Hawa* had survived a forced marriage, the death of twin babies and was working towards a PhD when Rapid Support Forces (RSF) fighters stopped her at a checkpoint on the road out of El Fasher in Sudan. They gang-raped her for more than a week. Her release was paid for by friends sending money to her phone and her brother, who tried to intervene, was shot dead.
Abdullahi Boru Halakhe, a senior advocate at Refugees International, met her recently a camp in eastern Chad. Hawa is one of more than 900,000 Sudanese refugees living there. Halakhe has worked humanitarian crises across the continent for decades, but describes that trip to The Independent as the hardest of his career.
