in the stations. These targeted raids were called roundups (Polish: Łapanka; French: rafle). By May 3, 1941, it was reported that the German army and police carried out mass raids in Polish cities, during which young women and girls around the age of 15 were captured and imprisoned in the stations. Despite the Nuremberg Laws that forbade German men from having contact with Jewish women because they were considered subhumans, Jewish women were also imprisoned in these stations. In addition, some prostitutes, mainly in Western Europe, were forced to enter the stations to avoid being sent to a concentration camp.

In 1942, the driver for the Swiss Red Cross delegation, Franz Mawick, wrote in the city of Warsaw about one of the cases where soldiers searched for women and girls to staff the stations: Germans in uniform look intently at the women and girls aged 15 to 25. One of the soldiers pulls out a pocket flashlight and shines it on one of the women, straight into her eyes. The two women turn their pale faces toward us, the first about 30 years old. 'What is this old whore looking for here?' one of the three soldiers laughs. 'Bread, sir,' the woman begs. 'A kick in the ass you get, not bread,' the soldier replies. The owner of the flashlight guides the light again onto the faces and bodies of girls. The younger one is perhaps 15. They open her coat and begin to grope her with their lustful paws. 'This one is ideal for bed,' he says.

By 1942, approximately 500 stations operated throughout occupied Europe, and according to records, at least 34,140 European women and girls from the occupied nations were held in them, along with the female prisoners held in rape stations established within concentration camps. The conditions inside the stations were harsh and brutal. They were open daily between the hours of 14:00 and 20:30. Each soldier who visited a station was allocated 15 minutes to rape one of the women held in the station for a symbolic cost of 3 Reichsmarks. Each woman was raped by up to 32 soldiers every day. The unfortunate women underwent planned medical examinations frequently to ensure that their bodies would not transmit diseases and infections from soldier to soldier. Those who became pregnant as a result, and whose abdomens were already swollen and visibly apparent, were sometimes released; however, out of shame, they did not return to their families.

Yugoslav women were also put into the stations, and a 1941 document was even found in an archive in the city of Osijek in Yugoslavia, discussing plans to establish numerous stations in the city and the sanitation procedures and required regulations to maintain the health of the visitors. In occupied France, even before 1942, the Wehrmacht established a comprehensive bureaucratic system of about 100 new stations based on an existing system of government-controlled brothels. In the city of Paris in France, 22 brothels were confiscated by the Germans and converted into rape stations for their exclusive use. Some of the station owners made a great deal of money by catering to the needs of German officers and soldiers. The soldiers received official visitation cards issued by the Supreme Command of the Wehrmacht Land Forces. In the Soviet Union, women and girls were captured by German forces and imprisoned in the stations. In the city of Smolensk, the German command opened a station for officers in one of the hotels, into which hundreds of women and girls were forced and imprisoned. They were dragged by them through the street by their arms and hair without mercy.

2.18.3 Military German rape Stations in Camps (1942–1945)

In 1942, Germany decided to establish rape stations in the concentration camps for the privileged Aryan prisoners and those sentenced for criminal activity, primarily the Kapos and functionaries, which included the Polish Christian prisoners, to incentivize them to cooperate and increase their productivity. Jewish prisoners were forbidden from using them. Female prisoners from the occupied nations were forcefully put into the stations, taken mainly from the Ravensbrück concentration camp, which was an all-female camp, except in the Auschwitz concentration camp, where they used female prisoners from within the camp. The stations were derisively called camp brothels (German: Lagerbordell) and pleasure divisions (German: Freudenabteilungen). In some of the stations, the inscription Field Whore (German: Feld-Hure) was tattooed on the women's breasts. Some of the women underwent forced sterilization and forced abortions, which frequently led to their death. The stations were mostly built as barracks surrounded by a barbed-wire fence, each containing up to 20 women. In each barracks, there were several small individual rape rooms. As a result of the frequent rape the women underwent, they were often replaced due to exhaustion and illness and were transferred to the Birkenau extermination camp.

In 1942, the first station opened in the Mauthausen concentration camp. On June 30, 1943, a station opened in the Auschwitz concentration camp in Block 24. Many Polish women were held there. On July 15, a station opened in the Buchenwald concentration camp. At the beginning of 1944, a station opened in the Neuengamme concentration camp. In May, a station opened in the Dachau concentration camp. On August 8, a station opened in the Sachsenhausen concentration camp. In the summer of 1943 or on March 25, 1944, a station opened in the Flossenbürg concentration camp. At the end of the summer, a station opened in the Dora-Mittelbau labor camp. The stations were open in the evenings. The prisoners were required to register for a specific day and pay 2 Reichsmarks to rape a woman for 20 minutes, according to a predetermined schedule. An SS man matched each one with the woman he would rape. The stations created a coupon market among Kapos, functionaries, and criminals, since ordinary prisoners were penniless, emaciated, and exhausted, and they avoided exposing themselves to the SS. In addition, the 4th Reichsführer of the organization, Heinrich Himmler, directed that all homosexual prisoners should make mandatory visits to the stations once a week, so that they would experience how pleasurable the resource of women's bodies is, as a conversion therapy for their homosexuality.

2.18.4 Ochota Massacre (1944)

Between August 4 and 25, 1944, the armed assault brigade RONA, which collaborated with the Nazis under the command of Bronislav Kaminski, entered the Ochota district in the city of Warsaw. Residents in the district were annihilated, and at the same time, many women were raped by soldiers. The army initially focused on attacking resistance positions on Grójecka Street, but almost immediately, women from the civilian population on nearby Opaczewska Street began to be raped by soldiers from the army units. Civilians who attempted to hide in cellars throughout the district were annihilated by the army, while women were first raped by soldiers. Subsequently, captured residents were led by soldiers like a herd toward the Zieloniak concentration camp, while being shot and beaten. At the same time, women were repeatedly pulled from the crowd by soldiers and raped by them. Afterward, they were frequently annihilated. On August 5, units also entered the Radium Institute at 15 Wawelska Street, where some of the patients were slaughtered, while many women were first gang-raped by them, a pattern that recurred in other places as well. The soldiers decided that the patients and eight staff members would remain on-site, and the rest of the staff would be marched to the Zieloniak camp. In the evening, nurses who were left behind were gang-raped by them.

2.18.5 Battle of Monte Cassino (1944)

On February 18, 1944, the French Expeditionary Corps, which was part of the Allied forces, under the command of General Alphonse Juin, captured the Monte Cassino area in Italy. The following night, thousands of irregular Moroccan soldiers who served in it within the four regular divisions, referred to as Moroccan Goumiers (French: Goums Marocains), under the command of General Augustin Guillaume, and other colonial French soldiers, began to sweep the surrounding hills, and village after village passed into the control of the Moroccan soldiers. Women and girls were raped en masse by them during the entire campaign. In every town and village captured, mass rape took place. Over 7,000 women and girls were raped in the rural sectors of the southern Lazio region, between the city of Naples and the city of Rome, and including several locations in the Tuscany region: in the communes of Abbadia San Salvatore and Murlo, in the city of Siena, in the towns of Poggibonsi, Radicofani, Colle di Val d'Elsa, and San Quirico d'Orcia, and in the villages of Strove and Gracciano dell'Elsa.

The Moroccan soldiers used to rape women in pairs. Each of them was held by two soldiers on either side, and at the same time was raped by them, vaginally and anally. In many cases, severe damage was caused to their genitalia, rectum, and uterus. Mothers attempted to protect themselves and their daughters in vain. The men who attempted to protect the victims were annihilated. In the Esperia commune, 700 women were raped out of 2,500 residents, and as a result, many were slaughtered. In the Sant'Andrea area, 30 women were raped. A red partisan named Enzo Nizza, who was present at the scene, testified: In Abbadia we counted up to 60 victims of severe violence (rape), which took place before the eyes of their families. One of the victims was comrade Lidia, our liaison. The French command replied to our protests that it is the tradition of their colonial forces to receive such a reward after a difficult battle. In the Vallemaio commune, two sisters were forced to provide sexual satisfaction to a platoon of 200 Moroccan soldiers.

One of the testimonies described the typical manner in which the victims were raped by the Moroccan soldiers: The Moroccan soldiers who knocked on the door that did not open, broke it down, beat Rocca on her head with a musket butt, and caused her to fall to the ground unconscious. She was dragged 30 meters from the house and raped, while her father was dragged and tied to a tree by other soldiers. The terrified onlookers could not help because a soldier remained on guard with a musket aimed at them. The British officer who served on the Monte Cassino front, Norman Lewis, testified: The French colonial troops are running wild again. Every time they capture a town or village, wholesale rape takes place. Recently all the females in the villages of Patrica, Pofi, Isoletta, Supino, and Morolo were raped. In the town of Lenola, which fell to the Allies on May 21, 50 women were raped, but because this number was insufficient, children were raped. In the Castro dei Volsci commune, doctors treated 300 rape victims.

The French officers who watched the unfortunate women being raped by their men did not intervene. When residents reported the acts of rape, the officers shrugged their shoulders and dismissed them with a smile. In the Abbadia commune, residents begged the French commanders to order their Moroccan soldiers to stop raping, but they refused and replied that it is the tradition of their colonial soldiers to receive such a reward after a difficult battle. The victims who were raped were described in Italy as having been Moroccaned (Italian: Marocchinate), because they were raped by Moroccan men, a rape considered particularly brutal. In addition, women were also raped by white officers, non-commissioned officers, and soldiers from all four divisions of the French Expeditionary Corps, some of them Italian speakers like Corsicans who were not present in the platoons of the Moroccan soldiers.

2.18.6 Soviet Occupation in Eastern Europe (1944–1945)

During the war, the Soviet Union occupied and annexed several countries and regions, including: the eastern regions of Poland, Latvia, Estonia, Lithuania, part of eastern Finland, eastern Romania, and the Carpathian Ruthenia region in Czechoslovakia. In every country where Soviet forces passed through and occupied during their advance against Germany and afterward in the years 1944–1945, German, Polish, Hungarian, and Serbian women and girls were raped en masse by them, including in major cities. They were raped by them without any consideration for their age, which ranged from 9 to 80, and occasionally, a grandmother, mother, and granddaughter were raped by them together. In 1945, during the army's winter offensive, the number of women raped by them reached a mass scale. Women were gang-raped by dozens of soldiers. In several districts, literal orgies of rape took place. In the Leszno district, several commanders openly declared that their soldiers effectively needed to rape women to achieve satisfaction. Women were also raped by former Soviet prisoners of war and Soviet civilians who worked for the Soviet military administration in Germany, and frequently wore identical uniforms.

The commander of the Polish militia headquarters in the town of Trzebiatów issued a warning to all Polish women not to go outside unaccompanied so that they would not be raped by Soviet forces. Looting of goods from shops and farms was frequently accompanied by the rape of farmwomen, as in the villages of Zalesie, Olchów, Feliksyn, and Huta Szklana, including their subsequent slaughter in the village of Łagiewniki. For women, moving trains and railway stations were particularly dangerous, as in the city of Bydgoszcz and in the vicinity of the cities of Radom and Legnica. The number of pure Polish women raped in the years 1944–1947 reaches up to 100,000, and even exceeds it. The Soviet forces did not select from among the women who fell into their hands whom to rape along ethnic lines, and they did not distinguish between conquerors and victims. In the Warmia and Masuria regions, both Polish and German women were raped by them indiscriminately. Generally, however, German-speaking women were raped by Soviet forces with greater brutality than women of Slavic origin. As a result of the mass rape, an epidemic of venereal diseases spread throughout the country, infecting about one-tenth of the general population. In the Masuria region, up to half of the women were infected.

In the Pomerania region, mass rape took place. In the city of Kraków, the Soviet entry into the city and its capture were accompanied by a wave of rape of women and girls. Polish men who attempted to rescue them while they were being gang-raped by them were shot. In the Silesia region, Polish women were raped en masse, along with their German counterparts, even after the Soviet front had moved much further west. In the East Prussia province, many ethnic German women, who had been warned in advance by the Germans, fled ahead of the Soviet offensive, leaving the Polish women behind to be raped by them. However, not all of them managed to do so in time. At the end of January 1945, in the town of Iława, which was under the command of the Soviet commander Konstantinov, five German women from the city of Hamburg who attempted to escape were found a few days later naked and dead inside a cellar in a house on Rybaków Street in the town. In March 1945, near the city of Ratibor, 30 women captured in a flax factory were locked in a house in the village of Makowo and gang-raped over a period of time under the threat that if they did not submit to being raped by them, they would be slaughtered. German and Polish women caught in the streets of the cities of Katowice, Zabrze, and Chorzów were gang-raped by soldiers, mostly outdoors.

In March 1945, in the city of Olsztyn, there was hardly a single woman who survived and was not raped by the Soviets, regardless of her age. On April 17, 1945, a Polish woman who worked near the Soviet garrison testified in a letter from the city of Gdańsk that: Because we spoke Polish, we were desired. However, most of the victims there were raped up to 15 times. I was raped seven times. It was terrible. In the city of Gdynia, it was reported that the only refuge for women to avoid being raped was to hide inside cellars throughout the entire day. The month of June 1945 was the worst. A 52-year-old woman from the town of Pińczów, who was gang-raped, testified that two Soviet war veterans returning from the city of Berlin in Germany told her that since they had fought for Poland for 3 years, they had the right to take all the Polish women and rape them. In the town of Olkusz, 12 women were raped within two days. In the Ostrów district, 33 women were raped. On June 25, in a village located near the city of Kraków, a husband and a child were shot to death and subsequently the woman was raped. In another village, a 4-year-old girl was sexually assaulted by two Soviet men. In the first six months of 1945, in the village of Dębska Kuźnia, 268 women were raped.

Polish women who had been transported to Germany for forced labor and former female prisoners returning to the country were raped by Soviet soldiers on a very large scale. In May 1945, through the city of Stargard and the city of Szczecin, there was a mass movement of Poles returning from forced labor in the Third Reich. Along the journey, Polish women were raped by individual soldiers and organized groups. At the end of the war, Yugoslav communist leaders, including the Yugoslav partisan politician Milovan Djilas, protested to the ruler of the Soviet Union, Joseph Stalin, about the mass rape committed by Soviet soldiers who occupied parts of Yugoslavia. Stalin replied to them: Can he (Djilas) not understand a soldier who has crossed thousands of kilometers through blood and fire and death, enjoying himself with a woman? During the war and after it, the survivors remained silent because they could not speak while maintaining their dignity due to the traditional taboo in society.

On February 13, 1945, the Red Army and the Romanian Army, during their advance toward the city of Berlin in Germany, captured the city of Budapest in Hungary, which was defended by Hungarian and German soldiers, and annihilated 38,000 residents. During executions, Hungarian women and girls aged 10–70 were raped en masse by Soviet men. Girls were captured, transported to the Red Army quarters, and imprisoned, where they were raped by them repeatedly and sometimes subsequently annihilated. It is estimated that up to 800,000 Hungarian women were raped by Soviet forces. The rape was so massive that only very few women in Hungary were not raped. As a result, many women became pregnant and were infected with venereal diseases.

2.18.7 Occupation of Germany (1945–1948)

In 1945, the Allied armies invaded and occupied Germany. In the years 1945–1948, during the invasion and subsequent occupation, German women and girls were raped en masse by soldiers from all the advancing Allied armies (Soviet, American, and European). It is estimated that over 2,000,000 women and girls were raped by them. As a result, many women became pregnant. Abortions, which were previously illegal in the country, were temporarily permitted because of this. Many of them died from internal injuries as a result of the brutal rape they underwent. Others died from failed abortions or as a result of contracting venereal diseases that went untreated due to a shortage of medication. Many women who were raped ended their own lives, mainly due to an inability to cope with the trauma. Some were forced to end their lives by their fathers to wipe out the disgrace. Married women who were raped were shot to death by their husbands. Many women who were raped were called Allied whores by soldiers and other German men. They suffered verbal abuse and threats from them in the streets and in their homes. In 1946, the judges at the Nuremberg trials declared that the laws of war apply only to enemy subjects, not to Allies, and therefore the rape of German women was not considered a war crime. For decades, they were ignored due to the prevailing attitude that this was their justified fate since their country was the one that started the war. In Germany, they were silenced because of the shame.

2.18.7.1 Soviet Occupation (1945–1948)

On October 21, 1944, soldiers of the advancing Soviet (Red) Army of the Soviet Union captured the village of Nemmersdorf (currently the settlement of Mayakovskoye) in Germany and massacred the residents. It was one of the first pre-war ethnic German settlements to fall into their hands. All the women who were annihilated were first raped by them. Their ages ranged from 8 to 84. Many women were shot after they were raped. After women were raped, their bodies were crucified. In the farmyard, naked women who had been raped were nailed to a cart in a cross position through their hands. Near a large inn, the Roter Krug, two naked women who had been raped were nailed in a cross position through their hands, each to one of the two doors of a barn.

By 1945, the army had already invaded Germany on a massive scale. From the very first days of the invasion and during the founding of East Germany in the autumn of 1949, and even afterward, German women and girls were raped en masse by Soviet soldiers. The Soviet war correspondent, Natalia Gesse, testified: The Russian soldiers raped every German female from the age of 8 to the age of 80. It is estimated that up to 2,000,000 German women and girls were raped by them. At least 1,400,000 women were raped just in the provinces of East Prussia and Pomerania and in the Silesia region. At least 100,000 women were raped in the city of Berlin, both during the battle and after it, based on an increase in abortion rates in the subsequent months and updated hospital reports. The acts of rape in the city were so extensive that they were called the rape of Berlin. Women were frequently raped also by soldiers from rear units who arrived in subsequent waves.

About half of the unfortunate women were gang-raped by the Soviet forces, repeatedly, some up to 60–70 times. Many of them were brutally and publicly raped by them, including before the eyes of their husbands before both were slaughtered. Some were raped by soldiers of Asian origin and Mongols who fought in the ranks of the Red Army, and were described by them as savage and terrifying. German women were also raped en masse by soldiers of Kazakh origin who were considered particularly cruel. Polish women, including girls, who were liberated from the Nazi concentration camps and those who were held in forced labor on farms and in factories, were also raped by soldiers. About 240,000 of the victims died (about 10,000 women in the city of Berlin). In the years 1945–1946, 3.7% of the infants in Germany were born to mothers who had been raped. In the city of Berlin, about 90% of the women who were raped in 1945 contracted sexually transmitted infections. Files of the Ministry of Internal Affairs and the secret police of the Soviet Union, the NKVD, revealed that the leadership knew about the mass rape, but when they told the ruler of the Soviet Union, Joseph Stalin, that Red Army soldiers were sexually abusing German female refugees, he replied: We lecture our soldiers too much. Let them do as they please. Soldiers continued to rape women until, in the winter of 1947–1948, the Soviet military administration in Germany placed them on guard at posts and camps, effectively separating them from the population. In Austria, in the city of Vienna, between 70,000 and 100,000 women were raped by them.

During the battle for the city of Berlin, women testified: We, the women, continued to make ourselves look as unattractive as possible to the Soviets by smearing our faces with coal dust and covering our heads with old rags. We crowded together in the central part of the cellar, trembling with fear, while some peeked through the low cellar windows to see what was happening in the Soviet-controlled street. We felt paralyzed, (they) appear savage and terrifying. In April 1945, a German woman named Magda Wieland attempted to hide in the cellar of her apartment building. She testified that the first Soviet soldier who found her was a young 16-year-old boy whose origin was from Central Asia. She was captured and raped by him. In May 1945, 12-year-old Hannelore Kohl, who later became the first wife of the former Chancellor of West Germany, Helmut Kohl, was gang-raped by Soviet soldiers and subsequently thrown from a first-floor window. As a result, she suffered a severe back injury that remained for life. She suffered long and severe illnesses due to the trauma she underwent. In 2001, she ended her own lives.

After the war, Soviet veterans recalled their memories of their experiences in Germany. A former army officer testified: We were young, strong, and 4 years without women. And therefore we tried to catch German women. Ten men raped one girl. There were not enough women and therefore we had to take young ones, 12 or 13 years old. If she cried, we put something into her mouth. We thought it was fun. The former marine infantry officer in the East Prussia province, Zakhar Agranenko, wrote cynically in his diary: The Red Army soldiers do not believe in 'individual connections' with German women (hinting that they prefer to gang-raped them). 9, 10, 12 men at a time, they rape them on a collective basis. A telephone liaison in the Red Army testified: When we captured any town, we had the first three days for looting and...(rape). I remember a German woman who was raped lying naked, with a hand grenade between her legs. I did not feel shame. In one of the cases, a lieutenant was described standing to arrange in line a group of soldiers from his unit to organize the gang-rape of a German woman who was lying on the ground. Her hands and legs were already spread out and parted for the first soldier in line.

Aleksandr Solzhenitsyn, who participated in the invasion of Germany, wrote about it in his poem Prussian Nights. In parts of it, he wrote: Ringstrasse 22. It is not burned, only looted and rummaged. A moan near the walls, half-muffled: the mother is wounded, half-alive. The little daughter on the mattress, dead. How many were on him? A platoon, a company perhaps? A girl became a woman, and a woman became a corpse. The mother begged: 'Soldier, kill me!' Accounts of acts of rape are mentioned in the works of other Soviet writers, mainly war memories witnessed by the authors, such as Lev Kopelev, Vladimir Gelfand, Mikhail Koryakov, Evgeny Plimak, David Samoylov, Boris Slutsky, Nikolai Nikulin, Grigory Pomerants, Leonid Rabichev, and Vasily Grossman. The rape of German women by Soviet soldiers was considered a taboo and they were silenced, until after the dissolution of the Soviet Union and East Germany. Children born to women who were raped were called Russian children, and experienced social discrimination for decades.

2.18.7.2 American Occupation (1945–1946)

In 1945, the United States invaded Germany. In the years 1945–1946, during the invasion and subsequent occupation, German women and girls from the ages of 7 to 69 were raped en masse by American combatants and those who arrived immediately after them. Women who became pregnant and gave birth as a result were frequently destitute, and were mostly abandoned to their fate. Based on the number of mixed-race children born during this period, even if only 5% of them were born to mothers who had been raped, and only one out of every 100 women who were raped became pregnant and gave birth, the result is that approximately 190,000 women were raped by American soldiers. Many armed soldiers gang-raped women and children while aiming firearms at them. In the months of January and July, in over a quarter of the cases, they were raped along with many others, side by side. The rate of cases varied from unit to unit depending on the commander's approach. Military personnel used to break into the homes of German families and choose women to rape, while threatening their family members with weapons. Afterward, one or more women were raped by them. After they achieved satisfaction, the entire family was thrown into the street. American soldiers continued to rape German and Austrian women until at least the first half of 1946. In the months of May and June 1946 alone, the bodies of German women were found in American barracks in five instances.

When reports of acts of rape reached the army, officials showed interest only if the soldier who raped was Black and there was a fear that the rape he committed would undermine the status or political goals of the American military administration in Germany. Women were raped en masse by white soldiers as well, against whom no steps were taken in any case. The army introduced a policy of avoiding interaction with the enemy population, but in one sector, for example, a highly prominent commander determined that copulation without conversation does not constitute interaction, meaning that because the women are raped by the soldiers without prior conversation between them, the soldiers are not considered to be interacting with them, and therefore they do not deviate from the policy. The phrase became a motto used by the army's soldiers. In addition, thousands of American soldiers exploited the abundant food supply at their disposal in the face of the hunger and desperate situation of the occupied population, presenting women with two options: to submit to being raped by them or to starve to death. This offer was derisively called Frau bait. The amused soldiers gave them food after they raped them, even though they continued to view them as the enemy, in order to instill in them the realization that their survival was possible only as their prostitutes.

2.18.7.3 A Woman in Berlin (1945)

In 1954, an anonymously published memoir titled A Woman in Berlin (German: Eine Frau in Berlin) appeared, whose author was revealed to be Marta Hillers after her death. The book covers the period between April 20 and June 22, 1945, in the city of Berlin, during the invasion and subsequent occupation of the city by the Red Army. Marta was a blonde German woman in her early 30s who lived in an attic apartment in Berlin. She wrote that upon the Red Army's arrival on her street, a sudden silence fell. The soldiers entered buildings and basement shelters to select women to rape. Women staying with her in the cellar tried desperately to escape them. She attempted to convince the soldiers not to rape them and searched for a commander to beg him to stop the assaults, but her pleas were almost completely ignored.

