In the course of research in Somalia in October 1993, Human Rights Watch received accounts of rape by all the Somali factions. A forty-year-old woman in a camp for displaced persons in the Bay region gave the following account of an attack by hawiya militia:
The hawiya killed, looted, raped and kidnapped marehan women. As far as I know, about sixty women were taken. I know them personally. They even took one of my daughters...She is nineteen years old. [She] is now in Kenya...She was forcibly married to a hawiya, a gunman.
Testimonies about the activity of Aideed's forces in 1992 were all similar. A fifty-two-year-old Rahanweyne woman from Baidoa interviewed in the Bay region during October 1993 said, "The Aideed forces came and took Baidoa from the Marehan by force...Where they found Marehan people were staying, they raped the women and killed many people." A twenty-two-year-old Elai woman from Jawarey, a village between Saco Weyne and Bardera, recalled:
I was in the market early in the morning when people started shooting both in the air and at people. It was the Aideed militia, all Hawiye. They raped many women. They looted the market stalls of money, clothes, and sugar. That is what they came for. Not grain or anything else. Then they moved through the town collecting all the animals they could find. Many more women were raped.
A forty-year-old man from the Darod, interviewed in Gedo region during October 1993, told of an attack by the Ajuran, a Hawiye clan: "They raped many women and then killed some of them. They did not take any captives." An Ajuran woman of about the same age from Middle Juba region, interviewed in October 1993, described an attack by other Hawiye soldiers. She said, "They took about ten women to care for the animals that they stole. I have not seen any of them again. They raped nearly all the
women."
