Hatay, TURKEY: Samira* looks like just another girl next door, but on closer inspection, one sees grief in the eyes of the abaya and headscarf-wearing 17-year-old.

The teenager refuses to join her friends as they gossip, and walks back to her tent alone.

“I cannot share their happiness because storms of depression strike my mind every second,” Samira says, while slowly walking to a corner in the tent she shares with her mother Ghada, and her three younger siblings.

“I love to sit alone , it is always better to be with yourself,” she adds stoicly.

Samira is one amongst 17,000 Syrians taking refuge at the Atma Camp in Turkey’s Hatay district. Homs, her hometown, has been under siege for almost a year now during which much of its concrete structures have been razed to the ground.

But the teenager’s depression does not stem from the constant bombardment of her city. It’s something far more personal.

In September last year, Ghada’s husband was arrested. “We knew the shabeeha (pro-regime mercenaries) would come to hurt us, as they always did after arresting any member of a family,” she says.

Amid pitched battles with the Free Syria Army (FSA), “Storming residential areas with impunity was too risky for Bashar Al-Assad’s paid killers,” Ghada explains, adding, “Yet at some point during that fateful night, regime forces started shooting people at gunpoint. They broke into houses, arrested men and women without discrimination.” Her entire neighborhood was littered with bodies and blood.

Samira recalls, “In the absence of medical support, the injured screamed till they died.”

The family knew they had to escape as soon as Ghada’s husband was arrested – Samira helped Ghada pack up and they rushed to reach a relatives’ home in a relatively safe neighbourhood nearby.

“Worried for our lives and unsure about father’s fate, we could barely walk in the pitch dark, foggy night,” she says, trying to piece together memories of a trauma that still stings.

Ghada interrupts, and tries to coax her daughter into eating the lunch tray distributed by the Turkish Red Crescent.  But the attempt to soothe her daughter is fruitless.

Ignoring the food and Ghada’s advice “to forget the horrible past”. Samira continues: “It would have been much better had the shabeeha killed us ... What happened to the women was much worse than brutal death.”

She hides her face in her knees, but says, “Four shabeeha surrounded us. We kissed their feet but our pleas were ignored.”

While her little siblings miraculously managed to hide in bushes along the road, Ghada’s mercy plea was ignored. Samira was raped by the mercenaries.

She fell unconscious and woke up to find her mother motionless. “Even now, my mother murmers in her nightmares: Don’t touch her. She is your sister. We are Muslims,” she says, looking at Ghada.

Samira, her mother and a few other women who faced the same fate were rescued by the FSA that night. They were provided safe passage to the refugee camp in the nearby Turkish town.

“My daughter looks much older than her real age. She used to be an extrovert, now she tries to hide herself from the others,” says Ghada, weeping bitterly and blaming herself for failing to protect her only daughter.

Though there is no news about Samira father’s , she shudders at the thought of meeting him. “If he is still alive, he won't ever look at me out of shame,” Samira says.

“They killed my dreams. They destroyed the happiness in me. I won't  be the same Samira again.”

Samira’s not the only one

According to the Syrian Observatory for Human Rights (SOHR), over 6,400 women in Syria are either in detention or missing. There is no definitive figure for rape victims, but conservative estimates suggest the number is in the thousands.

Amongst many horrendous stories of brutality, the SOHR documented one in which the wife of a detainee from Latakia was raped in front of her husband in the prison.

Another 20-year-old was violated in the middle of the Homs’ Khalidiya neighborhood. Her crime was participation in a pro-democracy protest alongside her brothers.

An opposition group claims that over 1,500 Syrian women have been raped in prisons alone, most of whom have not been provided any physical or mental treament.

Many other victims either commit suicide or become mentally unstable after the trauma, while others are faced with unwanted pregnancies.

The Women Under Siege in Syria project (WUS) believes that regime supporters committed most of the rape attacks.  WUS even managed to record the confession of a Syrian Army solider, who says that he, along with his colleagues, was given “two tablets of a sexual stimulant to swallow” two hours before being commanded to take the captured women of Baba Amr, who had just witnessed their husbands, sons, and brothers shot dead at point-blank range.

Human rights organisations have recorded testimonials of Syrians outline how rape victims have been killed by male family members for bringing ‘shame’ to the family. In some cases, after killing daughters or sisters, the men commit suicide with the same weapon.

* Names have been changed for the sake of privacy.

Maryam Hasan is a young journalist, whose family struggled against Hafiz Al-Assad’s tyrannical rule and policies. She is using a pen-name due to security reasons.

The views expressed by this writer and in the following reader comments do not necessarily reflect the views and policies of the Dawn Media Group.