‘THEY RAPE US BEFORE WE CAN CROSS’: WOMEN, GIRLS FLEEING VIOLENCE IN MALI

Ayourou, Niger – It was just a few minutes before 7 o’clock on a Friday evening in early June when Kani* and 10 others fleeing violence in northeastern Mali arrived at a checkpoint in Labbezanga, close to the border with Niger.

Six armed men, three of them wearing military fatigues, at the checkpoint stopped the men and women who had begun their journey from their village on foot the previous day.“They [the gunmen] separated the men from the women,” Kani, 17, said. “Then three of them ordered all the four girls who made the journey to move into a small tent [the armed men had erected near the checkpoint].

“They took turns to rape us at gunpoint,” said Kani, who spoke to Al Jazeera from the home of a local legumes farmer in the Nigerien border town of Ayourou, a town on the border with Mali, where many Malian refugees have settled in recent years and where she has been living for the past several weeks since crossing into Niger.

Dressed in a brown headscarf and colourful dress, the teenager seemed frightened and depressed, her head bowed, as she spoke.

Since the ordeal, she said, she has become terrified whenever she sees a man with a gun.

“Policemen and soldiers scare me because they remind me of the people who raped me.”

The rape victims were all young girls who said they begged their attackers not to harm them because they were exhausted and hungry following the long journey they had made without food and enough water. 

“Everything we said fell on deaf ears,” Coumba*, another 17-year-old girl who was also raped, told Al Jazeera. “At some point, they started to beat us up with their guns and whips just to make sure we stopped talking.”

Coumba, who was dressed in a black headscarf and a gown with blue, brown and white colours, was sombre throughout her interview with Al Jazeera. The thought of the rape incident terrifies her, she said.“Each time I remember what happened to me at the border, I become very afraid,” the teenager said. Like Kani, she has been living at the home of the legume farmer in Ayourou since arriving in Niger.

The pair had fled together from Ouattagouna in eastern Mali following a series of attacks on the town by armed groups from the so-called Islamic State in the Greater Sahara (ISGS).

Fleeing the violence, more than 10,000 Malians have taken refuge in Ayourou, an old town which stands on an eponymous island in the river Niger. Some live in tents built for refugees on dry and dusty land just outside the town, while others have found refuge with local families inside the town, where locals mostly do farming and sell foodstuffs and livestock in the market.

When Kani and Coumba first arrived in Ayourou, they spent a few days in the refugee settlement before going into the heart of town in search of work and meeting the legume farmer who offered them work on his farm and was happy to accommodate them.

But, despite settling in quickly in their new home, they now believe making the journey to Niger was a mistake. 

“We didn’t know we were going to face another hell trying to leave Mali,” said Coumba. “If we knew anyone would attempt to rape us, we would have left Ouattagouna for another community in Mali.”

While the armed men, some of whom Kani and Coumba suspect were Malian soldiers because of the military camouflage shirts they were wearing, sexually abused the girls, the men they were travelling with were ordered to lie on their stomachs with their foreheads touching the ground.

“We could hear the women screaming and begging the [armed men] to let them go,” said 40-year-old Seydou Camara, one of the men who made the journey from Ouattagouna and now lives in the refugee settlement in Ayourou. “We couldn’t do anything because the men were armed and were going to shoot us if we dared try to rescue the women.”

The victims estimate that the abuse lasted for about an hour. Each of the three armed men that escorted the girls to the tent, they said, raped all four of them.

“They told us that the only way we could cross into Niger was if we had sex with them and that we could not say no to them,” said Coumba. “They only let everyone go after they had raped the girls and seized money from the men who had cash in their pockets.” 

Al Jazeera contacted the Malian government about the allegations against Malian soldiers on July 17, and then again on July 22, but received no response.

‘They raped almost every woman there’

It was the second time both Kani and Coumba, who lived in the same compound in Ouattagouna, had suffered sexual violence in their own country.

In March 2023, around the time that Human Rights Watch reported armed groups based in the north of Mali were carrying out widespread killings, rapes and lootings in villages in the northeast of the country, fighters stormed the street where the girls lived, burned down some houses, seized a number of men and sexually abused women, including the two teenagers.

“They [the fighters] came into our compound very late at night and raped almost every woman there,” Kani, whose father and only brother were abducted by the fighters that night and hasn’t heard from them since, said. “About 10 of us were raped at gunpoint by five men.”

Attacks on communities are common in Mali, a restive West African nation that has suffered years of instability. The country descended into conflict in 2012 when local Tuareg separatists supported by fighters rebelled in the north.