Ultimately, she was gang-raped by two soldiers outside the cellar. Later, she was raped by soldiers many more times. In one instance, four Soviet soldiers burst into the apartment, and one of them named Petka raped her. Women in the area were raped by Soviet soldiers on a widespread scale. Marta wrote: If a woman and her neighbors go to a Soviet commander to complain about the acts of rape and ask for his help in stopping them, he simply laughs. Many families were desperate to hide their young daughters so that they would not be raped and lose their virginity. Later, a Russian soldier described as elderly entered the apartment and raped her in an especially degrading manner, forcing her mouth open and spitting into it. After Marta was raped by him, vomited, and cried, she realized she had to find a wolf to keep the pack away. She went outside to find a higher-ranking Soviet officer and effectively offer him exclusive access to rape her. Other women made similar decisions, as it was the only alternative for women to avoid being systematically and brutally raped every day by numerous random soldiers.

On the street, she met a lieutenant from Ukraine named Anatol, described as big and strong. He replied to her that he would arrive at the apartment at 19:00. That same night, the soldier Petka also arrived with some of his friends. When Anatol arrived, he was unfazed, and she discovered that his rank meant nothing to the ordinary Soviet soldiers. Over the following days, Anatol returned repeatedly to rape her, thereby creating a taboo among the soldiers that the resource of her body had already been claimed by an officer and belonged to him. However, the taboo was not always effective. Among the many visitors to the apartment, she was also raped by a blonde lieutenant with a limping leg, completely ignoring the taboo with Anatol. On another day, he also brought a major so that he too could rape her. The lieutenant asked her if she liked the major. By this stage, she realized she had no choice given that Anatol had left, and therefore she reluctantly consented to submit to being raped by him in surrender for provisions, food, and protection, effectively becoming his prostitute to survive. In 1959, her memoir was also published in German, but it met with disregard and condemnation in Germany due to the disgrace of a German woman becoming a prostitute for Soviet soldiers. Consequently, Marta refused to publish another edition during her lifetime.

2.18.8 American Occupation in France (1944–1945)

Between June 1944 and May 1945, during the United States invasion and occupation of France, about 4,500 French women were raped by American soldiers, including in the late summer of 1944, shortly after their invasion of the Normandy region. Many women were gang-raped by armed soldiers while firearms were aimed at them. Hundreds of cases of sexual violence were reported in the region. In the Manche department alone, 208 women were raped. Additionally, the commander of the 29th Infantry Division, known as the Blue and Gray Division, Major General Charles Hunter Gerhardt, established a brothel for his soldiers and staffed it with French women so that they could enjoy the resource of their bodies in a more organized manner. It was called the Blue and Gray Corral, mocking the victims as if they were cattle in a corral. In August 1945, the mayor of Le Havre, Pierre Voisin, begged a regional commander, Colonel Thomas Weed, to establish brothels outside his city to reduce the mass rape within the city. Local French men testified: With the Germans, the men had to camouflage themselves, but with the Americans, we had to hide the women.

2.19 World War II in Asia (1941–1945)

In the years 1941–1945, the world war took place in Asia, which is also called the Pacific War and sometimes the Asia-Pacific War or the Pacific theater. It was the second and geographically largest theater in World War II, between the Japanese Empire and the Allies, in East and Southeast Asia, the Pacific Ocean, the Indian Ocean, and the Oceania region. It included the Second Sino-Japanese War and the brief Soviet–Japanese War, and featured some of the largest naval battles in history. In 1937, the war between Japan and the Republic of China broke out with hostilities, following Japan's invasion of Manchuria in 1931, but only beginning in 1941 was it practically considered a theater in World War II, after the United States and the United Kingdom entered the war after being attacked by Japan. In 1940, Japan invaded French Indochina, and in July 1941 it extended its control over the entire territory. Between December 7 and 8, Japan attacked the American naval base at Pearl Harbor in the Hawaii area. In response, the Philippines and the US-controlled islands of Guam and Wake, and the British colonies in the areas of Malaya (now Malaysia), Singapore, and Hong Kong, declared war. The Japanese achieved great success during the next six months, allied with Thailand and conquered these areas (except for the Hawaii area), in addition to the Dutch East Indies colony and the areas of Borneo, New Britain, Burma, the Solomon Islands, Gilbert, and parts of New Guinea.

In May 1942, Japanese and Allied aircraft carriers fought in the Battle of the Coral Sea, resulting in the retreat of a Japanese invasion force toward the city of Port Moresby in Papua New Guinea. In June, Japan invaded the Aleutian Islands. In the central Pacific Ocean, it was defeated in the Battle of Midway, which was considered a major turning point in the war. The Japanese experienced great difficulty replacing their losses in ships and aircraft, while the United States increased the production rate of both. In August 1942, the Allies in the Pacific launched major offenses in the Guadalcanal and New Guinea campaigns. Following them, from June 1943, Operation Cartwheel was launched, which in early 1944 neutralized the major Japanese base in the town of Rabaul in New Britain. By August 1943, Allied forces recaptured the Aleutian Islands, and in November 1943 initiated the campaign in the Gilbert and Marshall Islands which lasted until February 1944. In June, at the Battle of the Philippine Sea, the Japanese fleet suffered heavy damage. The Allied campaign to recapture the Philippines began in October with the Battle of Leyte Gulf, after which the Japanese were unable to continue fighting for the territory and began kamikaze attacks. Between June 1944 and June 1945, the rest of the war was characterized by the Allied strategy of island hopping, with invasions of the Mariana Islands, Palau, Iwo Jima, and Okinawa. This allowed a blockade of the Japanese home islands and the beginning of a strategic air attack campaign that brought extensive urban destruction.

Between April and December 1944, Japan achieved major gains in China in Operation Ichi-Go. In Burma, the Japanese launched an offensive into India, but in July 1944 the campaign reversed and led in May 1945 to its liberation by the Allies. From the beginning of the war, the Allies adopted a Europe first stance, giving priority to Germany. In May, following the surrender of Germany, Allied forces were transferred to the Pacific Ocean in preparation for a planned invasion of Japan in Operation Downfall. However, it was not needed after the United States dropped atomic bombs on the cities of Hiroshima and Nagasaki on August 6 and 9, 1945, and the Soviet invasion of Manchuria on August 9. On August 15, Japan surrendered unconditionally, and on September 2, it signed an instrument of surrender that ended World War II. It lost its former possessions in Asia and the Pacific, and until 1952 remained occupied by the Allies.

2.19.1 The Japanese Occupation (1939–1945)

Women and girls in occupied countries and territories were raped en masse and frequently by the Japanese armed forces. At the beginning of the initial Japanese invasion and occupation, white women and children were raped by them in Indonesia, in places such as the cities of Bandung, Padang, and Manado, in the town of Blora, and on the islands of Tarakan and Flores. During the initial invasion of the Dutch East Indies colony (now Indonesia), many Indonesian and European women and girls were raped by soldiers. Women were raped en masse between the battles from the city of Shanghai to the city of Nanjing. In Burma, Indian Tamil women and girls who were forced to work on the railway were raped by soldiers, and as a result, soldiers contracted venereal diseases such as chancroid, syphilis, and gonorrhea. Additionally, Vietnamese women were forcefully married to Japanese soldiers, gave birth to many children with them, and were abandoned after the soldiers returned to Japan in 1955. Official Vietnamese historiography viewed these children as children of rape and prostitution. The expected fate of Chitty girls to be raped by Japanese soldiers led their family members to stop the practice of endogamy and allow Eurasian, Chinese, and pure-blooded Indian men to marry them in the hope that marriage would protect them.

2.19.2 Bangka Island Massacre (1942)

On February 12, 1942, the Sarawak Royal Yacht attempted to escape the city of Singapore, just before it fell to the Imperial Japanese Army. On board were Australian and British service personnel, and 65 medical nurses in the Australian Army who served in the 2/13th General Hospital. The ship was bombed by Japanese aircraft and sank. About 100 survivors reached Radji Beach on Bangka Island, in the Dutch East Indies (now Indonesia), via lifeboats, including 22 nurses. The nurses treated the wounded and a large Red Cross sign was set up.

On February 16, in the mid-morning, a vessel carrying an officer and about 20 Japanese soldiers arrived at the island. They saw the nurses and decided to rape them. First, however, all the wounded men capable of walking were marched by them to one of the areas on the island and annihilated. Subsequently, wounded soldiers remaining on stretchers were also annihilated. After the nurses heard rapid bursts of gunfire, the soldiers returned to them, sat down in front of them, and cleaned their bayonets and rifles, and afterward, they raped most of them. After the soldiers achieved satisfaction, a machine gun was set up on the beach and the officer ordered them to enter the deep water. When the water reached approximately their waists, they were shot to death by them. All were slaughtered except for Nurse Bullwinkel. She was shot in the diaphragm and lay motionless in the water until the Japanese left. Due to the shame, for nearly 80 years, the details that the Australian nurses were first raped by the soldiers were silenced. Bullwinkel was not permitted by the Australian government to speak about it.

2.19.3 Manila Massacre (1945)

Between February 3 and March 3, 1945, during the Battle for the City of Manila in the Philippines, the Imperial Japanese Navy, led by the Japanese Commanding Admiral, Sanji Iwabuchi, the Japanese Command General, Tomoyuki Yamashita, and his Chief of Staff Akira Muto, decided on a mass annihilation of the residents. Because so many women were raped by them during the annihilation, the massacre is also called the rape of Manila (Filipino: Paggahasa ng Maynila). Between 100,000 and 500,000 residents were annihilated, including women and children. During the annihilation, Filipino women and girls were gang-raped by them repeatedly.

In one of the cases, soldiers entered a shelter where women, infants, and children were hiding. Infants and children were stabbed with bayonets while their mothers begged for mercy. Women were first raped by them. A young girl was raped by at least 20 soldiers before her breasts were amputated. Afterward, one of the soldiers placed her amputated and mutilated breasts on his own chest to mimic a woman and mock the appearance of women's bodies, which he viewed as shameful, while the rest of the soldiers laughed. Subsequently, they doused the young girl in gasoline, along with two other women whom they had raped to death, and set all three on fire. The soldiers proceeded to set the entire shelter on fire and annihilated many of its occupants. Women who attempted to escape the burning building were captured by the soldiers and raped by them. For example, after 28-year-old Julia Lopez was captured, her breasts were amputated, and afterward she was raped by soldiers and her hair was set on fire. Another woman's head was partially severed while she attempted to defend herself; she was subsequently raped by a soldier. On February 10, women were raped at the nurses' home of the Philippine General Hospital. On February 12, a massacre took place at De La Salle College during which 41 of its occupants were annihilated and two women were raped. A soldier decided to rape the body of one of the women as well. Filipino civilians who attempted to escape were captured and annihilated, while pregnant women were slaughtered by having their abdomens ripped open.

Additionally, 400 women and girls from the wealthy Ermita district were rounded up and transported to a selection committee that chose from among them the 25 women and girls considered to be the most beautiful. Those selected by it, many of them aged 12–14, were transported to the Bayview Hotel, which was converted into a rape center, where they were raped by Japanese enlisted men and officers, each in turn. Over 400 women were raped in this hotel, in the Alhambra Apartments, in the Miramar Apartments, and in the Manila Hotel. All of these are located in the Ermita district of the city.

2.19.4 Military Japanese rape Stations (1938–1945)

During the war, the Japanese Army and Navy established through a governmental system about 2,000 military rape stations within the army camps on the front line, and imprisoned in them women and girls from the occupied countries and territories throughout the Far East, so that soldiers would rape them in an organized manner. Correspondence within the military indicates that one of the objectives was to reduce the spread of venereal diseases among the soldiers by conducting routine medical examinations of the victims. The stations were mockingly called comfort stations (transliterated: Ianjo), and the unfortunate women comfort women (Japanese: 慰安婦; transliterated: ianfu), because their bodies afforded the soldiers so much pleasure that in their amused eyes, it comforted them for the hardships of the war. In the official records of the Army and Navy, they were called military supply, female ammunition, and war supply units as they were transported to the stations. Their bodies were also mockingly referred to as public toilets by the Japanese men due to their use in satisfying the physical needs of numerous soldiers.

In the years 1938–1945, between 360,000 and 410,000 women and girls were held in the stations. Most were young, and a significant percentage were minors. Most were from Korea, China, the Philippines, Thailand, Burma, Indonesia, and Vietnam. Others were from Timor, Malaya, Taiwan, Manchukuo, Micronesia, French Indochina, the Dutch East Indies, New Guinea (including several mixed-race Papuan-Japanese women), and other occupied countries and territories. About 400 Dutch women and girls captured in Dutch colonies were also imprisoned in the stations, along with other European women and girls, primarily from Australia. The stations were established in North and South Korea, Manchukuo (now Northeast China), Japan, the Philippines, China, Indonesia, Malaya, Vietnam, Cambodia, Thailand, Burma, Taiwan, French Indochina, the Hong Kong and Macau region, and the islands of New Guinea, Sakhalin, and the Kurils. The stations were ordered and supported by the Army and Navy authorities, and managed directly or through private agents. The military police were responsible for supervision in various parts of China and on the island of Java in Indonesia. The stations were so widespread that the military offered accounting classes on how to manage them and determine the rate of attrition or actuarial durability of the women held in them.

From the very early stages of the war, when Japan began to expand militarily, the authorities began to capture women and imprison them in the stations. Young women and girls were captured in their homes. Personnel from the Naval Military Police captured women in the streets and imprisoned them in the stations after conducting forced medical examinations on them. Women were also transferred to the stations through deception, false promises of jobs and pay to help alleviate family debts—such as working as factory workers and nurses—or ostensibly to acquire higher education. The military enforced quotas and frequently ordered local leaders directly to provide women for the stations along the front lines, particularly in rural areas where brokers were rare. In China, in cases where locals did not provide the soldiers with what they wanted, they executed the Three Alls Policy, which meant capturing and raping women indiscriminately, while simultaneously annihilating everyone, burning everything, and looting everything. The women chosen to be taken to the stations were separated from their family members and were often first forced to watch them being annihilated by soldiers. A survivor testified that when the soldiers took her, they had already begun to skin her father while he was alive. Women whose family members fought against the Japanese were targeted for imprisonment in the stations by military forces, such as the Naval Military Police, Tokkotai, which captured women and imprisoned them in stations on the fronts in China, Indochina, and Indonesia after their fathers dared to attack the military police, the Kempeitai.

The unfortunate women were held in filthy stations without toilets, water, and laundry facilities, and were not provided with a sufficient amount of food. The stations also led to the spread of venereal diseases. The women who were first brought to the stations and initially screamed and attempted to resist were usually taken immediately to be raped like everyone else, so that they would learn firsthand that their resistance was futile anyway, which completely shattered their spirit and forced them into a reluctant resignation to their fate. On ordinary days, they were brutally raped by 10 men daily, while being repeatedly beaten by them, particularly when they dared to try to resist them, and up to 40 men on days following a battle. They were held for about 3 years on average in the stations, and therefore it is estimated that each of them was raped about 7,500 times. Women who attempted to escape or dared not submit to being raped by the soldiers underwent torture. They were forbidden even from ending their own lives because their bodies were considered an essential resource in the war. Girls who nevertheless attempted to end their lives had their family members threatened with punishment.

Many women died as a result of the brutal and continuous rape they underwent. Consequently, women held in the stations were replaced by other women with high frequency. In many cases, those who became terminally ill were cast out of the stations to die alone. Most of the survivors became sterile at exceptionally high rates, as a result of the damage caused to their vaginas after being raped numerous times, or as a result of venereal diseases and the injections of Salvarsan they routinely received. The unfortunate women received no medical treatment except for venereal diseases, and that too was intended only to ensure that their bodies would not transmit diseases from soldier to soldier. They also underwent sterilizations and abortions to ensure that the resource of their bodies would continue to meet production capacity. The women were frequently raped also by the military doctors and medical workers themselves while being examined by them.

At least 80% of the women held in the stations were Korean, and they were intended for those of lower ranks. Up to 75% of them died as a result of the frequent rape they underwent. European women, on the other hand, were intended for the officers, because the resource of their bodies was considered more enticing. In 1942, about 800 women were trafficked from Korea to Burma under the pretext that they were being brought to visit wounded people in hospitals or to roll bandages. The vast majority of the girls imprisoned in the stations were from poor families. Privileged men or officials who agreed to surrender to Japan did not have their daughters imprisoned in the stations as a reward for their loyalty, unless they or their families dared to show signs of independent tendencies. In Korea, the Army and Navy frequently outsourced the task of capturing girls and transporting them to the stations to subcontractors, who were usually connected in some way to organized crime groups that were paid for them. In Korea, a traditional Confucian society, a woman engaging in sexual relations outside of marriage is considered a disgrace, and therefore the Korean girls imprisoned in the stations were almost always virgins. The military viewed this as the best way to ensure that the bodies of the unfortunate women would not infect the soldiers with venereal diseases, thereby limiting the spread of venereal diseases that would disable the capacity of soldiers and sailors.

In one of the cases, Korean women were purchased by a Japanese station manager for 300 to 1,000 yen, depending on the degree of enticement attributed to the resource of their bodies. They were imprisoned in his station, became his property, and were not released even after completing the terms of enslavement detailed in the contract. A Korean woman named Kim Hak-sun, who was imprisoned in a station in 1941, testified that she was raped 30 to 40 times every day, every day of the year. She added: When I was 17 years old, the Japanese soldiers came in a truck, beat us (her and her friend), and then dragged us into the back of the truck. On the first day I was raped, and the rape never stopped. I feel sick when I get near a man. Not just Japanese men, but all men, even my husband. I tremble every time I see a Japanese flag.

In the Dutch East Indies colony (now Indonesia), the military police established the stations and imprisoned women in them, including hundreds of European women and possibly even more. Several women were also forcefully placed into the homes of officers and compelled to become their comfort slaves. They were considered fortunate because each of them was routinely raped by only one man. On the island of Java, many Muslim women and girls, including about 1,000 women and girls from East Timor, were imprisoned by soldiers in stations and raped by them. Some of them were transported to stations in other areas. Common destinations included eastern Indonesia, Thailand, Burma, Malaya, the island of New Guinea, and other areas outside the colony. Many of them were girls aged 14–19, including from prominent upper-class families, whose fathers were deceived by being told that they were being taken to receive an education in the city of Tokyo in Japan or in Singapore, or to work as waitresses and actresses. Several women were also transported from Flores Island. On Flores Island, all the Indonesian women and girls held in the stations were raped by 23 men daily, including an officer, two non-commissioned officers, and 20 soldiers. Each one was destined to be raped by 100 men weekly, and received from each a ticket that she was ordered to present as proof that her body was meeting production capacity. The Indonesian Muslim girl from Java, Siti Fatima, testified that she was taken to the city of Tokyo on the false promise that she would study there, and instead was taken to be raped at one of the military stations on Flores Island.

In Bali province, upon the arrival of the Japanese, women were sexually assaulted by them and subsequently imprisoned in stations until all stations in the province were staffed. Dutch women were intended only for the officers because the resource of their bodies was considered more enticing. About 400 Dutch girls, along with other European girls, were taken from refugee camps and imprisoned in stations. Sixty-five women were forced into them. Others facing hunger in the camps agreed to offers of food and payment for work whose nature was not fully revealed to them. Some sacrificed themselves to protect the younger ones. The Dutch girls were raped day and night, and were routinely beaten by them. In the town of Blora, 20 European women and girls were imprisoned in two houses. Over a period of 3 weeks, the women and their daughters were brutally raped by soldiers, repeatedly, as their units passed near the houses.

In February 1944, senior Japanese officers arrived at an abandoned military prisoner-of-war camp in the town of Ambarawa on Java Island. They ordered all young women from the age of 17 to stand in a line so that they could select from among them those with the most enticing bodies for the stations. Ten young women were selected, including the 21-year-old Irish-descended Dutch-Australian woman, Jan Ruff-O'Herne. Ruff-O'Herne and six other young women were taken by officers to a military station in an old Dutch building in the city of Semarang. On the first morning, they were photographed, and the photographs were placed on the veranda, which served as a reception area, so that military personnel could, while waiting for their turn, choose which of them they wished to rape. Over the next four months, the young women were systematically raped and beaten by them day and night, and those who became pregnant underwent forced abortions. Ruff-O'Herne attempted to resist every time she was raped, but to no avail. She even cut her hair so that her body would not entice the soldiers, but this achieved the opposite result because her body intrigued them even more.

After the war, the victims, including Ruff-O'Herne, and many of the parents of the young girls who estimated that their daughters were held in the stations, remained silent for decades due to the shame. Ruff-O'Herne maintained her silence until 1992. On February 15, 2007, she testified: One story has never been told, the most shameful story: the story of the 'comfort women,' and how these women were forcefully taken against their will to provide sexual services to the Imperial Japanese Army. I can never forget. At the 'comfort station,' they beat me and raped me systematically day and night. Even the Japanese doctor raped me every time he visited to examine us to detect venereal disease. For fifty years, the 'comfort women' maintained silence. They lived in terrible shame. With a feeling of being dirtied and soiled.

In the Philippines, about 1,000 women and girls were imprisoned in the stations, some as young as 12. The stations were deployed throughout the country inside and outside military bases, from the northern region of the Cagayan Valley to the Davao region in the south. In the town of San Ildefonso, in a residential house for soldiers called The Red House (transliterated: Bahay na Pula), young women were held and forced to become comfort slaves. The survivor, Narcisa Claveria, who was held in one of the stations at the age of 13 for 18 months, testified that during the day the women were forced to cook, clean, and do laundry for the soldiers, and every night they were raped by them. Another survivor, Fedencia David, who was put into a station by soldiers when she was 14 years old, was forced to wash clothes and cook for them, and every night she was raped by 5 to 10 soldiers.

On the island of New Guinea, Melanesian women were also imprisoned in the stations. Women were transported to the stations from the town of Rabaul (now in the Papua New Guinea region), along with several mixed Papuan-Japanese women born to Japanese fathers and Papuan mothers. The Australian captain, David Hutchinson-Smith, testified that young Papuan-Japanese girls were also held in the stations. During the period of the island's occupation, 16,161 Papuan women from the island were held in the stations and raped by soldiers. The prisoner of war Gordon Thomas, who was held in the town of Rabaul, wrote in his diary that every woman was apparently raped by 25 to 35 men daily. A Japanese naval surgeon named Kentaro Igusa, who was stationed in the town, wrote in his memoirs that the women were ordered to wash their genitalia after each time they were raped, so that they would be clean for use by the next military personnel in line. Some of them were unable to wash them effectively, partly due to lack of experience, and they contracted venereal diseases, until their genitalia were so swollen that they cried and begged for help in vain. They continued to rape them despite their infection and severe discomfort.

In Malaya, Muslim girls were imprisoned in stations to be raped by soldiers. A Malay woman who was raped and imprisoned in one of the stations testified: (I was) like an animal, they did to me exactly as they pleased. I had to obey their orders until submission. In East Timor, girls who had not even menstruated yet were also imprisoned in the stations. These girls were raped repeatedly by soldiers. Anyone who dared to refuse to submit to being raped by them was slaughtered. In China, in the occupied city of Shanghai, the army opened stations for the soldiers. In northern Hebei Province, Hui Muslim girls were transferred to the Hui Girls' School under the false promise that they would receive training as entertainers, but they were imprisoned and forced to become comfort slaves. In Taiwan, over 2,000 women were imprisoned in stations by the army, more than half of whom were minors. About 100 Micronesian women from the Truk Lagoon in the Caroline Islands were also imprisoned in the stations.

The survivor Suki Falkenberg, who was imprisoned in one of the stations, testified: Serial penetration by many men is not an easy form of torture. Just the tears at the opening of the vagina feel like fire on a cut. Your genitalia become swollen and bruised. The damage to the uterus and other internal organs can also be immense. Being used as a public dumping ground by those men left me with a deep shame that I still feel at the bottom of my stomach. It is a hard, heavy, and sick feeling that never completely disappears. They not only saw my completely naked and helpless body, but (also) heard me begging and crying. They turned me into something low and disgusting that suffered severely before them. Even years later, it requires immense courage for me to put these words on the page, so deep is the cultural shame.

The Army and Navy distributed numerous condoms to units for free, in order to allow soldiers to rape the unfortunate women without the fear that their bodies would transmit venereal diseases from soldier to soldier. The condoms were branded under the name Attack No. 1, out of a perception of the male genitalia as the most formidable weapon of war, and the bodies of the unfortunate women as territory they were conquering in their amused eyes. The decision whether to use condoms was exclusively the soldiers', while the women had no ability to resist when they were raped by soldiers who did not wear them. In July 1943, in Malaya, the army distributed 1,000 condoms to soldiers in the state of Negeri Sembilan, and another 10,000 to soldiers in the state of Perak. As the war continued and due to the shortage resulting from the sinking of almost the entire Japanese merchant fleet by American submarines, the medical treatment of the victims in the stations was neglected, because the running-out medical supplies were reserved for service personnel. Since Japanese ships were sunk one after another by American submarines, Japanese logistics collapsed, and therefore it was decided to wash condoms and reuse them, which reduced their effectiveness. Women were ordered, after being raped by military personnel, to clean their semen fluids from the condoms they wore, and keep them for the next soldiers in line.

