Sudan is on the brink of collapse.
After 17 months of a brutal civil war that has devastated the country, the army launched a major offensive in the capital, Khartoum, attacking areas held by its implacable rival, the paramilitary Rapid Support Forces (FAR).
The FAR seized most of Khartoum at the start of the conflict, while the army controls the twin city of Omdurmanjust across the Nile River.
But there are still places where people can, and do, cross between the two sides.
At one of those points, I met a group of women who had walked four hours to a market in army-controlled territory on the edge of Omdurman, where food is cheaper.
The women had come from an area of Sudan called Dar es Salaam, which is held by the FAR.
Their husbands no longer left the house, they told me, because the FAR fighters beat them, kept the money they earned, or detained them and demanded payment for their release.
“We endure these hardships because we want to feed our children. “We are hungry, we need food,” said one.
Warning: Some details of the story may be disturbing.
And women, I asked, are they safer than men? And what do they say about rape?
The chorus of voices faded away.
Then one exploded.
“Where is the world? “Why don’t you help us?” he declared in a torrent of words as tears ran down his cheeks.
“There are so many women here who have been raped, but they don’t talk about it. What difference would it make anyway?
“For some young women, the FAR make them lie down in the streets at night,” he continued. “If they return late from this market, the FAR detains them for five or six days.”
As he spoke, his mother sat holding his head, sobbing. Other women around her also began to cry.
“In your world, if your daughter went out, would you leave her?” he asked. “Wouldn’t you go look for her? But what can we do? Nothing is in our hands, no one cares about us. Where is the world? Why don’t you help us?”
The crossing point between the territories It was a window to a world of despair and hopelessness.
Travelers describe how they have been subjected to anarchy, looting and brutality in a conflict that the UN says has forced more than 10.5 million people to flee their homes.
But sexual violence has become a defining feature of the long-running conflict, which began as a power struggle between the army and the FAR but has since involved local armed groups and fighters from neighboring countries.
The United Nations High Commissioner for Human Rights, Volker Turk, has said that rape is being used as “a weapon of war”.
A recent UN fact-finding mission documented several cases of rape and threats of rape by members of the military, but found that the FAR and its allied militias committed large-scale sexual violence, amounting to violations of international law.
One woman the BBC spoke to blamed the FAR for raping her.
We met her at the crossroads market, aptly named Souk al Har, the “Heat Market.”
Since the war began, the market has expanded across the barren lands of a desert highway leading out of Omdurman, attracting the poorest of the poor with its low prices.
Miriam, whose name is not real, fled her home in Dar es Salaam to take refuge with her brother.
She now works at a tea stall, but at the beginning of the war, she said, two armed men entered her house and tried to rape her daughters, one 17 years old and the other 10.
“I told the girls to stay behind me and I told the FAR: ‘If you want to rape someone, it has to be me,’” she said.
“They beat me and ordered me to take off my clothes. Before I took it off, I told my girls to leave. They grabbed the other girls and jumped over the fence. Then one of the men lunged at me.”
The FAR has told international investigators that it has taken all necessary measures to prevent sexual violence and other forms of violence that constitute violations of human rights.
But Accounts of sexual assault are numerous and consistent, and the damage has a lasting impact.
Sitting on a bench in the shade of a row of trees, Fatima (not her real name) told me that she had come to Omdurman to give birth to twins and that she planned to stay.
One of her neighbors, she indicated, a 15-year-old girl, had also become pregnant after she and her 17-year-old sister were raped by four FAR soldiers.
People woke up from the screams and went out to see what was happening, he explained, but the armed men told them they would shoot them if they did not return home.
The next morning, they found the two girls with signs of abuse on their bodies and their older brother locked in one of the rooms.
“During the war, since the FAR arrived, we immediately began to hear about rapes, until we saw it in front of us with our neighbors“said Fatima.
“At first we had doubts [sobre los informes]but we know that it was the FAR soldiers who raped the girls.”
The other women are gathering to begin the journey back to their homes, to the areas controlled by the FAR.
They say they are too poor to start a new life like Miriam did when she left Dar es Salaam.
As long as this war continues, they will have no choice but to return to their horrors.
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