First they shot her husband. Then the soldiers killed her two sons, ages 5 and 7. When the uniformed men yanked her daughter from her hands next, Mary didn’t think it could get any worse.

Mary and her family were members of the Nuer tribe in South Sudan,
caught up in a vicious power struggle between the new country’s
President Salva Kiir, a member of the Dinka tribe, and his Vice
President, Riek Machar, a Nuer. Their war, fought largely along ethnic
lines, has turned the northern part of the country into a wasteland. At
least 50,000 people have been killed, according to the U.N., nearly 4
million face famine, and another 2.2 million have fled their homes,
recounting tales of civilian slaughter, gratuitous torture and even
forced cannibalism. Mary and her family were among the tens of thousands
of civilians seeking refuge at a U.N. peacekeeping base in the northern
city of Bentiu when they ran into Kiir’s forces on the road in June
2014.

The 27-year-old recounts what occurred next distantly, as if she were
explaining something that happened to someone else. The soldiers told
Mary that they considered the Nuers in the camps to be rebels, and that
they killed her sons because they couldn’t risk letting them grow up to
be fighters. “We don’t kill the women and the girls,” the soldiers told
Mary. “They said they would only rape us. As if rape were different than
death,” says Mary, speaking in a safe house in neighboring Uganda run
by Make Way Partners, an American Christian organization that provides
housing, medical care and schooling for South Sudanese orphans and
victims of human trafficking. After the soldiers killed her husband and
sons, five of them held her down and forced her to watch as three others
raped her 10-year-old daughter. Her name was Nyalaat. When the men were
done, Mary says, “I couldn’t even see my little girl anymore. I could
only see blood.” Then the men took turns with Mary. Nyalaat died a few
hours later. “I wanted to die too.”

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