Before military forces fled from lost battles with Allied forces, they annihilated Korean female captives held in the stations because they no longer had a need for the resource of their bodies. In the years 1944–1945, during the final stand of the Japanese forces, women held in the stations were often annihilated or forced to end their own lives. In the Truk Lagoon in Micronesia, 70 women were annihilated before the expected American offensive after the Navy mistakenly viewed the American airstrike as a prelude to their landing. In Burma, Korean women held in the stations were annihilated by hand grenades thrown into the trenches where they were kept, and some by swallowing cyanide pills given to them. During the Battle of Saipan, women held in the stations seized the opportunity and ended their own lives by jumping from cliffs. Women held in stations in Burma and the Pacific islands were slaughtered so that their bodies would provide food for the starving army soldiers who were cut off on remote islands in the Pacific or trapped in the jungles of Burma. Because the unfortunate women were held in stations established in army camps on the battlefields, many of them were also annihilated by Allied forces while they were overcoming the defense of the Pacific and destroying Japanese camps.

After the conquest of Java Island, Allied forces such as the Dutch and Australians permitted the Japanese forces to continue controlling the population, and to rape Muslim Indonesian women on the island en masse. The Dutch men themselves had raped Indonesian women for centuries, including keeping them in military stations for Dutch soldiers. After the war, for decades, survivors did not tell their family members that they were held in the stations, to hide from them the degradation they underwent. In Confucian cultures such as China and Korea, where sex before marriage is considered shameful, the survivors were ignored and ostracized for decades after the war. Traditionally in these cultures, an unmarried woman must value her chastity above her life, and any woman who loses her virginity before marriage for any reason is expected to end her own life. The choice of the victims to continue living made them outcasts. In 2012, the former mayor of Osaka and co-leader of the Japan Restoration Party, Toru Hashimoto, declared that the role of the women imprisoned in the stations against their will was necessary in the war, because between battles, soldiers need to rest, as he put any it, upon the bodies of women. In the years following the war, many Korean women feared revealing that they were held in the stations, so that they would not be disowned and further ostracized.

2.19.5 Soviet Invasion of Manchuria (1945)

Between August 9 and 20, 1945, Soviet forces invaded and occupied Manchuria and the northern part of the Korean Peninsula, which were under Japanese control. During the invasion and subsequent occupation, Japanese women and girls were raped en masse by Soviet soldiers and their Mongolian allies, such as in the city of Harbin. They raped them frequently with the encouragement and even participation of the local Chinese population who opposed the Japanese occupation. In Manchukuo, women were raped repeatedly by soldiers daily, including 75 medical nurses who worked at the Sunwu Military Hospital and girls whose family members worked for the military and on the railway at the airfield in the city of Bei'an. During the occupation, forces entered the Bei'an airfield daily, where about 1,000 Japanese refugees were staying, to rape their girls. Every day they selected 10 girls. Those selected were raped by them repeatedly. The Soviets rejected all pleas from Japanese officers to stop the rape, replying to them that they must hand over their women to be raped because they were their spoils of war. In the town of Gegenmiao, currently called Gegenmiao Zhen (Japanese: 葛根廟鎭), women and children were raped by soldiers. Sometimes the soldiers also raped their bodies after they slaughtered them. Soviet forces previously stationed in the city of Berlin received permission from the Red Army to enter the city of Shenyang for 3 days of rape.

During the Gegenmiao massacre, over 1,000 women and children were raped and annihilated by soldiers and armed local Chinese rioters. In another case, a Japanese woman was raped by residents after her child was slaughtered by soldiers. Another woman, whose child was also slaughtered by soldiers, was stripped of all her clothes by residents and her breasts were amputated with a sickle. On August 14, women from a group of families attempting to escape their settlements, with local leader Yamada Tami, toward the city of Mudanjiang, were raped by soldiers. On August 15, another group of women attempting to escape to the city of Harbin, along with local leader Ikeda Hiroko, and who ultimately returned to their settlements, was raped by soldiers. In the northern part of the Korean Peninsula, Japanese and Korean women were also raped by Soviet soldiers. Many Japanese women married local Manchurian men (mainly Chinese) in the hope that they would protect them from Soviet soldiers. They were left behind and became known in Japan as abandoned war wives (transliterated: zanryu fujin).

2.19.6 Battle of Okinawa (1945)

Between April and June 1945, Allied forces invaded and occupied the island of Okinawa. During the war, Japan frequently warned its residents that if the country were defeated, all Japanese women would first be raped by Allied soldiers and only then would they be slaughtered by them; therefore, soldiers and civilians in occupied areas were to obey orders to fight to the death or end their own lives. As a result, in July 1944, women on Saipan Island ended their lives in mass suicides, including jumping from Banzai Cliff and Suicide Cliff. Upon the landing of the US Marines on the island, they swept the entire village on the Motobu Peninsula. All the young men had been mobilized for the war, and therefore they found only women, children, and the elderly. Taking advantage of the situation, they began hunting women in broad daylight to rape them. Those hiding in the village or nearby shelters were dragged out one after another, and within a short time, all the women of the village fell into their hands. Up to 10,000 Okinawan women were raped by the invading soldiers and those who landed later as part of the occupation.

The rape was so widespread that most residents of the island knew or had heard of a woman who was raped. Many women were raped with merciless brutality, and as a result, some were left with severe physical injuries. In fact, it was not only Japanese women who were raped by soldiers, as it was enough to be a woman of East Asian appearance to be deemed worthy of being raped by them, as happened, for example, to several Korean comfort slaves whom the Japanese had forcefully transported to the island. During the battle, Okinawan women were also raped by Japanese soldiers who viewed the Okinawans as inferior, similar to the Chinese and Koreans. They knew there was a slim chance they would survive due to the military's prohibitions against surrendering, and therefore they chose to enjoy the resource of their bodies before their death.

In one instance, men of the 4th Marine Regiment marched south and passed a group of about 10 soldiers gathered together in a tight circle near the road. A corporal marching with them testified that the soldiers looked quite enthusiastic and assumed they were playing craps (dice gambling), and then as we passed them, I could see they were raping an Asian woman, each in turn. Our crew continued to march as if nothing unusual had happened. In another case, three African-American Marines aged 19–20, Private James D. Robinson, Private John M. Smith, and Private Isaac Stokes, routinely went every week to the village of Katsuyama. They ordered the residents each time to gather all the local women so they could rape them in a weekly ritual in their amused eyes. After the women were gathered through violence, they were forcefully taken to the nearby hills and raped by them. Some of the women who were raped became pregnant and gave birth to biracial children. Others became pregnant, but they did not give birth to children because they were annihilated immediately after they were raped or they underwent abortions under field conditions by village midwives—some even before their husbands returned from the war. Others were left behind due to the shame. Almost all the survivors maintained silence due to shame and fear, and their rape was kept as a dirty secret. Reports of acts of rape that were received were largely ignored by the military police. Over 5 decades after the end of the war, women who were raped still did not dare to speak.

2.19.7 Occupation of Japan (1945–1952)

On August 15, 1945, Japan announced its surrender. The Japanese were well aware of the history during which Imperial Japanese troops had raped the women and daughters of the defeated in China and elsewhere, and assumed that the Allied occupation troops would behave similarly. Consequently, the Japanese government and the governments of several prefectures issued warnings to women calling on them to remain in their homes and with men who would protect them. The police in Kanagawa Prefecture, where the Americans were expected to land first, called on young women and girls to flee the area. Several prefectural authorities called on women to end their own lives before they were about to be raped, and if that was not possible, then immediately after they were raped. They called for the implementation of moral and spiritual education to enforce this directive. Upon the arrival of the occupation forces, women began to be raped en masse by them. During the Okinawa campaign and the beginning of the American occupation, thousands of women in the Ryukyu Islands were raped by soldiers. In the first month, at least 3,500 women were raped by them. During the first weeks of the occupation, in seaports such as the cities of Yokosuka and Yokohama, women were frequently raped. When American paratroopers landed in the city of Sapporo, women were gang-raped by them, and subsequently, some ended their own lives. Japanese women who begged for food were raped. Sometimes they received food from soldiers after they were raped by them.

On April 4, 1946, close to midnight, about 50 soldiers arriving in three trucks attacked the Nakamura Hospital in the Omori district to rape the women who were there. Upon hearing a whistle blow, which was the signal for them that they could begin raping them, they raped over 40 patients and about 37 female staff members for an hour. One of the women was holding her two-day-old infant. The infant was thrown onto the floor and was killed as a result, and subsequently, the mother was raped by them. Male patients who attempted to protect the women were slaughtered. On April 11, between 30 and 60 American soldiers cut the telephone lines to a residential block in the city of Nagoya, and at the same time raped many women and girls aged 10–55 who were there, without disruption. In another case, a 10-year-old girl from the city of Tokyo was raped to death by two soldiers. Her body was found severely torn in a car after losing a great deal of blood. A significant amount of blood had accumulated in the back seat, where a blood-soaked undershirt was also found. In the cities of Yokosuka and Tateyama, many women who were alone in their homes were raped by soldiers at gunpoint or under the pretense that they had come to give them money. Even in government offices and other public places, women who were alone were raped. In the city of Musashino, elementary school girls were gang-raped.

Women were also raped by personnel of the British Commonwealth Occupation Force (BCOF) stationed in Japan, which included Australian, British, Indian, and New Zealand troops. Women were frequently raped by Australian soldiers. A survivor testified: Most people in Kure remained inside their houses and pretended to know nothing about the rape by the occupation forces. The Australian soldiers were the worst. They dragged young women into their jeeps, took them to the mountain, and raped them. I heard them screaming for help almost every night. An officer in the Australian Army, Allan Clifton, who served as an interpreter and investigator, testified: I stood by a hospital bed. On it lay an unconscious girl, her long, wild hair scattered over the pillow. A doctor and two nurses were working to revive her. An hour before, she had been raped by 20 soldiers. We found her where they had left her, on an abandoned plot of land. The hospital was in Hiroshima. The girl was Japanese. The soldiers were Australian. Her groans and wails ceased and she was quiet now. The contortions of agony on her face disappeared, and her soft, brown skin was smooth and unwrinkled, stained with tears like the face of a child who cried until she fell asleep.

During the first ten days of the occupation of Kanagawa Prefecture, it was reported that 1,336 women were raped. In September 1945, in the city of Yokohama, it was reported that 119 women were raped. On September 3, for example, a woman was gang-raped by 27 soldiers. In 1946, it was reported that 301 women were raped. In 1947, it was reported that 283 women were raped. In 1948, it was reported that 265 women were raped. In 1949, it was reported that 312 women were raped. In 1950, it was reported that 208 women were raped. In 1951, it was reported that 125 women were raped. In 1952, it was reported that 54 women were raped. However, all these figures represent only a small fraction because they refer only to reported cases. Almost all the victims did not report out of shame and fear. Cases that were reported were censored and silenced by the military or were not treated severely. With the start of the occupation, the Japanese press reported on cases for two weeks, to which the Supreme Commander for the Allied Powers and the American authorities responded with extensive and immediate censorship of all Japanese media on September 10, which included press laws and pre-censorship prohibiting the publication of acts of rape by the occupation forces, including all reports and statistics, and even mentioning the existence of the censorship itself. The censorship continued until the end of the occupation in 1952.

2.19.7.1 Forced Military Brothel Facilities (1945–1946)

In 1945, a defeated Japan anticipated that Japanese women and girls would be raped en masse by Allied forces during the occupation. Consequently, on August 21, the government moved swiftly to establish a vast network of military brothel facilities. Into these facilities, they placed women and girls who were already marginalized or viewed as stigmatized by society—such as existing sex workers or those who had already suffered assaults—to satisfy over 300,000 Allied troops, thereby attempting to shield the wider population of women and girls from violence. These facilities were set up in areas where occupation troops were stationed. Government officials referred to the women held there as patriotic dams preventing mass rape and protecting national chastity. In a ceremony attended by bureaucrats and police officials, the following oath was read: Through the sacrifice of thousands of 'Okichis of our time,' we are building a breakwater to halt the raging waves and to protect and nurture the purity of the race. The name was derived from Okichi, a maidservant to the first American consul in Japan, Townsend Harris (who served from 1856 to 1861), who was historically romanticized or viewed as having been forced to sacrifice herself for a foreign official.

The Japanese government established the Recreation and Amusement Association (Japanese: 特殊慰安施設協会; transliterated: Tokushu Ian Shisetsu Kyōkai) to manage the facilities, bringing around 55,000 women into the system. These venues were euphemistically called comfort stations or comfort facilities, and the women were referred to as comfort women, under the premise that they provided relief to the occupation forces. Lower-class women were heavily funneled into these facilities to buffer women of higher socioeconomic classes. The coordination between police and medical authorities in regulating these designated districts left those trapped within the system with few options for escape, and many struggled with severe trauma, sometimes leading to self-harm.

From the beginning of the occupation, certain Allied military officials cooperated with the system; in September 1945, some local American commanders requested that the Japanese administration expedite these venues for their troops, even offering military police assistance if necessary to maintain order. In some instances, troops flooded these locations before they were officially operational. In Yokohama, over 100 American soldiers broke into one facility, assaulting 14 women held inside. Ultimately, up to 70,000 Japanese women worked within these various facilities across the country, where they faced frequent and ongoing exploitation. Military police and soldiers sometimes forced compliance through intimidation or demanded services without payment. The victims found it nearly impossible to seek justice due to the severe power imbalance between local Japanese police and the occupying Allied forces. Although American medical officers set up prophylactic stations and distributed tens of thousands of condoms weekly within the red-light districts and larger facilities to curb infections, venereal disease rates among the troops spiked dramatically. This surge was a primary reason why, in early 1946, the officially sponsored facilities were ordered closed. As a result, the number of women raped outside the facilities, which previously stood at about 40 per day, skyrocketed to an average of 330 per day after their closure. This serves as proof that the Japanese successfully protected many women from rape through these facilities.

2.20 Bangladesh Liberation War (1971)

Between March 26 and December 16, 1971, the Bangladesh Liberation War took place (Bengali: মুক্তিযুদ্ধ and phonetically: [mukt̪iɟud̪d̪ʱo]), also known as the Bangladesh War of Independence. It was an armed conflict sparked by the rise of the Bengali nationalist and self-determination movement in East Pakistan. On the night of March 25, the war broke out following a wave of civil disobedience generated after the deadlock of the 1970 elections, after the Pakistani military junta based in West Pakistan, by order of Pakistani President Yahya Khan, launched Operation Searchlight in the eastern part of the country to annihilate the people of Bangladesh. Initially, during the monsoon season, the Pakistani army was on the offensive as extensive military operations and airstrikes were carried out in rural and urban areas throughout the eastern part of the country. Supported by Islamists, the army established radical religious militias (Razakar, Al-Badr, and Al-Shams) to assist during raids on the local population. Military personnel and supporting militias executed systematic mass deportations and annihilations of nationalist Bengali civilians, intellectuals, religious minorities, students, and armed military personnel.

Conversely, members of the Mukti Bahini (a guerrilla resistance movement formed by the Bengali military), paramilitary forces, and civilians launched a massive guerrilla war against the Pakistani army, liberating many towns and cities in the early months. Bengali guerrilla fighters operated extensively against the Pakistani Navy, including in Operation Jackpot, while the young Bangladesh Air Force carried out sorties against Pakistani military bases. Sectarian violence also broke out between Bengalis and Urdu-speaking Biharis. On December 3, India joined the war in support of the Mukti Bahini militia, after Pakistan launched preemptive airstrikes in northern India. The Indo-Pakistani War involved fighting on two fronts. The capital city of Dhaka was a theater where numerous massacres occurred, including at Dhaka University. About 10,000,000 Bengali refugees fled to neighboring India, and 30,000,000 were internally displaced. On December 16, with air superiority achieved in the eastern theater and the rapid advance of the Allied forces of the Mukti Bahini militia and the Indian Army, Pakistan surrendered in the city of Dhaka. The war altered the geopolitical landscape of South Asia, with the rise of independent Bangladesh as the world's seventh most populous country. Due to complex regional alliances, the war was a central chapter in Cold War tensions involving the United States, the Soviet Union, and China.

During the 9-month war, between 200,000 and 400,000 Bengali women and girls of all castes and religions (Hindu and Muslim), and possibly even more, were raped by Pakistani military personnel and supporting pro-Pakistani militias. They were raped systematically and with indiscriminate brutality, as the implementation of a deliberate and organized strategy that formed part of military policy. Men in West Pakistan believed that Hindus were inferior, and therefore Hindu women and girls were primary targets. Hindu women were frequently slaughtered after being raped, with bayonets thrust into their genitalia. Conversely, Muslim Bengali women were perceived as Hindus or Hindu-like figures who required a correction of their gene pool through forced impregnation, as part of the West Pakistani design to engineer a new race. Consequently, they were intentionally raped and forcefully impregnated by soldiers and officers, and subsequently left alive to compel them to give birth to corrected offspring. In accordance with the demographics of Bangladesh, 80% of the women raped were Muslim. Religious leaders (including imams, mullahs, and fatwa-issuers from West Pakistan) openly declared that the forces were permitted to rape Bengali women because the resource of their bodies was effectively spoils of war and public property (transliterated: gonimoter maal). Non-Hindu girls were ordered to recite Muslim prayers; those who did not know them were raped, while those who did might be spared.

The Pakistani secret service (Inter-Services Intelligence), in cooperation with the Jamaat-e-Islami political party, established pro-Pakistani Islamist militias such as Al-Badr and Al-Shams, which targeted Bengali women for rape. Women were also raped by local Bengali fighters who collaborated with Pakistani forces during raids on villages, such as the Razakar militia. Members of the Jamaat-e-Islami party and several of its leaders who had lost the elections in Bangladesh collaborated with Pakistani forces in these rapes. High-ranking leaders were involved, including: Jamaat-e-Islami party leader Motiur Rahman Nizami, Jamaat-e-Islami party deputy leader Delwar Hossain Sayeedi, Razakar militia member Abul Kalam Azad, leader Ghulam Azam, leader Salahuddin Quader Chowdhury, and leader Ali Ahsan Mohammad Mojaheed. On July 25, the senior assistant to the secretary-general of the Jamaat-e-Islami party, Muhammad Kamaruzzaman, planned and advised the rape of women in the village of Sohagpur. Razakar militia member Abdul Quader Molla ed women and minors in the Mirpur area. General Amir Abdullah Khan Niazi, who commanded the Pakistani army in Bangladesh, routinely declared in the presence of officers how his army would deal with Bengali women: I will change the race of this bastard nation (transliterated: Main iss haramzadi qom ki nasal badal doonga), meaning his soldiers would rape them and thereby force them to give birth to offspring of a corrected race.

The tactics in conquering towns were as follows: In the first stage, the infantry was left behind and artillery was brought forward. Hospitals and schools were shelled, leading to absolute chaos in the towns. In the second stage, the infantry entered and sorted the residents according to their sex, except for young children. The women were placed in designated, guarded rape compounds so that they would be available for the soldiers. In raids by forces from military units and militias on villages, men were annihilated in a widespread, recurring pattern, while women were first raped by them inside the villages themselves, often in front of their family members' eyes. Some of the women were raped by them repeatedly until they died. Others who still remained alive were annihilated. Conversely, Bihari Muslim women residing in Bangladesh were raped en masse by Bengali nationalists, as the community was accused of supporting Pakistan. Women were also raped en masse by the Bengali rebels of the Mukti Bahini militia. On the night of March 25, women from Muslim families, many of them refugees from the state of Bihar in India whose family members had chosen Pakistan during the partition riots of 1947, were raped by Bengali forces and militias stationed in East Pakistan, and the breasts of some were amputated with specially designed knives. In late 1971, when India invaded Bangladesh, Bengali women were also raped by Indian military forces.

On April 17, a member of the local Razakar forces from the village of Ramchandrapur, Kanaan Uddin Sarkar, promised 50 Hindu families from the nearby areas of Sherpur district, the sub-districts of Badarganj and Birompur, and the villages of Kulahati and Aftabganj, safe passage to India. However, after they were gathered, they were imprisoned in the village of Baraihat (now in Phulbari sub-district). Members of the Razakar and Al-Badr militias looted their money and jewelry. Afterward, another member of the Razakar militia who was a close associate of Sarkar reported their imprisonment to the Pakistani army. At 11:00, the Pakistani army took them to the village of Akira, 100 meters south of Baraihat village. They were ordered to stand in two lines near a pond, the men in one line and the women and children in another. Subsequently, the males were shot in bursts from machine guns to first annihilate them. Several boys and children who survived the shooting were stabbed to death with bayonets. After all the males were annihilated, the soldiers turned their attention to the women. They raped them gang-style and brutally on the spot.

From the beginning of the war, local members of the Razakar militia, under the command of Madrich Ali, ordered the residents of Naria village to convert to Islam and forcefully marry their daughters to Muslim boys to be spared from the attack on the village. The residents refused, and the militia members promised them that they would teach them a lesson. On May 5, 12 soldiers from the Sherpur camp arrived on foot at the village, via the nearby village of Saduhati. The village was mostly populated by poor and underprivileged Hindus who made a living from manual labor. It was surrounded by many hills, which made it inaccessible during the rains, when country boats remained the only means of transportation to and from it. When the soldiers arrived at the village, the remaining residents attempted to flee for their lives, but the local collaborators from the Razakar and Al-Badr militias prevented them from escaping. Over 100 residents were captured and brought to the house of Kamini Kumar Deb, a resident of the village. The women and children were separated from the men and locked in a room, while the men were lined up and annihilated by gunfire in bursts. Afterward, the women were raped by the soldiers.

When the Pakistani army deployed from the city of Dhaka toward the districts, Hindus attempted to flee Bangladesh to find refuge in neighboring India. On their way, they believed they had found shelter in the remote village of Baushgari in the Demra union. On May 13, the army, assisted by local collaborators, entered the area via the Boral River and blocked the village. A collaborator named Asad led the forces into the village. With the onset of darkness, men and women were dragged out of their homes. The women were laid on the ground and raped by the forces while the men were lined up and forced to watch them being raped by them. Afterward, everyone was shot to death (about 350 residents) and their homes were set on fire.

On May 26, a group of five soldiers under the command of Captain Shufaiat arrived secretly from the town of Patuakhali in a motorboat. From the morning of May 27, the soldiers and local collaborators raided the town of Barguna. From the morning, rain fell continuously and most of the residents remained in their homes. They were unaware of the raid and therefore did not have an opportunity to escape from the town. By evening, they captured about 500–600 residents (including about 150 women), tied them with ropes, and transported them to the sub-prefectural prison in the town. The women were separated from the men and placed in a women's ward. Afterward, the soldiers routinely entered the ward to select women to rape according to their taste. Anyone who dared to refuse to submit to being raped by them was kicked and beaten with rifle butts, and sometimes shot to death. Afterward, all the women were taken to an adjacent empty ward, where they were gang-raped by the soldiers throughout the entire night. Some were also taken to be raped in a B and C department bungalow house, where the armed forces of the army had established their temporary camp. In the morning, they were returned to the ward with bloodstains on their bodies as a result of the rape they underwent.

On the night of October 6, a group of 60–65 armed Razakar militia members, under the command of Iskandar Ali Mridha, Mukul Ahmed Badsha, Ansar Ali Khalifa, and Sayed Hawlader, raided the homes of the Halder and Mitra families in the village of Angulkata. They broke down the doors and tied up the men, women, and children. Afterward, they raped the women before some of the men were taken to be annihilated.

At the end of the war, a West Pakistani soldier proudly declared: We are leaving, but we are leaving our seed behind. A very large number of women were left pregnant and between 25,000 and 250,000 women were forced to give birth. During the first 3 months of the year 1972, 30,000 babies were born, and 170,000 women and girls underwent abortions, including about 5,000 through independent abortions. Some of the babies were sent for adoption outside the country, in a practice encouraged by the founding president of Bangladesh, Mujibur Rahman, who declared: I do not want this contaminated blood in this country. Many women ended their own lives. Most of the victims contracted sexually transmitted infections. The survivors were forced to cope not only with the physical injuries and trauma but also with a conservative, hostile Muslim society that viewed them as a symbol of social contamination, degradation, and shame. While in the Bengali language, the meaning of the word Biranganas (transliterated: Birangonara) is heroines, they were mockingly referred to using the distorted word Baranganas (transliterated: Barangonara), which in post-war discourse acquired the meaning of prostitutes. They were ostracized by their husbands, family members, and communities, and only a few could return to their families and homes. Few men agreed to marry them, and those who did expected the state to compensate them with a large dowry (payment). The women who did marry were often abused, and most of them were abandoned after their husbands received the dowry. The victims were left without much support from the state or the community.

