The family now fears further revelations. Mwanvua’s period is late; she may be pregnant with the child of one of her captors. She may be infected with any number of sexually transmitted diseases, including HIV/AIDS. There is no doctor in the village, and no means of testing.

Complaining of muscle pain and headaches, she spends most days in her room. Deemed “damaged goods” by the community, she is unlikely to find a husband — and even if she does there will be no traditional dowry of five goats, a bag of salt and clothes valued at $100 because she is no longer a virgin. “This is the mentality here: Once you are caught by these people you have no value,” says her father.

Two years after the war in the Democratic Republic of the Congo was declared officially over, a wave of sexual violence continues to sweep through the country. Scenes such as that in the Silimu household are being repeated across the lawless eastern provinces bordering Rwanda, Burundi and Uganda. Here the war has ebbed but not disappeared: Fighters from Congo’s myriad militias and rebel groups, as well as fighters from Rwanda, are still loose in the forests and cities, pillaging, murdering and raping.

Although the violence is not on the same scale as it once was, it remains a messy, unfinished conflict that is having a huge impact on civilians — particularly girls and women. At least 40,000 have been raped over the past six years, according to a recent report by Amnesty International.

Congo’s recent history is a dark, underreported horror story that started a decade ago when Hutus responsible for murdering 800,000 Tutsis and moderate Hutus in Rwanda’s 1994 genocide fled across the border to escape the avenging Tutsi army. Two years later, Zaire (as it then was known), the vast, ramshackle heart of central Africa, imploded from a civil war and invasions by neighboring states, principally Rwanda. Rwanda invaded again in 1998 with the stated aim of hunting Hutus, sparking a six-year war that sucked in six other countries.

All sides used proxy forces: The Congolese army was aided by tribal Mayi-Mayi militias and Hutus. The Tutsi-led Rwandan army sponsored a rebel movement, as did Uganda. They turned eastern Congo into fiefdoms of plunder in which rape was a form of booty as well as a weapon against ethnic groups deemed hostile.

Spending months at a time in remote forests eroded the fighters’ discipline and humanity. “These forces very rarely met each other but they all punished the civilian population,” says Gwendolyn Lusi, a program manager in eastern Congo for the aid agency Doctors on Call for Service.

Following the loss of more than 3 million lives, peace accords were signed in 2002 and 2003. Foreign forces withdrew and Congo’s rival factions formed an interim government in the distant capital, Kinshasa, under President Joseph Kabila. This unwieldy, mutually suspicious coalition of former foes promised to rein in the fighters marauding in the east, but they have failed to integrate their forces into a single, unified army, leaving the east a patchwork of divided loyalties. Reeling from a succession of political crises, the government has paid lip service to restoring order but made little progress in building an effective police force and criminal justice system, leaving the east largely lawless.

The number of assaults against young girls in Goma, capital of North Kivu province in eastern Congo, has risen over the past year, according to Virginie Mumbere, an administrator with DOCS. They are attacked not just by soldiers but also by people they know — neighbors, relatives, teachers. Whether this means that the incidence of rape has increased, or that more assaults are being reported, or both, nobody can say.

“Insecurity continues to reign and the rapes continue: They are the fruit of disorder,” says Dr. Jacques Kalume, who treats 150 inpatients — 90 percent of them victims of sexual violence — at Goma’s main hospital. He performs 44 surgeries a month on women suffering incontinence as the result of a fistula forming between the anus and the vagina, the result of extreme violence. The smell of feces, which in some cases emerges from the vagina, can be so strong that many victims are shunned by their communities. Repairing the damage involves delicate surgery and months of convalescence. More than one operation is often needed.

In a recovery ward, some of Kalume’s patients knit or tend to infants while others gaze at the ceiling. Esperance Nyirandegeya, 30, gasps with pain when emptying her bladder into a tube, but she wants to talk — about the men who raped her and killed her husband and two children; about how she is afraid to return home because Rwandan rebel fighters are still there; about how so few women have the opportunity for treatment.