A year later, former coloniser France intervened, sending a 1,700-strong force to assist Malian forces in crushing them, but the fighters have since regrouped and spread to some other parts of the Sahel region, especially to Burkina Faso and Niger, launching attacks on the Malian military and United Nations peacekeepers and ensuring that parts of the region remain insecure and ungovernable. 

In 2020, then-President Ibrahim Boubacar Keita was forced out of office in a coup led by Assimi Goita, an army colonel who later took full control of the government when he was sworn in as military president in June 2021. 

Growing acrimony between Western powers, who voiced disapproval of the coup, and the military leaders pushed France out of the country. The Malian military government, in a bid to defeat separatist rebels and fighters in the north developed ties with Russia’s military and its Wagner Group of mercenaries, but the alliance has struggled to put an end to rebel activities which appear to have escalated, especially since the country ordered the UN peacekeeping mission known as the Multidimensional Integrated Stabilization Mission in Mali (MINUSMA) and its 15,000 international soldiers to depart last year.

“Since UN peacekeepers left last year, Islamist militants have been attacking communities in the northeast on a regular basis,” Adama Traore, a 45-year-old farmer who fled from Ouattagouna to Ayourou last August, told Al Jazeera.

In May, fighters returned to the compound where Kani and Coumba lived, burned the houses there and abducted some men. The two girls were among a number of people who escaped unhurt. They spent days living in a deserted building just outside Ouattagouna before they began their journey towards Niger.

“We left our homes with only the clothes we were wearing, as we had no time to pick up any of our belongings,” said Coumba, who left her parents and two siblings behind and has no idea whether they are still alive. “If we hadn’t run away, we may have been killed.”

The journey to Niger was a long and difficult one for Kani and Coumba. After the armed men who raped them at the border let them continue their trek to their destination, they arrived in Ayourou feeling exhausted and sick but managed to find a place to stay in a settlement for refugees.

A week after Kani and Coumba arrived in Ayourou, Heita*, a 45-year-old woman, who previously sold foodstuffs in a market in Ouattagouna, said she and two other women were raped at gunpoint by men in military uniform at the same checkpoint near the border with Niger while they were trying to flee Mali.

Heita had left Ouattagouna to escape the frequent attacks by armed groups in the town. In one of these attacks more than two years ago, her husband and two sons were killed by fighters who raped her in the process.

“It was already dark when we arrived at the checkpoint and the four men in military uniform we met there forced us into a small tent where they took turns to rape us,” Heita told Al Jazeera. “We initially refused to let them have their way but when they started hitting us with their weapons, we had no choice but to submit.”

As was the case with Kani and Coumba, Heita and the other travelling women were only allowed to continue their journey to Niger after their rapists were done abusing them. “The experience was one of the worst in my life,” said Heita, who eventually arrived at Ayourou with the other victims a day after the incident took place.

‘Raped by Russians’

Reports of rape by rebels and other fighters in Mali have been mounting in number since the conflict began in 2012. But government-backed forces, including the Russian mercenaries drafted in to assist them, have greatly added to incidents of sexual violence especially in the last three years. 

Frequent raids by Malian soldiers and Russian paramilitaries have made local people more afraid and anxious.

“If it isn’t militants attacking homes and killing people, it is white soldiers and the army torturing and sexually abusing villagers,” said Heita, who – like many locals in Mali – refers to Russian paramilitaries as “white soldiers”. “Living in Mali has become so dangerous.”

“Malian and Russian soldiers who claim to be fighting these militants have been arresting and torturing villagers who they accuse of working for the terrorists,” Traore explained.

Last year, UN experts said that, since 2021, they have received persistent and alarming accounts of human rights abuses that include rape and sexual violence perpetrated by Malian armed forces and Russian paramilitaries, adding that “victims of the so-called Wagner Group face many challenges in accessing justice and remedy for the human rights abuses, including sexual violence, and related crimes committed against them, particularly in light of the secrecy and opacity surrounding Wagner’s activities in Mali”.

While Heita wasn’t sexually abused by Russian paramilitaries during her stay in Ouattagouna, she said some women she knew back home had told her they had previously been raped by the Russians in Ansongo, a town located about 77km (48 miles) north of Ouattagouna. 

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“Two traders, who later moved to Ouattagouna, told me white soldiers raped them in their compound after arresting their husbands who they accused of working with militants,” said Heita. “The women were forced to leave Ansongo with their children because they feared for their safety.”

Malian government officials and Wagner did not respond to Al Jazeera’s requests for comment.

As the atrocities in Mali continue, those who have survived the abuse still live with the torture.

“Whenever I see a man with a gun, I fear that he is going to rape me,” said Kani, who – like Coumba and Heita – hasn’t sought medical examination in Ayourou because of fear of stigmatisation.

“I just can’t get over the abuses I faced in Mali.” 

*Names have been changed to protect anonymity.