2.20.1 Pakistani rape Camps (1971)

During the war, the army also established military rape camps for the soldiers and militia members. Girls from the age of 8 to women around 75 were captured and held as comfort slaves inside barracks that were mockingly called brothels. Many of them were gang-raped together, and sometimes immediately afterward, they were slaughtered in a mass slaughter. Others were left alive and raped repeatedly. Many of them ultimately were annihilated or ended their own lives. Some used the hair of their heads to hang themselves; in response, the soldiers sheared the women's hair. In the months of March and April, 563 girls were captured and held by the army in a rape camp. All of them became pregnant. The army began to release them only after they were already between their 3rd and 5th month of pregnancy, and abortions were not possible. The army held many women in rape camps within the Dhaka city area as well. Most were captured at the university and in private homes. Officers not only permitted their men to rape them, but also used them as comfort slaves themselves. Some of the women were enslaved as prostitutes.

In one of the cases, two sisters named Aliya and Laily were held in rape camps. Aliya was transported by the army to a rape camp when she was 13 years old, where she was gang-raped repeatedly for 7 months. She was in the 5th month of her pregnancy when she returned to her home. Laily was already pregnant when she was captured by the armed forces and put into a rape station; as a result, she miscarried. Both testified that while they were being raped, insults were hurled at them. Another girl named Khadija, aged 13, was walking to school with four other girls when they were captured by a group of soldiers. All five were put into a military rape station in the Mohammadpur district of Dhaka city. They were held there for 6 months, until the end of the war.

2.21 Indonesian Occupation of East Timor (1975–1999)

In December 7, 1975, the Indonesian military (ABRI/TNI) invaded East Timor under an operation called Operation Lotus (Indonesian: Operasi Seroja), under the pretext of anti-colonialism and anti-communism, to collapse the organizational framework of the government led by the Fretilin party that was established in 1974, and to bring about its downfall. During the first months of the occupation, the military faced heavy resistance from the rebels in the mountainous areas of the island's interior, but in the years 1977–1978, it acquired new advanced weapons from the United States and other countries. The downfall of the short-lived popular government sparked a violent quarter-century occupation during which between 100,000 and 180,000 soldiers and civilians were killed or starved to death, including during the invasion of the capital city of Dili. Indonesian forces and their auxiliary forces were responsible for 70% of the destruction.

During the occupation, thousands of Timorese women were raped by Indonesian soldiers as part of the campaign, often due to being relatives of men suspected of being dissidents. The military kept document files for its soldiers containing lists of women who were available to be raped by them at any time. Women received official summonses ordering them to report to military facilities to be raped by soldiers. These lists were passed between military battalions, which led to the women appearing on these lists being raped repeatedly. Women were also forced to become comfort slaves for soldiers in a systematic and institutionalized manner and with the military's support, and were even frequently forced into marriage as part of military policy. In one instance, for example, a woman was forced to reside with a commander in the city of Baucau. Women were also raped during interrogations conducted by the Indonesian authorities, some due to being the wives of men suspected of resistance or of collaborating with dissidents. In one case, for example, a woman was raped repeatedly during her interrogation which lasted for weeks. In another instance, a woman was stripped and interrogated semi-naked, while undergoing brutal sexual abuse under death threats. Another woman was forced to march naked past a line of soldiers, and subsequently to enter a container filled with urine and feces. Women who were raped hesitated to report due to shame and because of the intensive and tight military surveillance imposed during the occupation. Children, some of whom were also captured, were raped.

2.22 Sierra Leone Civil War (1991–2002)

In the years 1991–2002, the Sierra Leone Civil War took place. It broke out on March 23 when the Revolutionary United Front (RUF), with the support of the special forces of Liberian dictator Charles Taylor, and the National Patriotic Front of Liberia (NPFL), intervened in an attempt to overthrow the government of Joseph Saidu Momoh. During the first year, the Revolutionary United Front seized control of vast territories in eastern and southern Sierra Leone, which were rich in alluvial diamonds. The government's ineffective response and the disruption of state diamond production led to a military coup in April 1992, organized by the National Provisional Ruling Council (NPRC). By the end of 1993, the Sierra Leone Army (SLA) succeeded in pushing the Revolutionary United Front rebels back to the Liberian border, but the Revolutionary United Front recovered and the fighting continued.

In May 1997, a group of disgruntled army officers staged a coup and established the Armed Forces Revolutionary Council (AFRC) as the new government. The Revolutionary United Front joined forces with the Armed Forces Revolutionary Council to capture the capital city, Freetown, without much resistance. The new government led by Johnny Paul Koroma declared the end of the war, which led to a wave of looting and destruction. The Economic Community of West African States Monitoring Group (ECOMOG) forces intervened and recaptured the city of Freetown, but they struggled to suppress the remoter areas. In January 1999, world leaders intervened to promote negotiations between the Revolutionary United Front and the government. On March 27, 1999, the Lomé Peace Accord was signed, granting Revolutionary United Front commander Foday Sankoh the position of vice president and control over Sierra Leone's diamond mines. Nevertheless, in May 2000, the rebels advanced again toward the city of Freetown. In response, the United Kingdom declared its intention to intervene in its former colony and Commonwealth member in an attempt to support the highly weakened government of President Ahmad Tejan Kabbah. With the help of air support from Guinea, the British Operation Palliser ultimately defeated the Revolutionary United Front, regaining control over the city. The war resulted in the annihilation of between 50,000 and 70,000 people. About 2,500,000 were displaced from their homes, and widespread atrocities occurred.

During the war, between 215,000 and 257,000 women and girls were raped with great brutality by militia fighters of the Revolutionary United Front, the Armed Forces Revolutionary Council, civil defense forces, and the army. The militia fighters raped them indiscriminately regarding their age, though their distinct preference was to rape the younger women, girls, and virgins. Some of the women were raped by them with such great brutality that they subsequently bled to death. The unfortunate women were often gang-raped by multiple men (76% of the survivors). Most also had objects thrust into their vaginas, such as burning firewood, knives, umbrellas, and sticks. Personnel of the Revolutionary United Front militia routinely carved its initials (RUF) into the bodies of the women they raped, which placed them at risk of being mistakenly identified by government forces as members of it. Women and girls were also trafficked as comfort slaves by the army and militias. One-third of the women were raped in captivity and 15% of them were forced to become comfort slaves, and they were also trafficked to refugee camps. Women and girls were also forced into marriage.

From the beginning of the war and during it, the Revolutionary United Front militia conscripted women and children by force (up to 80% of them were girls aged 7–14 and up to 30% of them were young girls). The male children received weapons and were designated to become fighters, while the women were frequently denied access to weapons and were primarily designated to serve as comfort slaves for the men in the militia. They were raped routinely, sometimes by a single man and sometimes gang-style by several men. Conscripted women were ordered to submit to being raped by them. Although the militia members were permitted to rape women conscripted by force, they also frequently raped women outside the militia. The conscripted male children were trained, among other things, to rape women and girls and turn them into their comfort slaves, as part of their training as fighters. The Armed Forces Revolutionary Council also conscripted children as fighters who raped women and girls. At the end of the war, 6% of the survivors testified that they became pregnant, and 34% testified that they contracted sexually transmitted diseases. Girls were also infected with the Human Immunodeficiency Virus (HIV). Women who were raped were ostracized from the community (socially and economically), and labeled as unfit for marriage because they lost their virginity. Consequently, it was common that after the war they remained with their husbands (the former rebels) who married them by force, or became prostitutes to survive.

2.23 War in Abkhazia (1992–1993)

In the years 1992–1993, the war in Abkhazia raged between the Government of Georgia and paramilitary forces on one side, and a coalition of Abkhaz separatist forces and North Caucasian armed militants on the other. Ethnic Georgians residing in Abkhazia fought primarily alongside Georgian government forces. Ethnic Armenians, who formed the Bagramyan Battalion, and Russians from the Abkhazian population largely supported the Abkhazians, and many fought alongside them. The separatists received support from thousands of North Caucasian militants and Cossacks, and from military forces of the Russian Federation stationed in and around Abkhazia. The conflict took place concurrently with civil conflicts within Georgia itself, between supporters of the ousted President of Georgia, Zviad Gamsakhurdia, who served in 1991–1992, and the post-coup government led by Eduard Shevardnadze. Widespread atrocities were committed by all sides (both by Abkhazians and by Georgians), peaking after the capture of the city of Sukhumi by the Abkhazians on September 27, 1993, which was accompanied by a large-scale campaign of ethnic cleansing against the ethnic Georgian population. About 5,000 ethnic Georgians and 4,000 Abkhazians were annihilated or remained missing, and 250,000 Georgians became internally displaced persons or refugees. The war severely damaged post-Soviet Georgia, which suffered significant economic, human, and psychological damage. The fighting and subsequent ongoing sporadic conflict resulted in the devastation of Abkhazia.

During the war, women and young girls were raped with great brutality by Abkhaz soldiers, separatists, and their allies. In October 1992, after the fall of the town of Gagra to Shamil Basayev's battalion, all the women and girls who failed to escape in time were captured, dragged from their homes, and raped by soldiers before they were slaughtered. The Abkhaz commander Arshba himself raped a 14-year-old girl and only then ordered her execution. Soldiers were eager to rape young girls. An elderly Georgian woman who survived testified: They brought a blind man and his brother. They began beating the blind man, his brother, and his wife with a pistol butt and kicked him. He fell. One soldier said, 'We won't kill you, but where are the young girls?' In another case, a woman testified that a man was forced to rape his daughter, a teenage girl. Soldiers also raped bodies. On July 5, the village of Kamani fell to the separatists and their allies from the North Caucasus. The village was mostly populated by Svans (an ethnic sub-group of the Georgian people) and Orthodox nuns who lived in the St. George Church in the center of the village. The village residents (including women and children) were annihilated, and the church became a scene of a bloodbath. The nuns were first raped in front of the eyes of the Orthodox priests, Father Yuri Anua and Father Andria, and only then were they annihilated.

After the Abkhaz attack on the city of Ochamchire, residents were deported to the municipal football stadium in the town of Akhaldaba, where women and girls were separated from the men. The men were taken for immediate annihilation while the women and girls were taken first to be raped by them. For several hours, while the men were being annihilated, the women and girls were raped. Afterward, they too were annihilated. Between February 8 and 13, 1994, the Abkhaz separatist militia and their allies attacked the villages and populated areas in the Gali region. Residents were annihilated, homes were devastated, and women were raped. In addition, Abkhaz separatists organized detention camps where they held women and girls for 25 days, during which they raped them systematically. An elderly Georgian refugee who survived the war testified: They captured a young girl who was hiding in the bushes near the house where they murdered her parents. She was raped several times. One of the soldiers killed her and mutilated her body. She was cut in half. Near her body they left a message: 'Just as this body will never be one piece, Abkhazia and Georgia will never unite.'

A former resident of the Ochamchire district who was captured by Abkhaz separatists, Leila Goltiani, testified: I lived in Abkhazia 15 years ago, in the small town of Akhaldaba, Ochamchire district. Abkhazians attacked our town on September 16, 1993. It was impossible to hide anywhere from the bullets raining down on us. The Russian Cossacks approached me and began beating me. One of the Russian Cossacks approached me and asked me if I had ever had sexual relations with a Cossack. He grabbed me and tried to tear my clothes. Then I began to resist, but they beat my head against the ground and with the butts of AK-47 rifles. Afterward, they took me to an Abkhaz school where they held Georgian civilian prisoners. There were several pregnant women and children of various ages there. The Cossack battalion continued to arrive there regularly. They took young girls and children and raped them systematically. They were aged 10, 12, 13, and 14. They specifically targeted children. One of the girls was 8 years old. She was abducted by different groups of Cossacks and raped many times. I do not know how she managed to survive after so many acts of rape. They also took women, but later they started taking elderly women. They raped these elderly women in a way that I do not wish to detail, it was terrible.

2.24 Bosnia War (1992–1995)

In the years 1992–1995, the Bosnia War took place (Serbo-Croatian: Рат у Босни и Херцеговини and in Latin script: Rat u Bosni i Hercegovini). It was an international armed conflict in the socialist and multi-ethnic Republic of Bosnia and Herzegovina. It was populated by Muslim Bosniaks (44%), Orthodox Serbs (32.5%), and Catholic Croats (17%). Following the secessions of Slovenia and Croatia from the Socialist Federal Republic of Yugoslavia in 1991, it decided to hold a referendum for its independence on February 29. On January 9, 1992, in anticipation of the referendum results, the Serb leadership declared The Republic of the Serb People of Bosnia and Herzegovina (in Latin script: Republika srpskoga naroda Bosne i Hercegovine), effectively laying the foundations for today's Republika Srpska. Political representatives of the Serbs also boycotted the referendum and rejected its results. On March 1, the Republic of Bosnia and Herzegovina received its independence and international recognition. Following this, on April 6, the war broke out. The Serbs under the command of Radovan Karadžić, who were supported by the government of Slobodan Milošević and received supplies from the Yugoslav People's Army (JNA), mobilized their forces within Bosnia and Herzegovina, and during the following months seized control of about 70% of the country's territory in a campaign characterized by widespread ethnic cleansing of Croats and Bosniaks. Initially, the war was fought between units of the Yugoslav army, which later became the Army of Republika Srpska (VRS) on one side, and the Army of the Republic of Bosnia and Herzegovina (ARBiH), which was composed mainly of Bosniaks, and the Croat forces in the Croatian Defence Council (HVO) on the other side.

The main warring parties were the forces of the government of the Republic of Bosnia and Herzegovina, and forces of state-like separatist entities of the Croatian Republic of Herzeg-Bosnia and Republika Srpska. They were led by Croatia and Serbia respectively and received supplies from them. At the end of 1992, tensions between Croats and Bosniaks increased, leading to the escalation of the Croat–Bosniak War in early 1993. The Bosnia War was characterized by bitter battles, indiscriminate shelling of cities and towns, and ethnic cleansing carried out mainly by Serb forces, but also by Croat and Bosniak forces, such as in the siege of the city of Sarajevo, the Markale marketplace massacres, and the massacre in and around the town of Srebrenica in July 1995 which led to the annihilation of over 8,000 Bosniak men by Serb forces. Although the Serbs initially had military superiority thanks to the weapons and resources supplied by the Yugoslav People's Army (JNA), they ultimately lost momentum when the Bosniaks and Croats formed an alliance against Republika Srpska in 1994, with the establishment of the Federation of Bosnia and Herzegovina. Pakistan continued to supply the Bosniaks with weapons and anti-tank missiles. The war led to the breakup of Yugoslavia. It is estimated that over 100,000 people were annihilated in the war, and over 2,200,000 people were displaced from their homes. On November 21, 1995, the war ended.

During the war, between 20,000 and 50,000 women and girls were raped systematically and with great brutality by men from all sides and ethnic groups in Bosnia and Croatia. Most of them were Bosniak and some were Croat who were raped by Serb forces (officers and soldiers) of the Army of Republika Srpska, the police, the Yugoslav army, and members of the irregular units called Chetniks. They raped them with the support and even by the order of local authorities and commanders, as part of a well-organized, planned, systemic, official, systematic, and targeted military policy, and as a strategic goal in itself in the annihilation of the ethnic group. Women were gang-raped publicly in the streets and in their homes, in front of the eyes of their family members, village residents, and neighbors. Women were also raped with objects such as broken glass bottles, pistols, and batons. In addition, women were forced to become comfort slaves and prostitutes. Bosnian society is a patrilineal society in which children are considered to inherit their ethnic origin from their father. Therefore, the attackers mocked the unfortunate women they raped that they would as a result give birth to children of their ethnic origin.

Women were raped in the most systematic manner in eastern Bosnia, for example in the Grbavica neighborhood during the siege of the city of Sarajevo, and during the massacres in the towns of Foča and Višegrad. In the town of Foča, during the attack on the non-Serb population, non-combatant men were annihilated, while women and girls (mostly Bosniak) were captured and gang-raped repeatedly by members of the Serb armed forces, among others under the command of Gojko Janković. The commander of the Serb Višegrad brigade, Momir Savić, himself repeatedly raped a Bosniak woman. On May 23, 1992, around noon, about 1,000 Serb soldiers from the Yugoslav People's Army invaded the village of Hambarine and began to annihilate residents and set fire to homes. Women were raped by them. On July 24, Serb forces from the 5th Kozara Brigade from the city of Prijedor and from the 6th Krajina Brigade from the town of Sanski Most invaded the village of Briševo on foot and launched a two-day massacre. They annihilated Croat residents wherever they were found and burned houses and property. Many women were first raped and only then annihilated. Conversely, Serb women were also raped by Croat and Bosniak forces during the war. After forces of the Croatian Defence Council invaded the city of Orašje in April 1992, Serb women were raped by them.

In the area of the town of Višegrad, many women were systematically raped by soldiers of the Army of Republika Srpska and members of a local group of paramilitaries called the Avengers, the Wolves, and the White Eagles, under the command of Milan Lukić. The group had ties to the local police and Serb military units. On June 14, 1992, a group of 70 Bosniak residents, mainly from the village of Koritnik, was locked inside a house on Pionirska Street in the town of Višegrad. Before they were annihilated, some of the women were first taken out and raped. Afterward, they were returned to the house and a grenade was thrown inside, leading to the annihilation of some of them. Subsequently, the house was set on fire and 59 of them were burned to death. In July 1995, Serb forces invaded the town of Srebrenica and its surroundings, where tens of thousands of Bosniak refugees were crowded. Men and boys were taken for annihilation, while thousands of women and girls were raped by soldiers in the streets. Refugees saw them being dragged away and raped, and heard them screaming, but they could do nothing because soldiers stood nearby.

The survivor Zumra Šehomerović testified: The Serbs began at some point to take young women and girls out of the refugee group. They were raped. The rape often occurred in front of the eyes of others and sometimes even in front of the eyes of the mother's children. A Dutch soldier stood nearby and he just looked around with a Walkman on his head. He did not react at all to what happened. The Dutch soldiers walked around everywhere. It is impossible that they did not see. It didn't happen only in front of my eyes, but in front of everyone's eyes. I saw terrifying things. For example, there was a girl, probably about 7 years old. At a certain moment, several Chetniks (Serb fighters) recommended her brother to rape her. He didn't do it, and I also think he couldn't because he was still a child. Afterward, they murdered this young boy. The survivor Kada Hotić testified about one of the cases: I heard a woman begging: 'Leave her, she's only 9...' The screams suddenly stopped. The rumor spread quickly later that a 9-year-old girl was raped.

That same night, a medical orderly from the Dutch battalion saw two soldiers raping a girl: (We saw) two Serb soldiers, one of them stood guard and the other lay on the girl, without his trousers. We saw (also) a girl lying on the ground, on some mattress. There was blood on the mattress and she was covered in blood. She had bruises on her legs and blood was running down her legs. She was in absolute shock. The survivor Zarfa Turković testified about a woman who was raped in front of her eyes: Two held her legs and lifted them in the air, while the third began to rape her. Four of them raped her, each in turn. People kept silent, and nobody moved. She screamed, cried out, and begged them to stop. They shoved a rag into her mouth, and then we only heard stifled whimpers.

During the war, many women and girls became pregnant after being raped. In a study conducted among 68 Croat and Bosniak survivors, it emerged that 44 of them were raped more than once, 21 of them were raped daily during the entire period of their captivity, and 29 of them became pregnant. Women and girls who were raped contracted sexually transmitted diseases. During the war, about 3,000 men and male children were also raped anally and orally in detention camps and other locations. Male prisoners were forced to brutally rape one another. The acts included the mutilation of their bodies and causing blunt force trauma to their genitalia. It is estimated that hundreds if not thousands of male victims' stories will never be heard, because they died subsequently or due to shame. Due to the dominant masculine culture in Bosnia, many of them were rejected by their communities, and were often considered unmasculine and even accused of being homosexuals. After the war, children born to women who were raped suffered an identity crisis in their adulthood because in society it was mandatory to identify as a Bosniak, a Serb, or a Croat.

2.24.1 Serb Rape Facilities (1992–1995)

During the war, the Serb authorities established rape facilities where over 35,000 Bosniak and Croat women and girls were held for the Serb forces, under intolerable conditions of filth. In some of the facilities, they were forced into prostitution and raped for payment. Women's wings in regular detention camps also functioned as rape facilities. The facilities were established, among other places, in the camps of Keraterm, Manjača, Omarska, Trnopolje, Uzamnica, Vojno, Vilina Vlas, and Liplje. In fact, 80% of all women and girls raped in the war were raped in these facilities and for prolonged periods. They were brutally raped repeatedly for years, and they were released only after they became pregnant and were in a late stage of their pregnancy, to ensure that they could no longer undergo abortions. Serb soldiers and police officers arrived at these facilities regularly, chose one or more women they desired to rape, took them out, and raped them in full view of everyone, with the full knowledge and often direct involvement of the local authorities, and specifically the police forces. In other cases, girls were taken out of these facilities and held in various places for prolonged periods or trafficked and sold as slaves.

Throughout the town of Foča, following its capture in April 1992, the Serb authorities established numerous rape facilities where hundreds of women and girls were gang-raped by soldiers, police officers, and members of Serb military groups systematically. The local police were involved, and the chief of police forces, Dragan Gagović, even used to arrive himself at these facilities to select women to rape according to his taste. Those who were chosen were taken out of the facilities and raped by him. A commander in the Army of Republika Srpska, Dragoljub Kunarac, and his men also used to arrive at these facilities systematically to select women and girls to rape according to their taste. Those who were chosen, some of them girls of only 14 years old, were taken out of the facilities and taken to the soldiers' base (a house at number 16 Osman Đikić Street), where they were raped by them repeatedly. One of the houses, called Karaman's House, was converted into a rape facility managed by commander Radovan Stanković. Bosniak women and girls, including girls around 12 years old, were held in it and brutally raped, repeatedly, by Serb forces who visited it regularly for payment. The facility was mockingly called a brothel. Girls held in various detention centers were regularly taken out by soldiers and held as their comfort slaves. No trace remained of many women held in these facilities afterward.

A commander in the Army of Republika Srpska, Radomir Kovač, personally held four girls in his apartment, and raped three of them many times, one of them a 12-year-old girl. He also invited friends to his apartment and permitted them to rape them. Later, he loaned two of them to soldiers who gang-raped them continuously for over 3 weeks. After they were returned to him, he immediately sold one of them as a comfort slave and gave the second as a gift to his friend. Later, he sold the rest of the girls.

In the city of Doboj, non-Serb women who were not immediately annihilated were captured in various places in the city under inhuman conditions and raped. The factory used by the Bosanka company in the city, which produced jams and juices, and a school in the village of Grapska in the area, were also converted into rape facilities. Four types of forces were present in these facilities: the local Serb militia, the Yugoslav army, the police forces of the Republic of Serbian Krajina based in the city of Knin, called Martićevci, under the command of Milan Martić, and members of the White Eagles group. A former housing complex at an Olympic stadium in the city was also converted into a rape facility. Thousands of Bosniak and Croat women were imprisoned in it and gang-raped systematically. The various Serb paramilitary groups operating in the area, which were an extension of the Yugoslav People's Army, also used the resource of their bodies for funding, and called on the Serb men in the area to come to the facility and rape them systematically for payment. Due to the high demand to rape them, buses were organized that transported men from the city of Belgrade and its surroundings to the facility. Many women died in the facility as a result of the brutal rape they underwent. In the detention camps in the city, the women were separated from the men, and in the process, Serb forces used to bring men together with their female family members and force them to rape them. In one case, a 14-year-old boy was forced to rape his mother.

In the Miljevina camp, about 100 women and girls aged 12–60 were imprisoned and gang-raped regularly. A survivor testified that they told them repeatedly: You will give birth to our children. You will give birth to our little Chetniks (nationalist Serb fighters), and that the reason they were raping them was to plant (inside their body) the seed of the Serbs. Every time the Serb men desired to rape them, the Serb national song March on the Drina (transliterated: Marš na Drinu) was played on the camp's loudspeaker, signaling to them that they were about to be raped again, and that they must be ready. Often, women from the same family were chosen. Many women were beaten while being raped, sometimes brutally. Women were forced to carry the fetters to term and give birth.

At the Omarska camp, between spring and summer 1992 (for a duration of 5 months), between 5,000 and 7,000 Bosniaks and Croats were held under inhuman conditions. Women in the camp were brutally raped, beaten, their bodies were mutilated, and they were annihilated as a matter of routine. In May 1992, Serbs from the village of Snagovo surrounded the village of Liplje, captured it, and turned it into a concentration camp where they imprisoned 400 people in several houses. Houses where women were held were converted into rape facilities, and they were brutally raped by them on a regular basis. In the Uzamnica camp, in one of the cases, captive men were forced to rape captive women. In the city of Sarajevo, Bosniak and Croat women were forced to become prostitutes and were imprisoned in a facility that was mockingly called a brothel. United Nations forces stationed in the area also used to visit it on a regular basis.

