One morning in late March or early April 2008 TFG forces carried out a search operation near Bakara market. There had been exchanges of gunfire in the immediate area the previous days. A half-dozen TFG security personnel wearing green camouflage uniforms and driving a double-cabin pickup truck arrived at one family's home. Human Rights Watch interviewed a member of the family, a 15-year-old girl, about the ordeal that ensued:
Our mother ordered us to get into the house and the house was closed. She ordered us to slip under the beds…About five of them entered the house. I could see their legs as they searched the house. They came in, started searching the house and turning everything upside down.
The other children [in the room with me] panicked and shouted for their mother and at that moment I came out from under the bed and tried to escape but as I was running I was hit from behind with the butt of a gun. Then I fell forward. The man was wearing a [camouflage] uniform and carrying an AK-47 [military assault rifle]. At the back of his gun it was metal.
I attempted to run because I knew that definitely they would do what they have done to me…From that particular moment I last remember a man holding my neck as another climbed on top of my body. I woke up to yelling and the cries of my mother.
The girl told Human Rights Watch that she felt the rape was not unexpected because she had heard accounts of similar attacks befalling other girls in the area. "Their intention was to rape and loot," she explained. "That is the order of the day for the government forces in the area. It is their culture." When Human Rights Watch interviewed her she was three-months pregnant by one of the men who raped her.
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