From a neighboring bed, Cecile Furaha, 24, speaks of fresh attacks on women in her village. Asked about her rapists, her voice turns brittle. “I hate them. I was destroyed.”

The great unknown is HIV/AIDS. With many soldiers and refugees coming from Uganda and Rwanda, high-prevalence countries, it is assumed that many Congolese have been infected. But in towns such as Kasongo, in Maniema province, there is little opportunity for testing or treating. The colonial-era hospital, its grounds littered with syringes and needles, can afford only 140 tests per month, most of which are used to screen blood donors and surgical patients.

A tenth of patients test positive for HIV but are not told of their status. Staff fear for their lives in breaking such bad news, says the hospital’s director, Dr. Felly Ekofo. And there are some male patients who, after they discover they have the virus, continue to be promiscuous or to rape. Why? Ekofo shrugs, as if the answer were obvious. “Because they don’t want to die alone.”

But there are some small glimmers of hope that the peace, however fragile and spasmodic, is eroding the war’s terrible legacy. Anecdotal evidence (in the absence of reliable statistics there is no other kind) suggests that the number of sex attacks, while still high, is dwindling in some places. Improved security is allowing medical care to reach previously cutoff areas, sometimes for the first time in six years.

Rural areas, such as the forests of Maniema province, have become safer, said Zahera Zainabo, vice president of the nongovernmental organization the Voice of the Oppressed Women of Maniema. From recording a rape a day last year, the organization now receives reports of just one every three months.

This is still too many, she says. “Women are still considered like a toy, like something of no value.” Dehumanized by war, a soldier’s moral reference points are skewed, says Zainabo. Asked why they had raped a woman, one group of soldiers told her that their wives were far away and so they had no choice but to find a temporary, local replacement.

But she sees signs of progress: “This week a soldier was publicly punished for raping a woman prisoner. That’s new.” In the absence of a functioning police service and civil judicial system, the military is left to discipline itself. Having singularly failed to do so before, the sight of even just one soldier being arrested and taken away for indefinite detention on his commander’s orders counts as a breakthrough.

The arrest came after the radio station in Kasongo town reported the assault in its news bulletins — a daring departure. “It was a big risk for us,” says the station director, Modeste Shabani. “Soldiers came to us, angry, asking why we did that. We used not to speak about sexual violence.”

Even Mwanvua Silimu’s sad, brutal tale suggests the culture of impunity is eroding. It starts typically enough: In June 2003 she was abducted by a group of 13 Hutu rebels who used her and other female captives as slaves — porters, cooks, cleaners — and took turns beating and raping them.

But a year later, the improved security climate emboldened Mwanvua’s sister, Salama, 34, with courage bordering on recklessness, to track them down and demand Mwanvua’s release. Her father, Radjabo, followed her to make the same demand. Apparently fed up with years in the wilderness, and in an apparent attempt to curry favor with U.N. peacekeepers who could arrange their return to Rwanda, the kidnappers complied and in October handed over a bruised, battered but joyful Mwanvua. “I was so happy I wept,” she says.

Interviews with other victims recently attacked in Kasongo and Goma yield a pattern of rapists getting away scot-free, untouched by a puny police force that was either absent or reluctant to confront a soldier. Elaka Kalume, 21, was attacked in June by five soldiers on her way home from the market. “My husband was angry that I took that route alone. He was right; I blame myself.”

Vumilia Simuke, 24, was raped by a soldier on the orders of a village chief who wanted to punish her husband for endangering public health by not keeping the family toilet clean. “My husband didn’t respect the law,” she shrugs, matter-of-factly. Asha Mbaruko, 17, was assaulted in fields by two soldiers who beat her and stole the family’s goat. When her father reported the rape, military commanders threatened to kill him because they wanted to keep the goat. The rape complaint was brushed off as an irrelevance.