On May 24, 1992, the Trnopolje camp was established by the military and police authorities of Republika Srpska in the village of Trnopolje. Between 4,000 and 7,000 men, women, and children were held there at any given time (mostly Bosniaks and some Croats), and between May and November 1992, approximately 30,000 captives were held in it. The amount of food and water was insufficient, and the captives frequently suffered from hunger and thirst. The restroom facilities were also deficient. Most of the captives slept in the open air. The camp was guarded on all sides by the Serb military. Machine gun nests and well-armed posts were installed, training their weapons toward the camp. The soldiers used baseball bats, iron bars, rifle butts, their hands, their legs, and anything else in their possession to beat them. Women and girls were raped by soldiers, police officers, and camp guards. They were mostly raped by them at night. Many women were taken out of the camp at night by soldiers and raped by them. Consequently, at night, great terror prevailed among the women and girls due to the possibility that they would be taken to be raped.

In the Višegrad region, the Vilina Vlas Hotel was converted by the Užice Corps into one of the primary and most exclusive rape facilities in the area. Only women and girls who were considered beautiful and carefully selected were held there, so that, among other things, they would give birth to Chetniks as they phrased it, while older women were taken to be raped in other locations, such as occupied or abandoned houses. Approximately 200 non-Serb women and girls from the area, mainly Bosniaks (many of them under the age of 14), were brought to the facility by police officers, members of the White Eagles military groups, and the men of commanders Željko Ražnatović Arkan and Vojislav Šešelj. The facility was mockingly dubbed a brothel. The unfortunate victims were brutally raped by visitors numerous times and beaten with batons. Milan Lukić, the leader of a local group of military fighters termed the Avengers, the Wolves, and the White Eagles, who established his headquarters in the hotel, himself raped one of the women several times and executed captives held therein. The hotel manager, Duško Andrić, also raped women held in the facility. The police commander, Risto Perišić, assisted in their rape, torture, and execution. Most of them died or ended their own lives, and fewer than 10 survived. Their bodies were not found because they were buried in hidden locations and subsequently reburied. Another rape facility was also established at the Višegrad Hotel.

2.24.2 Croat and Bosniak Rape Facilities (1992–1995)

During the war, Croat and Bosniak forces also established rape facilities. In the Čelebići facility run by Bosniaks and Croats, Serb women were brutally raped by them. In the Dretelj camp, where most of the prisoners were Serb civilians held under inhuman conditions, women were raped and told that they would be held by them until they gave birth to an Ustashe (a Croat child who would become a fighter in their militia). In the city of Sarajevo, Serb women and girls were brutally raped in facilities run by Bosniaks and mockingly called brothels. In the detention camp in the village of Čelebići, which was under Bosniak and Croat control and under the command of Zdravko Mucić, Serb women were raped on a regular basis. His deputy, Hazim Delić, himself raped two women. In another case, a woman was interrogated by the local Croat commander of the Jokers militia, Anto Furundžija, who participated in the ethnic cleansing in the Lašva Valley and was under the command of the Croatian Defence Council. During the interrogation, she was assaulted by Furundžija, beaten, and raped orally and anally by another soldier. In 1993, the commander of the military police in the Croatian Defence Council, Ante Kovać, himself raped a Bosniak woman in a detention camp in the Vitez municipality. In the Heliodrom camp in the settlement of Rodoč, Serb and Bosniak women were held together and underwent sexual assaults.

2.24.3 Croat–Bosniak War (1992–1994)

During the war, a sub-war also took place between Croatia and Bosnia during which Bosniak women were raped by Croat forces. In the Lašva Valley, Bosniak residents were annihilated and women were raped by them. On June 19, the town of Novi Travnik was attacked by Croat forces. Bosniaks residing in its lower part were annihilated and women were raped. Units of the Croatian Defence Council under the command of Ivica Rajić, including the Maturice and the Ban Josip Jelačić brigade, invaded Bosniak villages in the Kiseljak municipality, annihilated residents, and raped women. On October 23, 1993, Croat forces of the Croatian Defence Council units named Apostoli and Maturice, under the command of Rajić, seized control of the Bosniak village of Stupni Do. Commanders and soldiers forced residents to leave their homes and hiding places and robbed them of their valuables. Most of the residents who fell into their hands were annihilated (between 37–44), while women were first raped by them. All houses were looted before they were set on fire. By the next day, most of the village was devastated. Between October 23 and November 3, in the town of Vareš, commanders of the Croatian Defence Council and its soldiers, under the command and supervision of Rajić, looted the property of the Bosniaks and sexually assaulted women.

2.25 Rwandan Genocide (1994)

Between April 7 and July 19, 1994, the genocide against the Tutsi occurred in Rwanda during the country's civil war. For approximately 100 days, between 500,000 and 662,000 Tutsis and some moderate Hutus and Twa (mostly men) were systematically annihilated by Hutu militias, and often even by their own neighbors. The genocide was characterized by extreme violence. Its roots lay in long-standing ethnic tensions, most recently the Hutu Revolution in Rwanda from 1959 to 1962, which led to Tutsis fleeing to Uganda. Hostilities escalated further due to the civil war that broke out in 1990 when the Rwandan Patriotic Front (RPF), a rebel group composed mostly of Tutsis, invaded Rwanda from Uganda. The assassination of President Juvénal Habyarimana on April 6, 1994, ignited the genocide. Hutu extremists exploited the power vacuum to target Tutsis and moderate Hutu leaders. Despite the scale of the atrocities, the international community did not intervene to halt the annihilation.

Even before the genocide began, Tutsi women were raped during the civil war. In early October 1990, Zaire sent hundreds of soldiers from the Special Presidential Division to the city of Kigali. They went directly to the front and began fighting the Rwandan Patriotic Front militia. Women were raped by the soldiers in the north of the country, and their homes were looted. During the genocide itself, between 250,000 and 500,000 Tutsi women and girls across the country and of all ages, including pregnant women, were systematically and with great brutality raped by Hutu men from the Interahamwe militia, the Rwandan Armed Forces, members of the Presidential Guard, and civilians, as an integral and deliberate part of their annihilation. Many were gang-raped by them. Hutu leaders (military and political) encouraged and even ordered, at national and local levels, that they be raped en masse. Government forces also mobilized Hutu civilians and ordered them to rape their Tutsi neighbors. One of the goals was to impregnate them, as Rwanda's patriarchal society is patrilineal, where children are considered to inherit their ethnic origin from their father. In addition, Hutu women who were considered moderate, politically identified with Tutsis, married to Tutsi men, or who dared to hide Tutsis were also raped by Hutu men.

Before and during the genocide, extensive use was made of organized propaganda, both in the print media and on the radio, to encourage Hutu men to rape Tutsi women, such as on the RTLM (Radio Télévision Libre des Mille Collines) station, which portrayed the resource of their bodies as seductive. The propaganda played an important role and contributed significantly to their widespread, cruel, and very public rape. Cartoons in the print media presented them as sexual objects. One of the cartoons printed in the Kangura magazine even depicted the head of the United Nations peacekeeping forces in Rwanda himself, Roméo Dallaire, enjoying the bodies of two Tutsi women, with the caption in the Kinyarwanda language that he, his men, and his army actually could not resist the resource of their seductive bodies. Another cartoon depicted three Belgian paratroopers having sexual relations with Tutsi women. Agathe Uwilingiyimana, who served as Prime Minister and was slaughtered at the very beginning of the genocide, was herself portrayed in political literature and propaganda as sexually promiscuous.

Perpetrators mocked their victims and declared in their presence: You Tutsi women think you are too good for us, and Let's taste what a Tutsi woman tastes like. The unfortunate women were often raped by them publicly at sites such as schools, churches, roadblocks, government buildings, and bushes. Residents were forced under duress and threats to stand by and watch them being raped. While some were being raped, their bodies were mutilated, particularly their breasts, vaginas, and buttocks. Some were also raped with objects such as sticks and weapons, which often led to their death. Women and girls were also forced to become the collective comfort slaves of Hutu men for several weeks, and some were forced into marriage. Pregnant women were also raped. One of the survivors, Marie-Louise Niyobuhungiro, testified that she was raped about five times a day, and every time she was raped she saw local people, generals, and Hutu men watching her being raped. Between rapes, she was forced to cultivate the land.

In addition, Hutu men released hundreds of male AIDS patients from hospitals and organized them into rape squads, so that they would infect the unfortunate women and cause them to experience a slow and unavoidable death. Survivors testified that the men who raped them mocked them that after satisfying themselves, they would not annihilate them so that they would experience a slow death from the disease. Many of them contracted the virus. A survivor testified: For 60 days, my body served as a path for all the thugs, militia members, and soldiers in the district. These men completely destroyed me. They caused me so much pain. They raped me in front of my six children. Three years ago I discovered that I am sick with AIDS. Between April 19 and the end of June 1994, the son of the Minister for Family Welfare, Arsène Shalom Ntahobali, with members of the Interahamwe militia and soldiers, arrived at the compound of the Butare prefecture office to capture hundreds of refugees. The women were raped by them and everyone was annihilated at various locations throughout the Ngoma commune.

After the victims were raped by them, they were in many cases annihilated, with the killing blows targeted at their reproductive organs. The genitalia and buttocks of others were sometimes cut and mutilated with machetes, knives, sharpened sticks, boiling water, and acid, to among other things destroy their reproductive capabilities. The assistant to the force commander of the United Nations Assistance Mission for Rwanda, Major Brent Beardsley, testified that he saw the bodies of 6 and 7-year-old girls who were raped by them with such great brutality that their vaginas were left torn and swollen, leaving no doubt that they were gang-raped. He testified: There was a lot of rape. It seemed that everywhere we went from April 19 until the moment we left, there was rape everywhere adjacent to these killing sites.

After the annihilation, almost all surviving Tutsi women had been raped. It is estimated that as a result, they gave birth to between 2,000 and 10,000 babies and even more. Women attempted to perform independent abortions. Some suffered from sexually transmitted diseases, including syphilis, gonorrhea, and AIDS. Many of them discovered that they carry the Human Immunodeficiency Virus (HIV), including thousands of widows, many of whom were raped. From a study conducted among 1,200 widows, it emerged that two-thirds of them carried the virus and infection rates in rural areas rose by more than twofold. Access to antiretroviral drugs was limited. Survivors also suffered from long-term stigma and social isolation, and they were discouraged from telling that they were raped, and those who raped them were not held accountable. The survivors were considered unfit for marriage, and husbands of survivors abandoned them. Their rights to property and inheritance were denied to them and their employment opportunities were frequently limited. Survivors dared to reveal that they were raped only after years, if at all. The children born to the women who were raped also suffered from stigma and were dubbed children of bad memories (French: les enfants mauvais souvenir) and unwanted children (French: enfants indésirés). Women continued to be held as personal slaves for several years, and were even forced to move to neighboring countries with their captors.

2.26 Congo Wars (1996–2020)

In the years 1996–1997 and 1998–2003, the First Congo War and the Second Congo War took place. The Second Congo War is also called Africa's World War and the Great War of Africa. On August 2, 1998, the war broke out when the country's president, Laurent-Désiré Kabila, turned against his former allies from Rwanda and Uganda, who had assisted him in seizing power. The conflict expanded after Kabila mobilized a coalition of other countries for his defense. The war drew in nine African countries and about 25 armed groups, making it one of the largest wars in African history. On July 18, 2003, it officially ended with the establishment of the transitional government, but violence continued in conflicts in various regions, particularly in the east, such as the Lord's Resistance Army insurgency and the Kivu and Ituri conflicts. The war led to the annihilation of about 5,400,000 people directly and as a result of disease and malnutrition, and to the displacement of about 2,000,000 people, forcing them to flee their homes and even seek refuge in neighboring countries. The war was heavily influenced and funded by the mineral trade in the region, which continued to fuel the violence.

During the wars and after them, over 2,000,000 women and girls (from one-year-old babies to 90-year-old women) were raped by military and police forces, other authority figures, and militia members from all armed sides, such as the Lord's Resistance Army, the Democratic Forces for the Liberation of Rwanda, the Alliance of Patriots for a Free and Sovereign Congo, the Opposing Congolese Patriots, the Patriotic Resistance Front in Ituri, the Nationalist and Integrationalist Front, the Patriotic Forces for the Liberation of Congo, the Mai-Mai, the National Congress for the Defence of the People, the M23 movement, the Twa operating in the Tanganyika region, and additional local and foreign militias, including armed groups from Burundi and Rwanda (among them Hutu militia members) and by civilians. The military forces were the primary perpetrators, and the acts of rape occurred mainly in the eastern part of the country, in the North and South Kivu regions and in the Maniema and Katanga provinces. It is estimated that every hour about 48 women were raped. The victims were raped by them with exceptional systematicness and brutality. Women and girls were sometimes also forced to become comfort slaves and prostitutes and were even forced into marriage.

Commanders frequently used to permit their fighters to invade villages and rape the women and girls as a reward. Some even ordered them to rape them. In many cases, they were gang-raped by them publicly and even in front of the eyes of their family members and communities, who were forced to watch. These public rape acts became so popular that they were even given the name la reigne (a distortion of the French word for rule, Le Règne). During these acts, the women were stripped, tied upside down in the middle of the village, and gang-raped by them. More than half of the victims were raped while working in the fields and mostly by groups of armed men. Women were beaten and raped by them and then left lying on the ground. Others were raped during raids on their villages. Many women were raped in the thickets where they attempted to hide after fleeing their homes. Women were also captured and raped when they attempted to flee toward refugee camps. In North and South Kivu, violence against women included unimaginable cruelty. Women and girls were raped by armed groups and forced to become comfort slaves. The aggression of the anti-government Kamwina Nsapu militia and the pro-government Bana Mura militia against civilians led to a rise in sexual violence. Women were raped in front of the eyes of their relatives. In one case, a man was forced to perform sexual acts on his female family member before he was executed.

Boys who served in the armed forces also raped women and girls. For instance, 16-year-old Noel Ruabirinda, who had been a militia member for two years, proudly declared: If we see girls, it's our right, we can rape them. Women were also raped by officials in detention facilities on a regular basis. Men were sometimes even forced to rape their own female family members. After they raped women and girls (including 5-year-old girls and 80-year-old women), they inserted a rifle barrel into their vaginas and opened fire. The genitalia of others were mutilated with knives and razors. Objects were thrust into the cavities of some of their bodies, such as tree branches and bottles. Chemical substances were poured onto the genitalia of others, and molten rubber was poured into the vaginas of women.

On October 12, 2002, after the forces of the Movement for the Liberation of the Congo and the Congolese National Movement under the command of Colonel Freddy Ngalimo captured the town of Mambasa, female residents were raped by them en masse. In 2003, sexual assaults by soldiers from armed groups and the army continued in the eastern provinces. In 2006, about 12,000 women and girls were raped within a 6-month period. In 2007, 54% of all sexual violence cases documented in the first six months were committed by army soldiers. From 2009, there was a rise in the number of women raped by the state's armed forces. In 2009, about 1,100 women and girls were raped every month, of whom 72% testified that they were tortured while being raped. From January 2010 to December 2013, it was reported that 3,635 women and girls were raped (some gang-style) by state forces (almost half), among them military forces (35.2%) and armed groups. Out of all the victims, 73% were women and a quarter were girls. In a study conducted in the North Kivu province, it emerged that 22% of the women were victims of sexual violence.

After the war, up to 200,000 surviving women who had been raped lived in the country, 13% of whom were under the age of 14. One survivor, for example, a 14-year-old girl, had already given birth to a baby twice after being raped and forcefully impregnated. Between January and July 2010, 66 toddlers under the age of 3 and 50 women over the age of 65 were hospitalized at the Panzi Hospital in the city of Bukavu after undergoing sexual abuse. The brutality with which the victims were raped led to severe health problems. Fistulas were a common phenomenon, and access to reconstructive surgeries in the country was limited. Furthermore, 87% reported discharge from their vaginas (in 41% of cases the discharge was feces and urine), and 79% reported pain in the lower abdomen. In a review of medical records among 658 survivors at the St. Paul Health Center in the city of Uvira, it emerged that 9% were infected with the Human Immunodeficiency Virus, 13% were infected with syphilis, and 31% were infected with gonorrhea. Few survivors sought medical treatment due to the associated costs and because if it were publicly revealed that they were raped, they would suffer from social stigma and be ostracized from their families and communities. In addition, 77% reported that they suffered from trauma that led to nightmares and insomnia, and 91% reported that they lived in fear and felt shame. Men who were raped and dared to admit it risked being ostracized by their families and communities and even facing criminal prosecution because they could be perceived as homosexuals, which is considered a crime in the country.

2.26.1 Kivu Crisis (2004–2020)

Following the war, all warring parties continued to rape women and girls in the North and South Kivu region on a large scale. Thousands of women and children were raped by them every week. Many women were gang-raped by them while being beaten. Numerous armed groups also captured boys and girls to conscript them into their service. Conscripted boys were forced to become soldiers while girls were forced to become comfort slaves. In February 2004, the forces of the Congolese Rally for Democracy-Goma besieged the city of Bukavu for 10 days. During this period, they massacred residents and raped women and children, some as young as 3 years old. From a study conducted between the years 2005–2006 among 2,465 female patients at a medical center in the city of Bunia in the Ituri district, it emerged that 73% of them were raped by armed men. In August 2007, it was reported that 181 women were raped in the village of Mutanda in the Rutshuru territory. In the same month, fighters from the National Congress for the Defence of the People militia, under the command of Laurent Nkunda, raided ten secondary schools and four primary schools and captured the children by force to join their ranks. Conscripted boys were forced to become soldiers while girls were forced to become comfort slaves.

On October 31, 2008, Nkunda announced supposed plans to create a fire-free corridor where displaced persons could return to their homes, while the militia in practice used the corridor to conscript residents into its service. In this case as well, conscripted boys were forced to become soldiers while girls were forced to become comfort slaves. Residents who refused were executed without trial. After the militia fighters captured the towns of Kiwanja and Rutshuru, they raped at least 16 women and girls for weeks. Between January and September 2009, over 1,400 residents were annihilated, mainly women, children, and the elderly, while women were first raped by them on a large scale. In the first 9 months of the year, over 7,500 women were reported to have undergone sexual abuse, only from reports from health centers in the North and South Kivu region. In the year 2010, for example, the leader of the Mai-Mai Sheka militia, Ntabo Ntaberi Sheka, ordered his soldiers to rape women and girls in the town of Walikale for 3 days, to punish its residents for collaborating with government forces. At least 387 women and children and even men were gang-raped by them. In August 2010, over 500 women were raped in the east. In a 2010 study, 30% of the women in the east testified that they underwent sexual abuse. By the year 2011, about 2,000,000 women and girls were raped against the background of the conflict, while in this year alone 400,000 women and girls were raped.

In the year 2012, 72 women were raped by members of the M23 militia in the town of Minova. In November 2012, Congolese army forces who lost in battle retreated from the front line to the town of Minova. From facing fighting men, they suddenly stood before helpless women and girls, who were easy prey for them to restore their lost sense of superiority. All the women and girls in the town (over 1,000) were systematically raped by them for three days. In the year 2013, members of the M23 militia executed residents without trial in populated areas, while women they first raped. At least 61 women were raped by members of the M23 movement near the city of Goma. In November 2013, dozens of women from the village of Pinga were captured by members of the Mai-Mai Sheka militia and forced to become comfort slaves. On May 1, 2015, during an attack on the Kikamba area in South Kivu, 100 women were raped. In the year 2017, there was a rise in the number of sexual violence cases by military and police forces, and 41% of the sexual violence committed by military forces and 42% of the sexual violence committed by the police was directed toward children. In the year 2024, the number of women raped doubled. In addition, Sudanese and Central African women were captured and forcefully transported to the country by the Lord's Resistance Army militia, where they were forced to become comfort slaves.

Women and girls were the primary victims who were raped in the wars in Congo, but the rape of men and male children was also common: from a study conducted between the years 2005–2006 among 100 male patients at a medical center in the city of Bunia in the Ituri district, it emerged that 95.2% of them were raped by armed men. In the year 2009, the rape of males was systematic and on a rising trend. In the year 2020, a young man from the Tanganyika province was stripped naked by members of the Twa militia, raped by them, and subsequently forced to rape his own mother.

2.27 Darfur War (2003–2020)

In the years 2003–2020, the Darfur War took place in Sudan, also known as The Land Cruisers. Rebel groups from the Sudan Liberation Movement (SLM) and the Justice and Equality Movement (JEM) accused the government of oppressing the non-Arab population in the region, leading to a widespread armed conflict. The government led by President Omar al-Bashir responded to the attacks with the ethnic annihilation of non-Arab residents. The government forces were composed mainly of the army, the police, and the Janjaweed militias, whose personnel were recruited mostly from among arabized indigenous Africans and a small number of Bedouins from the northern Rizeigat tribe. The government provided the Janjaweed militias with financial assistance and weapons and coordinated joint attacks with them, many of them against civilians. Hundreds of thousands of people died in the fighting or from starvation and disease. Millions more were displaced and fled to refugee camps or crossed the border. During the war, tens of thousands of non-Arab women and girls (from the age of two to 70 and older) were raped by government forces and Janjaweed militia members systematically and on a large scale, as a deliberate strategy assisted by the army, primarily in non-Arab villages. For women and girls, being raped was the primary threat. Pregnant women were also raped, and a third of the victims were young girls. Most were gang-raped by several militia members, often for entire nights. They were frequently raped in front of the eyes of others, including husbands, fathers, mothers, and children who were forcefully compelled to watch them being raped. Young women were raped with such great violence that they were unable to walk.

After the Janjaweed forces surrounded a village and invaded it, they went from house to house and massacred the men and male children, while they raped the women and girls, or they dragged everyone to a central location, where they annihilated the men and male children and subsequently raped the women and girls. In the second stage, the forces went to nearby villages and towns, to internal displacement camps, or to the border crossing with Chad, to also rape the women and girls who attempted to escape from them. In a remote area in Darfur, over 400 women and girls were raped. Some of the women were raped in front of the eyes of their husbands. Women and girls were raped particularly when they left their displacement camp or their settlement to search for firewood. Survivors testified that the men who raped them called them derogatory names in Arabic such as slaves (transliterated: abid) and blacks (transliterated: zurga). The survivor Souad Suliman testified that her attacker explained to her why he was raping her and told her mockingly: Black girl, you are too dark. You are like a dog. We want to give birth to a light baby. After women were raped by Janjaweed militia members, their bodies were marked with branding. The genitalia of victims were mutilated as a matter of routine. Women were also captured and sold as comfort slaves.

On August 24, 2006, it was reported that hundreds of women were raped around the Kalma refugee camp during the preceding weeks. In another case, seven women who left the camp to gather firewood were gang-raped by the Janjaweed forces while being beaten by them. Afterward, they stripped them completely naked, released them, and watched them attempt to escape from them naked to the sounds of their laughter. In November 2014, the town of Tabit, whose residents are mostly from the Fur people, was attacked by government soldiers in three waves of attacks that lasted a day and a half. Men were captured while 221 women and girls were raped. Additionally, residents were beaten and their property was looted. By the year 2015, the Rapid Support Forces continued to rape women. Women and girls who were finally released did not return to their families and they kept silent due to shame, ostracization, fear, intimidation by many government officials, and the inability to access certain affected areas. In this society, a woman who was raped was considered to have brought disgrace upon all her family members.

2.28 Boko Haram Insurgency (2009–2025)

In July 2009, the Islamist and jihadist rebel group Boko Haram launched an armed insurgency against the government of Nigeria, following long-standing religious violence between the Muslim and Christian communities in the country, with the ultimate goal of establishing an Islamic state. In 2002, the group was founded by leader Mohammed Yusuf to oppose Western education with his followers. Later, the group split into autonomous factions and began an insurgency. Commander Abubakar Shekau managed to achieve dominance among the rebels, becoming the de facto leader of the insurgency. He focused on overthrowing the government. Supported by other jihadist organizations, including al-Qaeda and al-Shabab, Shekau's tactics were characterized by extreme cruelty and targeted attacks on non-combatants. After years of fighting, the rebels became increasingly aggressive and began seizing control of vast territories in the northeastern part of the country.

