(HRW) – The attack started while she was drawing water for her family. “Sophie,” then 20 years old, was returning to her home in Bambari, in Central African Republic (CAR), when she heard that the Seleka, mostly Muslim fighters who had ousted the previous government, had burned down her family’s house. Sophie fled into the bush with four other young women. When they ran into a group of Seleka, she remembered, the men “started clapping their hands, showing joy.” They took Sophie and the others to a makeshift base in the bush, where they raped them repeatedly and forced them to do domestic chores. “Sometimes we prepared food, or did laundry,” she told me when I met her in May. “Sometimes when you were cooking, they would come and three of them would rape you. They did that three or four times a day—several men, different men.”