The militia members formed an alliance with the central command of the ISIS organization and continued to operate as the Islamic State under the command of Abu Musab al-Barnawi, while Shekau and his group were mostly still called Boko Haram. In the years 2018–2019, both militias launched new offensives and gained strength once again. In the mid-2010s, the militia's insurgency was at its peak, and it became the deadliest terrorist organization in the world in terms of the number of people annihilated by it. The leader declared in an audio broadcast that they were fighting to establish an Islamic state in the northern part of the country, which is predominantly Muslim. In 2014, the violence escalated dramatically after 10,849 people were annihilated and the militia drastically expanded its territories. The insurgency also spread to neighboring Cameroon, Chad, Mali, and Niger, thereby becoming a major regional conflict in Sub-Saharan Africa. In March 2015, Shekau joined the Islamic State to improve his international standing among jihadists, and the territories captured by him became the Islamic State's West Africa Province (ISWAP).

The militia maintained a rigid ideology regarding women and girls. According to its view, they were not meant to attend schools and acquire an education, but to serve as comfort slaves for men and cook for them. Consequently, during its raids, its men captured them and turned them into their comfort slaves or married them by force. Since 2014, at least 2,000 women and girls have been captured by the militia, and many of them were forced to become comfort slaves. On the night of April 14, 2014, militia members raided the Government Secondary Girls' School for girls aged 16–18 in the predominantly Christian town of Chibok, to capture them and rape them on a regular basis. The students were forced outside, and some were immediately loaded onto trucks waiting outside. The rest were forced to march several kilometers and were subsequently also loaded onto the militia's trucks that arrived in the area. In the vehicles, 276 girls were transported, all or most of them presumably to fortified camps of the militia in the Kondruga area of the Sambisa Forest. This is a nature reserve spanning 60,000 square kilometers.

The girls were Islamized and forced into marriage with the militia members. The price of each one stood at 2,000 Naira ($6). Many girls were also transported with fighters to neighboring Cameroon and Chad to sell them for forced marriage at a price of less than a dollar each. On May 5, shortly after 1:00 PM, the militia released a video in which Shekau claimed responsibility and declared that the girls should not have been in school but married, since girls from the age of 9 are already suitable for marriage, and therefore they were forced into marriage by them. He added: Allah ordered me to sell them. I will carry out his instructions, because the use of women and girls as slaves is permitted under Islam. A week later, the militia released another video showing about 130 of the girls dressed in long Islamic chadors and hijabs. Shekau declared in the video that many of the girls were non-Muslims and they would deal with them just as the Prophet Muhammad dealt with the infidels he captured. He threatened that if the captured militia members in prisons were not released, the girls would be kept in captivity and they would in fact continue to rape them on a regular basis.

On May 30, 2014, two of the girls were found raped, dying, and tied to a tree. Villagers testified that the militia left them this way and annihilated four other defiant girls whom they buried. Later that year, four girls managed to escape and walked for three weeks until they reached safety on October 12. They testified that they were held in a camp in Cameroon and raped daily. In April 2015, the militia filmed the girls being raped and released the video, while setting conditions for their release. It declared that it was ready to release 18 of the girls because they were already terminally ill anyway and some carried the Human Immunodeficiency Virus. However, they were ultimately not released. They were taken by another militia that believed the resource of their bodies could still yield profits for it. In August 2016, the militia published another video by order of Shekau showing about 50 of the girls, some holding babies they gave birth to after being raped. A masked armed spokesman standing next to them demanded the release of imprisoned fighters in exchange for their release. He declared that 40 of them were forced into marriage. In April 2023, two girls were rescued along with a baby that one of them gave birth to after being raped. Both were forced into marriage three times in captivity. Women and girls released from the militia's captivity frequently faced rejection by their communities and families due to the shame of being raped.

On February 19, 2018, at 5:30 PM, the militia raided the Government Girls' Science and Technical College in the town of Dapchi, capturing 110 girls aged 11–19, and annihilated five. The militia agreed, in exchange for a massive ransom, to release the rest only after they agreed to convert to Islam, except for the 14-year-old girl Leah Sharibu, who was kept in captivity because she refused. The militia fighters warned the parents of the released girls not to dare send them to school again. As for the girl Sharibu, the militia decided to show her the fate of an infidel, as they phrased it, who refuses to convert to Islam. She was Islamized and forced into marriage with a commander in the militia. She was raped by him on a regular basis, and as a result, she first gave birth to his son. At the end of 2020, she gave birth to his second child, and in 2023 to his third child. As of 2025, she was still held in captivity.

2.29 Syrian Civil War (2011–2024)

In the years 2011–2024, the Syrian Civil War took place. It broke out in the month of March due to dissatisfaction with the Ba'ath regime under the control of Bashar al-Assad, which triggered large-scale protests and pro-democracy rallies across the country, as part of the broader Arab Spring. The Assad regime responded to the protests with lethal force, leading to a series of defections, the appearance of armed opposition groups, and a civil uprising that deteriorated into a civil war. The opposition established groups such as the Free Syrian Army (FSA), received weapons from countries like Qatar and Turkey, and established the Syrian Interim Government after capturing the regional capitals of Raqqa in 2013 and Idlib in 2015. Conversely, pro-Assad forces received financial and military support from Iran and Russia. In 2013, the former intervened militarily, and in 2015, the latter followed suit. In 2014, the ISIS organization seized control of eastern Syria and western Iraq and established the Islamic State of Iraq and Syria (ISIS), leading to a coalition led by the United States to launch an aerial bombing campaign against it, while providing ground assistance and supplies to the Syrian Democratic Forces (SDF), a Kurdish-dominated coalition led by the People's Protection Units (YPG). The Islamic State was defeated in campaigns over the cities of Raqqa and Deir ez-Zor.

In December 2016, the victory of pro-Assad forces in the battle for the city of Aleppo, which lasted four years, marked the recapture of what was Syria's largest city before the war. In the Idlib province, the Hayat Tahrir al-Sham (HTS) militia established the Syrian Salvation Government, a technocratic and Islamist administration that ruled the region in the years 2017–2024. In December 2019, regime forces launched an offensive on the Idlib province. Between 2020 and November 2024, frequent clashes occurred between pro-Assad forces and the Hayat Tahrir al-Sham militia. On November 27, 2024, the Hayat Tahrir al-Sham militia launched a major offensive with the support of the Syrian National Army (SNA) and the Free Syrian Army. The city of Aleppo fell within three days, giving momentum to revolutionaries across the country. The southern rebels also launched an offensive and captured the cities of Daraa and As-Suwayda. Subsequently, the Hayat Tahrir al-Sham militia captured the city of Hama, while the Free Syrian Army and Syrian security forces launched separate offensives in the cities of Palmyra and Deir ez-Zor respectively. On December 8, Bashar al-Assad fled to the city of Moscow in Russia, while the cities of Homs and Damascus fell into the hands of the rebels. On January 29, 2025, at the Syrian Revolution Victory Conference, held at the presidential palace in the city of Damascus, the new government announced the appointment of the former leader of the Hayat Tahrir al-Sham militia, Ahmed al-Sharaa, as president of Syria.

During the war, tens of thousands of women and girls were raped by Syrian security forces, pro-government forces, state officials, Islamic State forces, Free Syrian Army forces, Shabiha militia members, and other pro-government militias, as a planned strategy. Women were raped by government security forces, rebels, and militia members at high rates. The terror of rape was the primary reason for the flight of 600,000 women from the war zone. With the outbreak of the war, state forces organized the rape of women in the city of Daraa. When they began their suppression of protesters in the city of Jisr al-Shughour, a tactic employed was raiding homes where women slept to rape them. On August 13, 2012, Alawite officers ordered their soldiers to rape young girls in the city of Homs and subsequently execute them by gunfire. Soldiers who refused to rape them were shot by the army. In 2013, it was reported that boys and girls barely 12 years old were raped and tortured in their genitalia. From the beginning of the war until the end of November 2013, about 6,000 women were raped, some gang-style, though the numbers are probably much higher considering that most cases were not reported. Most were raped by government forces, particularly during attacks on rebels' positions, at checkpoints, and in detention facilities.

In April and August 2014, it was reported that government forces and forces supporting it continued to rape women systematically. Many of them became pregnant. In August 2018, a woman was raped in the city of Hama by the leader of the Suleiman Shah Brigade himself, Muhammad al-Jasim, who was dubbed Abu Amsha. Women who were raped were considered a disgrace by their family members and communities and were slaughtered by them. Those permitted to live were considered unfit for marriage, and therefore many survivors kept silent. In 2015, it was reported that women and girls were also raped in government detention facilities during the entire war, particularly in the interrogation facilities of the Military Intelligence Directorate and in detention facilities managed by the General Security Directorate in the city of Damascus. In 2013, women were raped in the detention facility of the Syrian Political Security branch, and other women underwent sexual abuse in the detention facility of the Military Security branch in the city of Latakia. Men held in detention facilities were repeatedly threatened that their wives and daughters would be raped. Boys and male children were also raped. In one case, a 15-year-old boy was raped in front of the eyes of his father. Another 11-year-old child was raped by three officers of the security services. Men were raped with batons. In the Saydnaya Military Prison in the suburbs of the city of Damascus, women were raped while men were forced to strip and rape one another numerous times.

2.29.1 The Islamic State (2014–2017)

In 2014, the Islamic State announced the revival of the institution permitting the use of non-Muslim women and girls as comfort slaves and transferring them from hand to hand. It declared that not only are Muslim men permitted to rape non-Muslim women, but it is also a commandment, and it encouraged them to rape them. It established that the permission to rape them yields two practical results: first, it motivates men to convert to Islam, and second, it compels them to give birth to Muslim children who will also become the fighters needed to expand its control. According to the prevailing view, every non-Muslim woman must be raped by at least 10 different fighters of the Islamic State to atone for her infidelity. High-ranking officials of the Islamic State were the primary leaders in the systematic trafficking of these women. In the month of October, it explicitly stated in its online magazine Dabiq that there is religious justification according to the Hadith and the Quran to turn the wives and daughters of non-Muslims into comfort slaves and rape them, including young girls, because they are the spoils of war, the spoils of jihad—such as the Yazidi women who belong, as it phrased it, to the religion of infidelity. It ruled that these acts are permitted against disbelievers who refused to convert to Islam. It was written that the use of their wives as comfort slaves is a well-established aspect of the Sharia, which if anyone denies or mocks, they are denying or mocking the verses of the Quran and the words of the Prophet, and thereby committing apostasy against Islam. Therefore, as an organizational entity, it adopts and regulates this practice.

At the end of the year, the Islamic State published a pamphlet online that focused on instructions on how to treat slaves. It wrote that the Quran permits fighters to rape them and explicitly ruled that it is permitted to rape even young girls from the moment their bodies can be penetrated, even if they have not yet reached puberty. It was also written that fighters are permitted to impregnate them or trade them as comfort slaves. Additionally, they could be beaten to make them submissive. In January 2015, additional rules regarding comfort slaves were announced. An article in the magazine stated that Muslim men who turned non-Muslim women and girls into their comfort slaves and rape them should not deny it, but should in fact take pride in it publicly, because their sexual enslavement (transliterated: Tasarri) is permitted according to the ruling of the great Sharia and the pure prophetic Sunnah under the title of enslavement (transliterated: Saby). The right granted to Muslim men to rape infidels was considered the most sublime reward they could receive. Thus, for example, in June 2015, in a Quran memorization competition held in the city of Mosul, the three winning men received comfort slaves as a prize. Since many fighters wished to avoid them bearing offspring as a result of the rape, they were explicitly permitted to withdraw before ejaculation every time they raped them. In addition, the Islamic State ruled that it is permitted to marry young girls by force.

Tens of thousands of Yazidi, Christian, Shia, Turkmen, Shabak, and other women and girls, including girls only 9 years old, were systematically raped by Islamic State fighters, fighters from other armed groups, and other Muslim men in areas captured by the Islamic State, solely due to being non-Sunni Muslims—״infidels, as they phrased it. Sometimes all the women and girls in families were captured and forced to become comfort slaves. Many were granted, sold, or traded as comfort slaves for fighters and other Muslim men on a large scale, or were married to them by force. Many female captives were presented with two options: to convert to Islam or to be raped by Muslim men. Yazidi women and girls were systematically raped by them and forced to become their comfort slaves. Their systematic rape was deeply integrated into the radical theology of the Islamic State. Many Yazidi women were gang-raped in a pattern that became a custom. The command gave a free hand to fighters to rape as many Yazidi women as they wanted.

The Islamic State recruited tens of thousands of foreign fighters from around the world, and by mid-2018, their number grew exponentially to over 40,000. As a result, deep linguistic and cultural gaps were evident within its ranks, and their integration was critical. Therefore, the leaders of the Islamic State directly used the rape of female captives to establish relations and loyalty between local and foreign fighters by transferring them from hand to hand, which proved effective. Foreign fighters, like the local ones, raped captives on a regular basis and even became central partners in their rape. After the Islamic State fighters captured an area, the men were in many cases separated from the women and mostly annihilated, while the women, teenage girls, and young girls were divided among the fighters, raped by them, and forced to become their comfort slaves or were married to them by force. After they were raped by them, they were transferred to other fighters, while one-fifth of them were collected as a tax and trafficked to markets for selling comfort slaves to raise funds, such as in the cities of Mosul and Raqqa. Captives were sold repeatedly and raped each time by different men. This was based on a practice called temporary marriage. The older women who were not to their liking were mostly transported to an improvised market for selling comfort slaves to attempt to sell them as comfort slaves as well.

Yazidi women and girls who were already pregnant before they were captured underwent forced abortions. Women held in captivity were frequently beaten by their captors to train them to submit to being raped by them. Yazidi captives were forcefully impregnated while other captors used to inject the Yazidi women and girls they raped with pharmacological substances for contraception. Those who nevertheless became pregnant were forced to undergo forced abortions. Women and girls were raped not only by their captors but also by their friends frequently. The Islamic State executed women who dared to refuse to submit to being raped by its fighters. On December 17, 2014, it was reported that at least 150 women and girls from the Al-Bu Nimr tribe in the city of Fallujah, some pregnant, were annihilated because they dared to refuse to submit to being raped by fighters. In August 2015, 19 additional women were annihilated for the same reason.

The Yazidi women who were captured and transported to markets for selling comfort slaves were immediately examined by gynecologists to determine if they were virgins or pregnant before their sale. Women found pregnant underwent forced abortions. The women and girls were displayed in markets while carrying price tags on themselves. The younger they were, the more expensive they were. On November 3, 2014, the Islamic State issued an online price list for Yazidi and Christian women and girls. In the year 2015, it established an official price list: girls aged 1–9: 200,000 Dinars ($169). Women, teenage girls, and girls aged 10–20: 150,000 Dinars ($127). Women aged 20–30: 100,000 Dinars ($85). Women aged 30–40: 75,000 Dinars ($63). Women aged 40–50: 50,000 Dinars ($42). However, some of the captives were also sold for a pack of cigarettes and even granted as a gift. Captives were also sold as comfort slaves to men in Saudi Arabia, and in additional countries in the Persian Gulf and Turkey.

Women and girls were also sold online through photographs transmitted via encrypted applications, primarily Telegram and Facebook, and to a lesser extent WhatsApp. All the captives photographed in the pictures were under the age of 30, and some were girls who had barely finished elementary school. All were photographed in a shabby hall, and behind them were placed over-padded chairs or brocade curtains. They were ordered to look at the camera. The faces of many of them were heavily made up to further increase the buyers' desire to rape them. The Islamic State recorded which slave was owned by whom and used applications like Telegram so that if she dared to attempt to escape from her owner, any control point, checkpoint, or security force could identify her. In mid-2016, although the Islamic State was losing territory to Iraqi forces, it tightened its control over 3,000 women and girls held as comfort slaves to ensure that they could not escape.

Survivors testified that their captors used to explain to them proudly why they were raping them: a 15-year-old girl, for example, testified: (While he was raping me) he told me repeatedly that this is worship (transliterated: Ibadah). A 12-year-old girl testified: He told me that through my rape he approaches Allah. An adult woman held in captivity along with a 12-year-old girl testified that when she begged their captor to at least stop raping the girl, he replied to her that she is a slave, and it pleases Allah that he rapes her. Captors used to dispose of the male babies born to their comfort slaves before they captured them because the resource of their bodies was considered useless to them. In June 2017, for example, it was reported that a woman was separated from her one-year-old son and forced to become a comfort slave. She was starved for 3 days in a basement until finally her captors brought her a meal. After she finished it, they told her: We cooked your one-year-old son whom we took from you, and that is what you ate. Fighters used to brag about the number of women they raped. One of them, for example, Ammar Hussein, bragged that he himself had raped over 200 women from minority groups in Iraq. Many captives attempted to end their lives. Yazidi girls in Iraq, for example, who were raped by fighters, ended their lives by jumping to their deaths from Mount Sinjar.

In June 2014, during the capture of the Iraqi cities, women were captured and raped by Islamic State fighters. Between July 6 and September 10, women and girls were systematically and widely captured and raped by Islamic State fighters and its allied rebel groups. In the month of August, between 5,000 and 7,000 Yazidi women and girls were captured and sold as comfort slaves or married by force in northern Iraq. In the same month, 450–500 women and girls were captured and transported to the Nineveh region. From them, 150 single women and girls were selected, who were mainly from the Yazidi and Christian communities. They were transferred to Syria and there they were granted to fighters as a reward or sold as comfort slaves to other Muslim men. On August 3, the entire village of Kocho, which numbered about 1,826 residents, was captured. The men and boys over the age of 14 were separated and most were annihilated, and over 1,000 women and children were captured: the male children were taken to military camps, where they were trained and forced to also become fighters, while the women and girls were granted to fighters and sold as comfort slaves. On the same day, Yazidi women and girls from the Al-Qahtaniya area were captured and forced to become comfort slaves, and out of them, 450–500 were taken to the city of Tal Afar. Hundreds more were taken to the village of Siba Sheikh Khidir and from there to the town of Ba'aj. Between August 3 and 6, 500 Yazidi women and children were captured in the town of Ba'aj, and over 200 from the village of Tel Banat. The women and girls were forced to become comfort slaves.

On August 4, after the Sinjar Mountains were captured, women and girls were captured in the Yazidi village of Hardan and forced to become comfort slaves. Other Yazidi women were captured in other villages in the area. On August 6, 400 Yazidi women in the town of Sinjar were captured to sell them as comfort slaves. On August 7, it was reported that dozens of Yazidi men in the town of Sinjar were annihilated, and their wives were granted to single jihadist fighters. On August 10, about 7,000 women and girls were captured and forced to become comfort slaves in northern Iraq. On August 15, up to 1,000 women and children were captured in the Yazidi village of Kocho. The women and girls were forced to become comfort slaves. By the end of August, up to 2,500 Yazidis were captured, most of whom were women and girls forced to become comfort slaves. On August 12, it was reported that about 1,500 Yazidi and Christian female captives were forced to become comfort slaves. In August 2015, it was reported that a 26-year-old American woman named Kayla Mueller, a humanitarian aid worker, was captured and granted to the leader of the Islamic State himself, Abu Bakr al-Baghdadi. She was married to him by force, held by him personally, and brutally raped by him repeatedly until she died.

In 2014, it was reported that Islamic State fighters also notified Muslim families among the occupied populations that they must hand over their daughters to satisfy them sexually, in a custom called sexual jihad and marriage jihad (transliterated: Jihad al-Nikah). Leaflets in the occupied cities of Mosul and Tikrit stated that women, virgins or not, must sexually satisfy fighters to purify themselves, and that those who refuse would be beaten or annihilated, because they violate the will of God. In June 2014, it was reported that the Islamic State hung posters calling on the residents of the city of Mosul to hand over their single daughters to marry them by force to fighters.

In November 2015, it was reported that about 2,000 women and girls were still being bought and sold in areas controlled by the Islamic State. In October 2016, many Yazidi women and girls were still held in captivity as comfort slaves. In 2017, 1,882 Yazidi women and girls were still held as comfort slaves in captivity in Iraq and Syria. The bodies of comfort slaves in the city of Mosul also served for the fighters as human shields during the campaign over the city. Some of them were forcefully transferred to the city of Raqqa due to demand. In 2018, it was reported that about 6,300 Yazidis were captured in the Sinjar district, while women were raped and forced to become comfort slaves within an institutionalized rape system. Many women and girls were held in captivity as comfort slaves for a long time. A Yazidi woman held in the home of an Islamic State commander in the city of Ankara in Turkey was rescued only in July 2020. A 7-year-old Yazidi girl was rescued from the home of two commanders in the city only in February 2021. Another 21-year-old Yazidi woman, Fawzia Amin Sido, who was sold to a Palestinian man who supported the Islamic State, was rescued only in October 2024. She was an 11-year-old girl when she was captured.

2.30 Rohingya Genocide (2016–Present)

From October 2016 to January 2017, and since August 2017, the genocide against the Muslim Rohingya and the annihilation of other minority groups in Myanmar, such as the Kachin, has been taking place. It has been a series of ongoing ethnic cleansings, persecutions, killings, and military crackdowns by the state's armed forces (Tatmadaw) and the Burmese authorities. Their persecution dates back at least to the 1970s, and they have since been systematically targeted by the government and Buddhist nationalists. At the end of 2016, security and police forces launched a widespread crackdown against residents in Rakhine State, located in the northwestern part of the country, which included extrajudicial executions, the killing of infants, and the burning of villages, businesses, and schools. Between August 25 and September 24, 2017, at least 6,700 Rohingya were killed in attacks. In January 2018, it was reported that at least 25,000 Rohingya had been killed by the military and local residents in Rakhine State, approximately 116,000 Rohingya were beaten, and about 36,000 were thrown into fires. Starting from 2024, the Arakan Army has also participated in abuses, particularly in territories under its control. Over 1,000,000 Rohingya have been displaced and have fled to other countries, the majority to Bangladesh—resulting in the establishment of the largest refugee camp in the world—while others fled to India, Thailand, Malaysia, and other parts of South and Southeast Asia, where they also face persecution. The largest wave occurred in 2017, leading to the largest mass exodus in Asia since the Vietnam War. By September 2018, over 700,000 people had fled or been expelled from Rakhine State to neighboring Bangladesh as refugees.

Even before the genocide began, for decades, the Tatmadaw forces used the rape of women and girls from minority groups, such as Rohingya and Karen women, as a military strategy. Some were forced to become comfort slaves or were married by force. During the genocide, Rohingya women and girls were raped en masse by Tatmadaw forces, including army soldiers and border guard police, Buddhist militia members, insurgent groups in Rakhine, Kachin, and Shan states, and local Rakhine residents, due to their ethnic and religious identity. They were targeted massively, extensively, and systematically as an integral part of the military strategy during the ethnic cleansing. Many were gang-raped. In Rakhine State alone, hundreds and perhaps thousands of Rohingya women and girls were raped by Tatmadaw forces, with many subjected to side-by-side gang-rapes in mass assaults.

In one case, a 15-year-old girl selected to be raped was brutally dragged along the ground for a distance of more than 15 meters, where she was gang-raped by 10 soldiers. Some of the women and girls were raped to death, while others were found traumatized and with open wounds after reaching refugee camps in Bangladesh. Women were also captured and forced to become comfort slaves in military captivity, such as at the base of Light Infantry Battalion 551. Women were also stripped and forced to walk naked in public as part of their degradation. On February 3, 2017, a study based on the testimonies of over 200 Rohingya refugees revealed that half of the women had been systematically raped or sexually assaulted, some gang-style. Between August 25, 2017, and August 2018, over 18,000 women and girls were raped.

On August 25, 2017, military forces and armed local Rakhine tribesmen invaded the village of Chut Pyin. Men were killed while women were raped by members of the security forces. On August 30, military forces invaded the village of Tula Toli. Women were first separated and ordered to sit near the river and wait while the forces killed the men. Women who entered the river in a desperate attempt to escape their inevitable fate were ordered to come out and sit back along the riverbank. After some time, the soldiers ordered them to stand up and try to run away from them. It amused them to watch the women try to escape in vain, despite clearly having no chance. As they began to run for their lives, the soldiers opened fire on them. Some entered the river in a desperate attempt to dodge the bullets and drowned in the current. At least 200 women were killed. The soldiers left about 30 women alive, whom they selected to rape first before killing them. They were ordered to wait again along the river, where they were divided into six groups and taken to be gang-raped by the soldiers in nearby huts. After the soldiers raped them, they beat them, looted their jewelry, and set the huts on fire.

Since the military coup in the country in 2021, the army has further intensified the systematic rape of women. On March 1, 2023, at approximately 3:00 AM, military forces crossed the Mu River, raided the village of Tar Taing, and killed residents. The villagers did not manage to escape due to the mistaken assumption that the soldiers would not cross the river. In the evening, the forces captured between 70 and 100 residents and took them as hostages to a local monastery. the next morning, soldiers used them as human shields while marching to Nyaung Yin village, located four kilometers west. Later in the day, all the hostages were killed by the soldiers, while at least three women were first raped by them.

2.31 Tigray War (2020–2022)

Between November 3, 2020, and November 3, 2022, the Tigray War took place, also referred to in certain academic and political sources as the Northern Ethiopia Conflict. It was a civil war fought primarily in the Tigray Region of Ethiopia between allied forces of the Ethiopian Federal Government and Eritrea on one side, and the Tigray People's Liberation Front (TPLF) on the other. Following years of escalating tensions and animosity between the TPLF and the governments of Ethiopia and Eritrea, fighting broke out after TPLF forces attacked the Northern Command headquarters of the Ethiopian National Defense Force (ENDF), along with several other bases in the Tigray Region. The ENDF launched a counteroffensive from the south, while the Eritrean Defence Forces (EDF) began launching attacks from the north, which Prime Minister Abiy Ahmed described as a law enforcement operation. On November 28, federal allied forces captured the regional capital, Mekelle. The TPLF declared shortly thereafter that it would continue fighting until the invaders were gone, and on June 28, 2021, the Tigray Defence Forces (TDF) recaptured the city of Mekelle. By July, they had advanced into the neighboring Amhara and Afar regions.

In early November 2021, the TDF, alongside the Oromo Liberation Army (OLA), took control of several towns on the highway leading south from the Tigray Region toward Addis Ababa, and the TPLF stated that it was considering marching to the capital. The TPLF and the OLA, together with seven smaller rebel groups, announced a coalition aimed at dismantling Abiy's administration, and subsequently establishing a transitional authority. In response, a successful government counteroffensive was executed. In late August 2022, the fighting escalated dramatically, and by October, Ethiopia, Eritrea, and Tigray had rapidly mobilized and deployed hundreds of thousands of troops against one another. Throughout the war, all parties—and particularly the ENDF, the EDF, Amhara regional forces, and the TDF—committed mass extrajudicial killings of civilians, including in the towns of Axum, Bora, Mahbere Dego, Zalambessa, Mai Kadra, Kobo, Humera, the village of Chenna Teklehaymanot, and the Hitsats refugee camp. The ENDF and EDF forces carried out ethnic cleansing. Between 162,000 and 378,000 people were annihilated, and a major humanitarian crisis developed, leading to widespread famine and immense economic damage to the region, with reconstruction costs alone estimated at approximately $20,000,000,000.

During the war, between 10,000 and 120,000 women and girls (including young girls around the age of 8, pregnant women, and elderly women around 72) were raped en masse daily by soldiers and militia members who usually wore uniforms. These perpetrators were from the ENDF, the EDF, Ethiopian and Amhara security forces, the TDF, the Amhara Region Special Forces, local Fano militias, and other special units. The atrocities occurred heavily in cities like Mekelle and Adigrat, as well as the towns of Rawyan and Wukro. Many were gang-raped, with some women subjected to gang-rapes spanning several consecutive days. Mothers and their daughters were raped side by side, and the unfortunate victims were frequently targeted in front of the eyes of their family members. Some were forced to become comfort slaves, and men were forcefully compelled under duress to rape their own female family members.

The rape of women and girls in the Tigray Region was deliberate and systematic within the well-organized command hierarchy of the ENDF and the strict command hierarchy of the EDF. Soldiers who refused to participate were punished. In January 2019, before the war broke out, Ethiopian Prime Minister Abiy Ahmed, who belongs to the Oromo ethnic group, joked in front of a crowd: So if you are wondering what the share of the Oromo is in the Tigray Region, let DNA find out, mocking the fact that members of his ethnic group had already gang-raped women and daughters in a previous conflict. The crowd responded with enthusiasm, and he added: Those who went to the town of Adwa (in Tigray) to fight did not just go and come back. Each of them had about 10 children (after raping their mothers). The crowd reacted with loud laughter and applause. On March 21, 2021, Abiy stated that the suffering of the women being raped by his soldiers in the war was of minor importance, declaring: The women in Tigray? These women have only been penetrated by men, whereas our soldiers have been penetrated by a knife. In early 2021, an Ethiopian general stated that it was a matter of course for soldiers to rape women during wartime and that they were fully permitted to do so in the Tigray Region.

ENDF and EDF forces, alongside Amhara fighters, told the unfortunate Tigrayan women they raped that they belonged to an ethnic group devoid of history and culture, and therefore they were raping them to remove their Tigrayan identity and bloodline, to purify their Tigrayan blood, to ethnically cleanse them, and to turn them into Amharas. Women were told that if they wished to receive basic supplies to survive, they had to submit to being raped. ENDF soldiers declared that it was justified to rape Tigrayan girls because they were not human like them, stating that while their own father was Prime Minister Abiy Ahmed, the girls' father was the defeated leader of Tigray, Debretsion Gebremichael. Parents shaved their daughters' heads and dressed them in boys' clothes in a desperate hope that soldiers would not recognize they were girls. Soldiers also frequently mutilated the genitalia of the victims, extinguished cigarettes on their bodies, branded them with hot iron, and forcefully inserted nails, metal rods, screws, plastic debris, and other objects into their reproductive organs while shouting ethnic slurs and insults. Women and girls begged for emergency contraceptive pills. Many contracted sexually transmitted diseases, including HIV, and faced severe obstacles in accessing medical treatment due to the intense social stigma and the total collapse of the healthcare infrastructure during the war.

Approximately 8% of the women in the Tigray Region were raped during the conflict, with about 70% of them being gang-raped, and a tenth of all women experiencing sexual violence. By late March 2021, at least 512 to 516 victims had been hospitalized across five medical facilities in Mekelle, Adigrat, Shire, Wukro, and Axum. However, the actual number of cases was vastly higher because most medical centers were non-functional and due to the heavy social stigma. A physician at a hospital in Mekelle shared that every woman who came forward usually testified to 20 other women who had been raped alongside her but did not dare seek medical help. By mid-April, at least 829 sexual assault survivors had been treated in the five active hospitals, representing only the tip of the iceberg. In July 2021, it was reported that 26,000 women and girls aged 15–49 had undergone sexual abuse since the beginning of the war.

On November 19, 2020, soldiers from the Eritrean Defence Forces invaded the Hitsats refugee camp, massacring Eritrean refugees who were perceived as traitors and raping women. Between December and January 2021, over 136 raped women were hospitalized in the cities of Mekelle and Adigrat and the town of Wukro, while many other cases went unreported. On January 4, 2021, it was reported that many women were raped, some by a single man and some gang-style. In the city of Mekelle, women were captured by security forces and held in captivity at unknown locations. Women begged for emergency contraceptive pills. On January 23, a female refugee testified that she fell into the hands of a soldier dressed in the uniform of the Ethiopian security forces who decided to rape her at gunpoint. She realized that she was going to be raped by him anyway even if she desperately tried to resist, as she stood no chance against him, and therefore she begged him to at least rape her with a condom. The amused soldier replied that a condom was unnecessary and raped her.

On February 1, 2021, it was reported that six young girls were raped by the Ethiopian National Defense Force in the city of Mekelle and were subsequently threatened not to seek medical treatment. In the town of Axum, women were raped by Ethiopian and Eritrean defense forces. Men who dared to try to help them, or were even merely witnesses, were shot by soldiers. As a result, residents stopped responding to the whimpers and cries for help of women being raped. In the city of Mekelle, soldiers from the Ethiopian defense forces also entered a flour mill in the Kebele 17 neighborhood, removed the men, and subsequently raped women. In the Ayder area of the city, two women aged 18 and 20 were raped. On February 15, 200 teenage girls and girls under the age of 18 who had been raped were brought to health centers and hospitals in the city of Mekelle. On February 28, 11 women who studied at the Ayder Referral Hospital in Mekelle and were on their way from the library to their dormitories were raped by the Ethiopian National Defense Force.

In early March, a 15-year-old girl was raped by the Eritrean Defence Forces in the city of Shire in front of witnesses who were forced to watch, including her brother. A woman in the town of Keresber was raped twice and was unable to walk when she reached a hospital. Women on the outskirts of the city of Mekelle were captured by soldiers and forced to become their comfort slaves for several weeks. Between rapes, they were forced to serve as domestic workers. One of the women was raped every night by the Eritrean Defence Forces for a week. In another case, six women were raped by the Eritrean Defence Forces for 10 days. One of them testified that the soldiers joked and photographed her. They tied her to a rock, stripped her, stabbed her, and subsequently raped her repeatedly. The vagina of another woman was filled with nails, stones, and plastic. In August 2021, it was reported that between 512 and 514 raped victims were hospitalized in Ethiopian hospitals, but the number of victims who were raped was vastly higher. Between November and December 2022, 852 women were raped and underwent sexual abuse, mostly by Eritrean forces.

2.31.1 Rape Camps (2020–2022)

During the war, the Ethiopian and Eritrean defense forces established three known rape camps for their soldiers. The primary hospital in the town of Hawzen was destroyed and converted into a rape camp by the Ethiopian National Defense Force. Captured women and girls were transported to the camp and imprisoned inside. The beds originally intended for patients served as the surfaces upon which they were raped, and some victims were even tied to them to ensure they could not escape. They were raped by soldiers from both the Ethiopian and Eritrean defense forces. A second rape camp was established at a construction site by the Ethiopian and Eritrean defense forces. One of the women was held in this camp alongside her baby. While she was being raped by a soldier, her baby was held by the soldiers waiting next in line, passed from hand to hand as they rotated. This left her with no choice but to submit to the assaults so they would allow her child to live. A third rape camp was established near a river.

2.31.2 Tigray Defence Forces (2020–2022)

Dozens of Amhara women and girls were also raped by soldiers from the Tigray Defence Forces (TDF) in the Amhara Region, while being subjected to ethnic slurs. Some were girls as young as 14 who were subsequently slaughtered by them. Between August 12 and 21, 2021, during the capture of the town of Nefas Mewcha, 71 or 73 women were raped, 16 of whom were targeted by TDF fighters while enduring ethnic abuse. A commander named Helemal proudly explained to a woman he raped why he was doing it: The Amharas are donkeys, the federal defense forces raped my wife, and now we can rape you as we please. In late August and early September, dozens of women and girls were raped consecutively by soldiers across several villages. A 12-year-old girl in the town of Filakit Gerger was raped by four soldiers for hours in front of her father's eyes. A 14-year-old girl was raped by five or six uniformed soldiers.

Between August 31 and September 4, the Tigray Defence Forces captured the village of Chenna Teklehaymanot and surrounding areas in the Dabat district, massacring residents. At least 30 women and girls were raped and sexually abused by soldiers, including 14-year-old girls targeted in Chenna Teklehaymanot and the town of Kobo. The soldiers also beat them, hurled ethnic insults, and threatened them with death. After some were raped by fighters, they were further forced to cook for them to satisfy their hunger. In late 2021, during the joint offensive by the Tigray Defence Forces and the Oromo Liberation Army, women and girls were widely and systematically raped by civil security forces in areas of the Afar and Amhara regions. In January 2022, it was reported that women were raped by the Tigray Defence Forces during the occupation of the Amhara Region as part of a systematic campaign against the Amhara civilian population.

2.32 Arab–Israeli Conflict (1834–Present)

Since 1948, a conflict has existed between Israel and its surrounding Arab nations, rooted in Israel's presence in a region that Palestinian Arabs also claim ownership over. The concurrent rise of Zionism and Arab nationalism beginning in the late 19th century marked the onset of the conflict. Zionists viewed the land as the ancestral homeland of the Jewish people, while Arabs regarded it as Palestinian Arab land and a vital component of the Islamic world. By 1920, sectarian friction commenced with the division of Ottoman Syria in accordance with the 1916 Sykes–Picot Agreement between the United Kingdom and France, which served as the framework for the British Mandate for Palestine and led to the issuance of the 1917 Balfour Declaration expressing British support for a Jewish national home. In 1948, following the adoption of the United Nations Partition Plan for Palestine, the conflict escalated from internal strife. One day after the expiration of the British Mandate and the Israeli Declaration of Independence, the Arab League launched the 1948 Arab–Israeli War, which concluded with a formal division along the Green Line. Subsequent wars erupted in 1956, 1967, 1973, and 1982. Confrontations between Israel and various Palestinian factions multiplied over time, including the First Intifada (1987–1993), Israel's intervention in the Lebanese Civil War (1975–1990) to expel the Palestine Liberation Organization from Lebanon, the Second Intifada (2000–2005), and more recently, the October 7, 2023 attack and the subsequent Gaza War.

2.32.1 The Arab Side (1834–2023)

Since the outbreak of the Arab-Israeli conflict in the 19th century, and particularly prior to the formation of organized Jewish defense forces, instances occurred where Arab armed groups engaged in massacres of Jewish populations. In contexts where Jewish women and girls were captured during these periods of unrest, testimonies and historical records indicate they were frequently subjected to rape before being killed. Instances of violence targeted Jewish populations outside the borders of historical Palestine as well. In the city of Baghdad, Iraq, between June 1 and 2, 1941, numerous Jewish women and girls were gang-raped by rioters during a widespread pogrom known as the Farhud, in which approximately 135 Jewish residents were killed and extensive properties were plundered. During anti-Israel demonstrations and militant attacks globally, participants frequently chant the slogan in Arabic: Khaybar Khaybar ya Yahud, Jaish Muhammad sawfa ya'ud (Hebrew: זכרו את ח'ייבר יהודים, צבא מוחמד עוד ישוב; English: Remember Khaybar, oh Jews, the army of Muhammad will return). This chant references the historical Battle of Khaybar in the year 628, where the Prophet Muhammad led an Islamic army to besiege and capture the fortified oasis of Khaybar, which was home to a prominent Jewish community. Following the defeat of the inhabitants, surviving women and daughters were taken as captives and distributed among the fighters, including Safiyya bint Huyayy, who was taken by Muhammad and subsequently raped already on that very night, and even married by force.

Historical records highlight explicit declarations by Arab political and media figures regarding the intended fate of Israeli civilians in the event of a military conquest. A primary vehicle for this rhetoric was the Egyptian radio station Sawt al-Arab (Voice of the Arabs), which operated under the direct oversight of President Gamal Abdel Nasser's regime. Serving as the most influential broadcasting station in the Arab world during the mid-20th century, it was a central apparatus for transnational pan-Arab propaganda. Between 1953 and 1967, Ahmad Said served as its director and chief announcer. Renowned for his distinct and emotionally charged broadcasting style, Said wielded significant influence over Arab public opinion. Leading up to and during the 1967 Six-Day War, the station focused heavily on rallying public sentiment against Israel. Said frequently broadcasted severe warnings regarding the anticipated outcome of an Arab victory, famously utilizing the phrase The men to the sea and the women for us, explicitly threatening the systemic annihilation of Jewish men and the mass rape of Jewish women.

Israel has maintained its sovereignty through substantial military capabilities. The well-equipped Israel Defense Forces maintain ground control over the regions of Judea and Samaria (the West Bank), utilizing intelligence and rapid deployment to neutralize cross-border incursions and hostile operations, with the exception of the coordinated surprise invasion on October 7, 2023, which is examined in a separate chapter. Analysts and writers have historically warned that a total military defeat of Israel would result in a catastrophic humanitarian crisis and large-scale ethnic cleansing, accompanied by widespread gender-based violence against Jewish women and children. Mordechai Horowitz aptly captured this perspective, writing: The Arabs love their murder hot, moist, and steaming, and if they are ever given the freedom to realize themselves, we will yearn for the sterile gases of the Germans (through which millions of Jews were annihilated during World War II). The annihilation would be accompanied, like any annihilation, by the mass rape of Jewish women and girls.

2.32.1.1 Sack of Safed (1834)

In 1834, a plunder took place in the Sidon Eyalet in the city of Safed of the Ottoman Empire, also known as the Safed Pogrom. It was a large-scale, month-long attack by Muslims and Druze on the Jewish community during the Peasants' Revolt in Palestine. It began on Sunday, June 15 (7th of Sivan), the day after the holiday of Shavuot, and lasted for 33 days. It was described as a spontaneous attack on a defenseless population during the armed revolt against the rule of the Ottoman governor of Egypt, Ibrahim Pasha. The pogrom occurred during a governmental vacuum while Ibrahim Pasha was fighting to suppress the broader revolt in the city of Jerusalem. Jews were annihilated and severely injured, and houses and synagogues were destroyed. Many Torah scrolls were desecrated. Hundreds fled the city and sought refuge in open rural areas or in nearby villages.

During the pogrom, many Jewish women were raped by Muslim and Druze rioters, as testified, for example, by the cantor Yitzhak Farhi. In one of the synagogues, women were raped on torn pieces of Torah scrolls, as testified by Rabbi Yisrael of Shklov. In one of the houses where a group of Jews attempted to barricade themselves and protect women, its two defenders were shot, and subsequently all the women hiding inside were raped. Rabbi Menachem Mendel of Kaminitz wrote in his memoirs in his refined language: The remaining people they afflicted with cohabitation, both males and females, meaning the rioters raped the women and children who did not manage to escape from them. During the riots against the Jewish community that broke out also in the city of Hebron, women were also raped by the rebels. When the army of the Egyptian officer, Ibrahim Pasha, captured the city, his soldiers also raped Jewish women.

2.32.1.2 Nebi Musa Riots (1920)

Between April 4 and 7, 1920, the Nebi Musa Riots, also known as the Jerusalem Riots, took place in the British-controlled part of the Occupied Enemy Territory Administration, in and around the Old City of Jerusalem. Five Jews were annihilated and hundreds were injured. The riots broke out shortly after the Battle of Tel Hai, as a result of escalating tensions in Arab-Jewish relations, against the background of increasing pressure on Arab nationalists in Syria during the Franco-Syrian War. They occurred concurrently with the Nebi Musa celebrations, which were held annually on Easter Sunday, and they are named after it. Arab religious leaders delivered speeches during the celebrations, where many Muslims traditionally gathered for a religious procession. They included slogans referencing Zionist immigration and previous clashes over remote Jewish villages in the Galilee region. The British military administration in Palestine faced criticism for withdrawing forces from the city and for taking control of it slowly. As a result of the riots, trust between the British and the Jews was eroded, and the Jewish community in the region accelerated moves toward autonomous infrastructure and security mechanisms alongside those of the British administration.

During the riots, Jewish women were raped by the Arab rioters. On the morning of April 6, 1920, thugs attacked the courtyard of Hana Jaffe, near the Gate of Remission of the Temple Mount, in the Muslim Quarter, where three Jewish families resided, who since the beginning of the riots had been under siege. The attackers breached the doors of the courtyard, and the residents fled to the upper floor. The rioters broke furniture and plundered the house, and subsequently went up to the second floor, where they saw the two sisters of Moshe Lifshitz, a 25-year-old woman and a 15-year-old girl, and decided to rape them. They first beat the other residents, including the children, and struck their brother's head with an iron bar, so that he would not interfere with them raping them. Afterward, his two sisters were gang-raped by the rioters, each in turn. On the second day, the riots escalated, and the British authorities declared martial law, imposed a siege on the Old City, and no one was permitted to leave the area, which did not prevent the rioters from continuing to massacre Jews and rape their wives and daughters.

2.32.1.3 Jaffa Riots (1921)

Between May 1 and 7, 1921, a series of riots by Arabs against Jews took place in Mandatory Palestine, known in Hebrew as the 1921 Riots (Meora'ot Tarpa). They began in the city of Jaffa and spread to other parts of the country. In total, 47 Jews were annihilated and 146 were injured. During the riots, Jewish women and girls were raped by Arab men. On the first day, at 1:30 PM, an immigrant hostel where 100 Jews resided was attacked by the crowd, and although they attempted to block the gate, it was breached and attackers streamed inside. The Jews tried to hide in various rooms. When the police arrived, not only did they not attempt to disperse the rioters, but they actually directed them toward the building. Those who were captured were stabbed and beaten. An Arab policeman who was at the scene decided to exploit the situation and capture a Jewish woman to rape her. He went inside, saw five women, and began firing at them from his pistol. Three of them managed to escape from him while the other two were captured by him. He attempted to rape them, but fortunately, they also finally managed to escape from him by the skin of their teeth despite being shot.

2.32.1.4 1929 Palestine Riots (1929)

Between August 23 and 29, 1929, the 1929 Palestine Riots occurred, also called the 1929 Riots (Meora'ot Tarpat), the Al-Buraq Uprising (Arabic: ثورة البراق, transliterated: Thawrat al-Burāq), and the Events of 1929. They were a series of demonstrations and riots in which a long-standing conflict between Palestinian Arabs and Jews over access to the Western Wall in the city of Jerusalem escalated into violence. The uprising broke out as a result of the Mufti's refusal to accept the United Kingdom's proposals for joint representation in Palestine, and his desire to strengthen his standing by raising concerns of a Jewish takeover of the Temple Mount. In total, 133 Jews were annihilated and 339 were injured, most of whom were unarmed. The riots were accompanied by the destruction of Jewish property.

During the riots, Jewish women and girls were raped by Arab men. On August 24, the riots spread to the Jewish Quarter in the city of Hebron. Men and male children were annihilated by Muslim Arab residents of the city, while women and girls were first raped by them. After rioters raped them, they plundered houses and their personal belongings. Rioters also broke into the home of Ben-Zion Gershon, who was the pharmacist at the Beit Hadassah clinic, and a paralytic who could not move from his place. They decided that before his death, he would first watch his daughter being raped by them. She was gang-raped in front of his eyes by dozens of rioters, each in turn. After they satisfied their desires, they slaughtered her in front of his eyes. Afterward, they slaughtered him as well with torture. The hands of his wife were severed, and she died in agony. Between 65 and 68 Jews were annihilated and 58 were injured in the city.

On the same day, in the afternoon hours, Arabs from the neighboring Arab village of Qalunya penetrated the Motza colony and broke into the home of Aryeh Leib Maklef, one of the founders of the Metula colony. Present in his home were also two rabbis, among them Shlomo Zalman Shach. The intruders saw the two female members of his family and decided to rape them. They first slaughtered Aryeh, his son, and the two rabbis, and hung his wife Batya on a fence after they tortured her, so that they would not interfere with them raping them. Afterward, the two female family members were raped by them before they too were slaughtered and their house was set on fire. On August 29, Arab rioters suddenly invaded the Jewish Quarter in the city of Safed from the valley and immediately began to systematically annihilate Jews. For the women, they cut off their breasts, as testified by a Scottish missionary who worked in the city.

2.32.1.5 The October 7 Attack (2023)

On October 7, 2023, during the holiday of Simchat Torah, 3,800 fighters from Hamas's Nukhba elite forces, along with approximately 2,200 additional gunmen from other groups, breached the border fence at 119 points in a coordinated manner using vehicles and motorized paragliders, and penetrated the Gaza envelope region in southern Israel to commit genocide. Concurrently, about 1,000 gunmen launched approximately 4,300 rockets from the Gaza Strip toward Israel, bringing the total number of participants to 7,000. They attacked residents in 21 settlements and military bases, including in the kibbutzim Be'eri, Kfar Aza, Nir Oz, and Alumim, and in the moshav Netiv HaAsara, and annihilated 1,219 residents: at least 810 civilians, including 38 children and 71 foreign nationals, and at least 379 security forces personnel. At the Nova music festival held at the same time nearby, an additional 364 civilians were annihilated by them and many others were injured. About 250 civilians, Israeli soldiers, and foreign workers were captured and transported to the Gaza Strip. Hamas declared that the invasion was a response to the ongoing Israeli occupation, the blockade of the Gaza Strip, the expansion of illegal Israeli settlements, the rise in Israeli settler violence, and the recent escalation. Several Arab countries and countries with a Muslim majority blamed Israel for the invasion due to its occupation of the Palestinian territories. The invasion led to the prolonged Gaza War. This was the first large-scale invasion into Israel's territory since the 1948 Arab–Israeli War, and it is currently considered the deadliest in the history of Israel and the deadliest for Jews since the Holocaust.

During the invasion, many Jewish women and girls of all ages were stripped and raped by Hamas fighters from the Izz ad-Din al-Qassam Brigades, Nukhba fighters (its special forces unit), Islamic Jihad fighters from the Al-Quds Brigades, and gunmen from additional militant groups. They were raped by them brutally, with great cruelty, and in a systematic, targeted, and widespread manner as part of the planning of the invasion. The rape took place in all the arenas where the Hamas fighters operated (at least in seven locations and four different areas): in the area of the open-air Nova music festival held near Kibbutz Re'im, and in the surrounding area to which the participants fled and on the nearby Route 232; in the kibbutzim Be'eri, Re'im, and others; in Israel Defense Forces bases near the border, where female soldiers were raped, such as at the Nahal Oz military base; and in captivity in the Gaza Strip. Many of them were gang-raped by gunmen, with cooperation among them. They were frequently raped by them in front of the eyes of others, including partners, family members, and friends. Hamas fighters photographed naked and bleeding women after they raped them, to document the result for their amused eyes. Most of the unfortunate women who were raped by them were subsequently slaughtered and their bodies were systematically mutilated and burned, particularly their genitalia. Their naked bodies were displayed publicly in the streets of the Gaza Strip and their pictures were uploaded to the internet. Gunmen also raped corpses of women.

A survivor from the festival who hid testified that he heard screams of women being raped. A woman who hid near the festival area testified that she saw a gunman bend a woman over and rape her. Afterward, he passed her to another gunman. After they satisfied their desires, they cut off parts of her body, including one of her breasts, threw it into the street, and played with it. She was still alive and bleeding. Subsequently, an additional gunman began to rape her, and at the peak of his pleasure while still raping her, he shot her in the head, and afterward ejaculated his seminal fluid. The survivor Yoni Saadon testified that a young woman near a car was captured by gunmen who began to strip her to rape her. She tried desperately to escape from them. In response, they decided to show her what the fate is of a Jewish woman who refuses to submit to being raped by Muslim men. They threw her to the ground and one of them took a shovel and decapitated her. Saadon added that after her head was severed, it rolled on the ground. He also testified that while he hid under the festival stage, he saw a woman being gang-raped by 10 gunmen while being beaten by them, and subsequently she was shot in the head.

The survivor Ron Preger testified that he heard a woman screaming They are raping me, they are raping me, and afterward several shots after which she fell silent. Another survivor saw men in civilian clothes dragging a woman out of a pickup truck on the nearby Route 232, to a place where they decided to rape her. They gathered around her and gang-raped her while she screamed. Afterward, she was slaughtered with a knife by one of the men. Three additional survivors testified that they saw women being raped and subsequently slaughtered there and at an additional location along Route 232. The survivor Raz Cohen hid in a large bush for several hours. He testified that he saw gunmen raping women and subsequently slaughtering them, and he saw gunmen who first slaughtered them and afterward raped their corpses while laughing. The survivors Raz Cohen and Shoham Gueta, who hid in a stream bed, saw a white pickup truck from which 4–5 men exited. They dragged a young, naked woman along the ground to a place where they decided to rape her. She was raped by them and subsequently she was slaughtered with a knife.

The survivor Sapir testified that she saw at least five women being gang-raped by groups of heavily armed men (about 100 gunmen) before they were slaughtered by them. She added that she saw them cutting off one of a woman's breasts and afterward throwing her severed breast from hand to hand, while they held the severed heads of three additional women. The survivor Yora Karol testified that he hid behind Sapir and saw a woman being raped before she was slaughtered. Another survivor testified that he also saw gunmen gang-raping a woman while mutilating her body, until finally they slaughtered her while still raping her. Ten additional survivors at different focal points in the party area watched from their hiding place women being raped, some gang-style, but due to their mental state, they could not testify. At the bend in the road known as the Mefalsim bend near Kibbutz Mefalsim, through which primarily partygoers at the festival attempted to escape, gunmen set up a blockade with vehicles, placed an ambush, and fired with a submachine gun at arriving vehicles. They performed an immediate confirmation of kill on the men, while women found in the vehicles they first raped and only afterward burned them alive. In one of the captured settlements, a survivor testified that he saw gunmen in military uniforms gang-raping a young woman while mutilating her body, until finally they slaughtered her while still raping her.

After the occupied territories were liberated by Israeli security forces, it was revealed that many women and girls had been raped alongside the annihilation. An apocalypse of naked or waist-naked corpses was found, with legs spread apart, and the hands of some were tied with rope and handcuffs, smeared with seminal fluids. Corpses were mutilated and with their genitalia mangled. The pelvises of some were broken and bleeding massively as a result of the brutal rape they underwent. In the festival area, producer Yinon Rivlin testified that he saw the body of a young woman lying on her stomach without pants and underwear. Her legs were spread apart and her vagina was cut open. Another producer, Rami Shmuel, testified that he saw corpses of naked women in a state that left no doubt that they had been sexually assaulted. A member of the disaster victim identification organization, Jamal Waraki, testified that he saw the corpse of a woman bent over and her underwear pulled down to her knees. In a video filmed after the festival by Eden Wessely and distributed on social networks, a woman was seen lying on her back in a torn dress after she was raped, burned, and slaughtered. Her legs were spread apart and her vagina was exposed. She was raped in front of the eyes of her husband and others before she was shot. A cut remained on her leg, apparently caused by the cutting of her underwear. Her face was completely charred and her right hand covered her eyes. She was later identified as Gal Abdush.

In the kibbutzim Be'eri and Kfar Aza, at least 24 corpses of naked or semi-naked women and girls were found, with signs of sexual abuse. Some were mangled and some were tied. In Kibbutz Be'eri, corpses of women and girls were found naked and bound in a repeating pattern. Corpses of women and girls who were raped were found, most in pajamas in their bedrooms. A paramedic from the special rescue unit 669, Sergeant J., found the corpses of two girls aged 13 and 16 in a bedroom. One was in torn boxer shorts with bruises in her groin. The other was in pajama pants pulled down to her knees. Her buttocks were exposed and seminal fluid was smeared on her back. He testified that according to the state of her corpse, he has no doubt she was raped before or after she was slaughtered. Elsewhere, two corpses of women were found with their legs and hands tied to their beds. Internal organs were removed from one of the corpses and her genitalia were stabbed with a knife. In Kibbutz Kfar Aza, survivor Nira Shpak testified that she saw several corpses with exposed genitalia, some in torn clothes. In Kibbutz Re'im, emergency security team member Noam Mark testified that he found in a house three naked corpses of women from the festival with clear signs of severe sexual violence.

In one of the kibbutzim, a commander in the disaster victim identification organization, Chaim Otmazgin, testified that he saw corpses of two naked women with objects inside them. The organization's spokesman, Simcha Greiniman, testified that he saw the corpse of a woman with sharp objects inside her vagina, including nails. For example, a corpse of a woman was also found with a knife embedded inside her vagina, a corpse of a woman with dozens of nails embedded in her groin and thighs, a corpse of a naked woman with clear signs of severe sexual violence, and a naked corpse of a woman from the waist down, shot in the head.

The corpses of the victims were brought to the Shura military camp to prepare them for burial. Corpses arrived mangled and with broken limbs and pelvises, and in a state that left no doubt they had been raped, from young girls to elderly women. A female reservist stationed at the camp, Shari Mendes, testified that naked corpses or corpses with little clothing and with signs of sexual violence were brought to them, some only in underwear stained with blood from their pelvic area, including corpses without heads and limbs and mangled faces. The faces of some were shot several times after death. She also testified that her team received corpses of female soldiers who were shot in their vaginas and breasts. She added: They were all young women. Most in skimpy clothes or shredded clothes and their bodies bled, particularly around the underwear, and some of the women were shot many times in the face to mutilate them. Their faces were in agony and frequently their fingers were clenched when they died. We saw women whose pelvis was broken. Broken legs. There were women who were shot in the groin, in the breasts... it seems there is no doubt what happened to them. An identification team officer stationed at the base, Captain Maayan, testified: I can say that I saw many signs of abuse in the area (of the genitalia). We saw broken legs, a broken pelvis, blood-stained underwear. She added that she saw at least 10 corpses of female soldiers with signs of sexual violence, including cuts in their vaginas, underwear soaked in blood, and a corpse whose fingernails were torn out. In a video, the corpses of two female soldiers who were shot in their vaginas were seen.

The Israel Defense Forces released a video called the atrocities film, which contains a collection of raw footage in the Gaza envelope region from the time of the annihilation, particularly segments filmed from body cameras carried by Hamas fighters. Although the video shows graphic footage of humans being annihilated by gunmen, segments showing women being raped by them were removed, appearing only afterward, to slightly reduce the degradation to her family members, but according to the appearance of their bodies it was clear they had just been raped. Hamas fighters declared in the video that they received explicit orders to rape women, and this was among other things their mission, and they even described how they raped them. Another gunman declared that he was given orders to rape corpses of women as well. On March 28, 2024, an Islamic Jihad operative, Manar Mahmoud Muhammad Qasem, declared in a video that he raped a woman in Kibbutz Nir Oz. In the video, he described her clothes, her bra, and her underwear, and recounted that after he raped her, she was taken along with her mother by two additional gunmen. In May 2024, two Hamas members, a father and his son, declared that they raped women in Kibbutz Nir Oz at gunpoint, and only afterward did they slaughter some of them.

Women and girls who were transported to the Gaza Strip and held in captivity were raped by their captors and underwent sexual abuse, including in front of the eyes of other female captives. Some were even threatened that they would be married to them by force. An Israeli military official stated that we know that female hostages were raped during captivity under Hamas control. A physician who treated released captives testified that many of the 30 females aged 12–48 underwent sexual abuse during captivity. Former captive Ilana Gritzewsky, aged 31, testified that while gunmen transported her on a motorcycle to captivity in the Gaza Strip, they groped her. After she lost consciousness, she woke up and saw that her shirt was raised, her breasts were exposed, her pants were pulled down, and seven gunmen were standing over her. One of the captors told her that he intended to keep her in the Gaza Strip and marry her by force.

On March 26, 2024, former captive Amit Soussana, aged 40, testified about the sexual abuse she underwent in captivity. On approximately October 24, her captor named Muhammad dragged her at gunpoint to a child's bedroom, where he, with the gun pointed at me, forced me to commit a sexual act on him. Former captives Chen Goldstein-Almog and her 17-year-old daughter Agam testified that they saw three women who told them they had been sexually assaulted in captivity. Agam described a female captive who underwent sexual abuse by a guard while she was washing herself in a sink. Former captive Aviva Siegel testified that she saw a woman whose captors had just sexually abused her when they took her to the restroom. In December 2025–January 2026, former captive Romi Gonen testified that she underwent sexual abuse in captivity repeatedly.

Many survivors who were raped remained silent due to a sense of shame. A physician testified that many of the women who witnessed sexual assaults experienced post-traumatic stress disorder. The United Nations and other international organizations responsible for women's rights and affiliated with the organization—including the organization's Committee on the Elimination of Discrimination against Women, and the Entity for Gender Equality and the Empowerment of Women (UN Women), as well as other international women's organizations and prominent feminist women in the West—initially refrained from issuing immediate condemnations regarding the rape of women and girls. Only on November 29 did the Secretary-General of the United Nations, António Guterres, address the issue, and only on December 2 did the entity UN Women publish a short statement addressing the accounts, which faced extensive public criticism in Israel and globally for the delay in its issuance. Critics and commentators argued that the prolonged silence from global human rights and feminist bodies reflected institutional bias and a failure to recognize the gender-based violence perpetrated against Jewish and Israeli victims.

2.32.1.6 Independent Actions (1946–2019)

Since the outbreak of the Arab-Jewish conflict, numerous Jewish women and girls have been raped by Arab men in independent actions, targeted due to their national and religious identity. In many instances within the Israeli legal framework, these cases were documented and prosecuted under criminal statutes, as establishing an explicit nationalist or ideological motive carries high evidentiary thresholds unless publicly declared by the perpetrators. However, analysts and investigators note a distinct pattern wherein victims are targeted specifically based on their affiliation with the rival national group, serving as an assault intended to degrade both the individual and the broader community. The cases compiled in this section represent documented instances where the victims were subsequently killed by the perpetrators following the assaults.

In 1946, for instance, a Jewish girl was gang-raped by three Arab men from the village of Sheikh Munis. In February 1951, a Jewish girl in the Katamon neighborhood of Jerusalem was gang-raped by Arab infiltrators who crossed from Jordan, led by Muhammad Mansi and Jamil Muhammad Mughrabi. On December 4 of that year, a 19-year-old Jewish woman named Lea Festinger, who was walking home from a bus stop in the Bayit VeGan neighborhood of Jerusalem, was intercepted and gang-raped by Arab militants who had infiltrated into Israel from the town of Beit Jala in Jordan, led by Muhammad Mansi. Afterward, they severely mutilated her body, killed her, and concealed her remains inside a cave located approximately one and a half kilometers from the armistice line with the Jordanian-controlled West Bank. On December 6, another Jewish woman was captured and gang-raped by Arab infiltrators near Jerusalem before being killed.

On March 17, 1954, a civilian passenger bus traveling from the city of Eilat to Tel Aviv was ambushed by a squad of 12 armed Arab infiltrators, commanded by Said Abu Bandak, as it ascended the Ma'ale Akrabim (Scorpions Pass) steep road. The attackers opened heavy fire on the vehicle, causing it to crash into the mountainside. Passengers attempting to escape the bus were shot down. The gunmen then boarded the vehicle and executed the remaining passengers at close range. One female passenger was dragged from the bus and subjected to rape. Following the assault, the perpetrators executed her and severed her finger to plunder a ring she was wearing. Before retreating across the border, the attackers desecrated the remains of the victims. Her body was later discovered in the terrain with her clothing heavily disarrayed. Eleven passengers were killed in the Ma'ale Akrabim massacre; two soldiers, a severely wounded female soldier, another female passenger, and 5-and-a-half-year-old Miri Furstenberg survived.

On June 11, 1982, during the fifth day of the First Lebanon War, shortly before midnight, a 21-year-old discharged soldier, Dafna Carmon, left the home of a friend's parents on Shimshon Street in Haifa and walked toward her residence on Moriah Street. Along the route, she was abducted by Ahmad Kozli, the brothers Kamal and Muhammad Sabihi, and their cousin Atef Sabihi. She was raped by the captors, after which she was killed, and her body was left in a wooded area near the Beit Oren road. In May 2006, Anwar Akhdoush, a 35-year-old Arab resident of the village of Zurif who worked as an occasional laborer at the municipal market in Beit Shemesh, targeted a 9-year-old Jewish girl, Lipaz Himi, who frequented the area. Investigators established that he meticulously planned the attack, motivated by national hostility. On May 4, he lured her to accompany him under the pretext of giving her 10 Shekels, leading her to a stairwell near the market where he and his associates lodged, and raped her. Following the assault, he used her belt, a shoelace, and an additional cord to strangle her to death before fleeing the scene. Following his apprehension by security forces, he stated that he targeted her because she was Jewish.

On February 7, 2019, Ori Ansbacher, a 19-year-old Jewish woman from the settlement of Tekoa, left her workplace at the Yaelim Center, where she volunteered in a national service program supporting youth with special needs—to spend time alone in nature. That same day, Arafat Irfaiya, a 29-year-old Arab man from the city of Hebron in the Palestinian Authority territories who was ideologically affiliated with the Hamas organization, infiltrated into Jerusalem by walking through a breach in the security barrier near the town of Beit Jala, equipped with a knife to commit an attack against Israeli civilians. Irfaiya spotted Ansbacher in the wooded area near the Ein Yael spring, ambushed her, and stabbed her with his knife. Despite her resistance and cries for help, Irfaiya subdued her in the isolated location. He dragged her approximately 150 meters into the brush to avoid detection, stabbed her again, gagged her with a scarf, bound her hands with a belt to prevent further resistance, and raped her before inflicting the fatal wounds. Irfaiya subsequently returned to the Palestinian Authority territories, where he was later captured by Israeli counter-terrorism units. During his interrogation and subsequent legal proceedings, it was confirmed that the attack was executed with a combined nationalist and sexual motive.

2.32.2 The Jewish Side (1947–1949)

In the years 1947–1949, during Israel's War of Independence and other conflicts of that period, there were documented instances where soldiers in the Israel Defense Forces raped Arab women and girls, such as during the Safsaf massacre, the Deir Yassin affair, the Nirim affair, and the Al-Dawayima affair, while some cases remained classified for years. On October 29, 1948, for example, military forces entered the Arab village of Safsaf, and its residents raised a white flag. The soldiers separated the men from the women and ordered them to stand in a line in the northern part of the village. While they were lined up, several soldiers selected four girls to rape, one of them 14 years old, and ordered them to accompany them under the pretext of bringing water for the soldiers. Instead, they led them to empty houses and raped them, while approximately 70 of the village residents were killed.

However, military commanders and authorities did not tolerate the phenomenon, and it was curbed through disciplinary actions and law enforcement measures, with no further systematic occurrences reported in subsequent wars. In 2006, a researcher at the Hebrew University, Tal Nitzan, authored a study examining the absence of widespread sexual violence by Israeli soldiers against Arab women during conflicts. Her sociological thesis argued that deep-seated national and cultural boundaries played a defining role in shaping soldiers' behavior and perceptions regarding the opposing population. This research faced public and academic debate regarding its interpretations and theoretical framework. Regarding biblical law, historical commentators note that classical rules concerning female captives in warfare (Yefat To'ar) were designed to restrict arbitrary actions by imposing formal legal obligations and structural procedures rather than granting unconditional permission.

2.32.2.1 The Nirim Affair (1949)

On August 8, 1949, following the conclusion of the War of Independence, Platoon 3, commanded by Second Lieutenant Moshe, was deployed to man the Nirim outpost near the border with Egypt. On the eve of their departure south, the company commander, Captain Uri Rosenblum, briefed them, stating: You must shoot to kill any Arab found within your sector. On Friday, August 12, at approximately 09:00 AM, the platoon commander went out on a patrol in the southwestern part of the sector. He traveled in a command car accompanied by two squad leaders, Corporal David and Corporal Gideon, alongside three other soldiers: Private Moshe, Private Yehuda, and Private Aziz. The driver was Corporal Shaul. They encountered two Bedouin men and a young Bedouin girl. The officer ordered the soldiers to put the girl into the vehicle. She began to scream and wail, but to no avail. Afterward, they drove the two men away by firing several shots into the air. On the way back to the outpost, the soldiers exchanged a few words with her, particularly Corporal David, while simultaneously conversing among themselves regarding their desire to subject her to rape.

During the afternoon hours, the patrol arrived at the outpost, and the soldiers took the girl down from the command car. The officer ordered them to confine her in an unused shack and place a guard over her. Private Avraham was sent to stand watch at the entrance. After about two hours, the officer left for an additional patrol. At the same time, the platoon sergeant took the girl out of the shack, stripped her of her traditional black dress, stood her completely naked outside, and in a degrading manner washed her in plain view of everyone under a pipe, with no walls to conceal her, while rubbing her body with water and soap. Afterward, he burned her dress, dressed her in a purple t-shirt and khaki shorts, and confined her again in the shack under the guard of Private Avraham. Before long, soldiers gathered near the shack and demanded that the guard let them enter so they could rape her each in turn. The guard agreed, but on the condition that he would rape her first. Once agreed, he entered the shack and raped her. After about 5 minutes, he exited the shack appearing to button his pants. After him entered the second soldier, followed by the third soldier, who also raped her each in turn for about 5 minutes. Upon exiting the shack, they were also seen buttoning their pants.

Upon the officer's return from the patrol, he understood that the girl had been raped by his soldiers. He conducted a brief inquiry, and subsequently, in the dining hall, he declared that three soldiers raped the Arab girl. He ordered her brought to the headquarters shack and placed before him. The two squad leaders, Corporal David and Corporal Gideon, were present in the shack. The officer examined her new clothes. She told him in Arabic that his soldiers had assaulted her. He ignored her words, as he deemed it their prerogative, and he even turned to his soldiers and remarked that her body needed to be washed first to be clean for repeated assaults. At approximately 17:00 PM, the commander ordered one of the privates to crop her hair in front of his eyes and the sergeant's eyes. Her hair, which previously flowed to her shoulders, was significantly cropped and washed with kerosene. Afterward, she was stripped, stood completely naked, washed again under the pipe before their examining eyes, dressed in the same t-shirt and shorts, and confined once again in the shack.

In the evening, a highly festive atmosphere prevailed at the outpost, and the officer ordered his soldiers to make preparations for a party. The tables in the large tent that served as a dining hall were arranged in rows, sweets were laid out on them, and some wine was poured into cups. Exactly at 20:00 PM, the soldiers sat in their places. The commander instilled Zionism in them, emphasizing the importance of the role they were performing and their contribution to the state. By order of his deputy, Sergeant Michael, Private Yehuda read a chapter from the Scriptures. When he finished, they broke into song, told jokes, ate, and drank. At approximately 21:30 PM, shortly before the end of the party, the officer asked the soldiers for silence. He stood up and, with a smile on his face, reminded them of the Bedouin girl imprisoned in one of the shacks at the outpost. He declared that he was putting two options to a vote before them. The first: that she would be enslaved from then on as a worker in the outpost's kitchen. The second: that she would become the comfort slave of the outpost and the soldiers would subject her to rape, each in turn. There was a massive commotion. The dozens of soldiers who were there raised their hands, and the second proposal was accepted by a majority vote. The soldiers began to shout enthusiastically: We want to assault her!

The officer announced that it was decided by a majority vote to assault the girl. He determined that the schedule would be as follows: that night, the soldiers of the platoon's headquarters squad would rape her. On Sunday, the soldiers of A Squad would rape her. On Monday, the soldiers of B Squad would rape her, and on Tuesday, the soldiers of C Squad would rape her. The driver, Corporal Shaul, jokingly asked him: And what about the drivers? Are they outcasts? The officer replied that they were included in the headquarters squad, along with the sergeant, the squad leaders, the cooks, the medic, and himself of course, who would rape her that very night. To these words, he added a threat: if any of the soldiers raped the girl out of turn and broke the order he established, the Tommy (Tommy gun, submachine gun) will speak. After the party ended, the officer ordered the platoon sergeant to bring a folding bed to their shared tent and lay the girl on it so she would be ready for use. The sergeant did as bidden, entered the tent, closed the entrance, and turned off the flashlight. After about an hour and a half, the officer ordered the girl to be removed from the tent because a foul odor was already emanating from her as a result of the frequent rape she underwent. The sergeant called one of the corporals, and both removed from the tent the torn bed and upon it the girl, who was sprawled in a state of fainting. They carried the bed to the entrance of her shack, and before entering, the sergeant laid her on the floor, and accompanied by Corporal David, carried her in his arms and returned her to the shack.

The next day, at approximately 06:00 AM, Private Eliyahu, who was on guard duty, saw the girl exiting the shack. He asked her where she was heading, and she replied to him in tears that she was begging to see the officer. Private Eliyahu showed her the way to his tent. The girl begged the officer that they stop raping her. In response, he threatened her that he would execute her and ordered her to return to the shack. A bit later, while shaving near the pipe, the sergeant asked him what to do with her. He ordered him to execute her since they had already raped her anyway. The sergeant ordered Corporal David to take two soldiers equipped with shovels to dig her grave. The girl was brought from the shack and placed onto the command car. Moments before the vehicle left the outpost, one of the soldiers shouted that he requested the return of the khaki shorts the girl was wearing. The officer ordered her to be stripped and the shorts returned to the soldier, as in the grave she would not need them anyway. She remained in the vehicle with only a t-shirt, while her lower body was completely exposed.

The vehicle set out. Corporal Shaul was driving it, and with him were Sergeant Michael, Corporal David, the medic, and those designated to be the gravediggers, Privates Eliyahu and Shimon, who were equipped with shovels. They distanced themselves approximately 500 meters from the outpost. The driver, Shaul, remained in the vehicle, and the other soldiers, with the girl, walked a short distance into the sands. Privates Eliyahu and Shimon began to dig her grave to a depth of about 30 centimeters in front of her eyes. When the girl saw what they were doing, she began to scream and cry and tried to escape. She managed to run about six meters before the sergeant aimed the Tommy gun and fired one bullet at her. The projectile struck her right temple, blood flowed from there, and she fell on the spot and moved no more. The two soldiers continued to dig her grave. The driver remarked that she might still be dying and asked the sergeant to shoot her a few more times to ensure she was dead. Before the sergeant could finish his sentence, Corporal David approached him, took the Tommy gun, and shot the girl's body several additional times. Afterward, they placed her body into the dug hole, sealed it with sand, and buried her inside it. Subsequently, they returned to the outpost.

In the afternoon hours, the officer arrived in the city of Beer Sheva and went to the cinema to watch a movie, where he met the battalion commander, Major Yehuda Drechsler. Drechsler asked him if they had already released the girl and driven her back to the place where they found her. The officer replied to him: They killed her, adding humorously: It was a waste of gasoline. On August 15, the officer ordered Sergeant Michael to prepare a telegram in his handwriting summarizing the event, signed it, and transmitted it to the company commander in these exact words: On my patrol on August 12, I encountered Arabs in my commanded area, one of them armed. I killed the armed Arab on the spot and took his weapon. And I took the Arab woman captive. And on the first night, the soldiers abused her (raped her), and the next day I saw fit to remove her from the world. Signed: Moshe, Second Lieutenant. The next day, the officer again met in Beer Sheva with the battalion commander, Drechsler. In the conversation, Drechsler said to him: Rumors have reached me about a rampage regarding the Arab woman. The officer replied to him: What can I do. It's the boys. Later, the officer claimed that he himself did not ultimately rape the girl, because it was impossible to assault a girl who was so dirty. The affair was silenced for many years. Her body remained buried in the sands of the western Negev.