Buried in these accounts, however, there are signs that Congolese men are now slower to stigmatize daughters and wives who have been raped, and quicker to pursue justice against their rapists. Elaka was “forgiven” by her husband rather than banished. The people in Vumilia’s village were so enraged by the chief’s hard-line approach to sanitation that they fired him. Asha’s father had the courage to report the attack, and she has since found a husband.

Harbingers, perhaps, of more tolerance for victims and less for perpetrators. It may not seem much, but after eight years of darkness it is, at last, a glimmer.

Health Ministry officials said 88 died, while the Interior Ministry put the toll at 114, not far off the 125 killed in a suicide attack in Hilla in February. Police said nearly 500 pounds of explosives were used.

Another car bomb, thought to have been detonated by a suicide bomber, immolated 11 people in a queue to refill gas canisters. In the town of Taji just north of Baghdad, 17 Shiite men were dragged from their homes and executed by gunmen in military uniform.

An Internet statement purportedly from al-Qaida in Iraq claimed responsibility for the carnage and said it was a reprisal for the joint American and Iraqi army offensive in the town of Tal Afar near the Syrian border. Thousands of troops swept through the insurgent stronghold this week, killing and capturing more than 300 suspected militants. The government trumpeted the operation as a major victory over the resistance.

The Internet statement said the radical Islamist group’s response was a nationwide suicide bombing campaign. “We would like to congratulate the Muslim nation and inform it the battle to avenge the Sunnis of Tal Afar has begun. Our brigades have joyfully set off to uphold their religion through death.”

Wednesday’s attacks exposed the government’s inability to protect citizens from a sectarian campaign against the majority Shiites. Al-Qaida and other extremist factions within the Sunni Arab resistance consider Shiites apostates and American collaborators. Targeting civilians is seen as an attempt to spark a backlash and spread chaos.

Shiite clerics and politicians have restrained their followers, but the Shiite-dominated security forces are accused of abusing and murdering Sunnis, edging the country closer to full-scale civil war.

A recent lull in violence had prompted rumors that an onslaught was being prepared. An Oct. 15 referendum on a draft constitution, rejected by many Sunnis as a plot by Shiites and Kurds to break up Iraq, deepened the foreboding.

The attack in Taji, a rural town with Shiite and Sunni residents, happened before dawn. The 17 victims were assembled in the town square and shot, said one witness. Hours later, as daylight broke over the capital, hundreds of men huddled in Oruba Square, the heart of Shiite Khadhimiya, hoping for a day’s casual labor.

“We gathered and suddenly a car blew up and turned the area into fire and dust and darkness,” said a survivor named Hadi. As bodies and vehicles burned, the able-bodied carried and wheeled the wounded on carts.

It was the same area where about 1,000 Shiite pilgrims died in a stampede on Aug. 31 sparked by fears of a suicide bomber. Sunni Arabs who saved some pilgrims from drowning in the Tigris River were hailed then as symbols of reconciliation, but Wednesday there was only anguish and rage.

“There’s no political party here; there are no police,” said another survivor, Mohammed Jabbar. “This targeted civilians, innocents. Why women and children?”

At least 12 other bombs shook the capital until 4 p.m., sending plumes of smoke into a balmy blue sky. Most appeared to have been detonated remotely rather than by would-be martyrs.

A bomb near a Shiite cleric’s office killed five and wounded 24. Other bombs targeted U.S. and Iraqi troops and Western security contractors, killing at least nine Iraqis and wounding two Americans.

Hospitals struggled to cope with the influx of people with missing limbs and bad burns. Depending on the corpses’ condition, the dead were stacked on stretchers or shoveled into garbage bags.

But on Oct. 10 American and Iraqi troops stormed the family’s house in Baghdad, put a hood over Jedda and flew him to Shaiba, a British military base outside Basra, Iraq. The British military, it turned out, had deemed the 48-year-old father of six a dangerous terrorist who had plotted weapons smuggling and bomb attacks and said jailing him was “necessary for imperative reasons of security.” Eight months later he has not been charged nor seen a lawyer but he is still interned at Shaiba.

“We want our dad back,” his son Abdullah, 11, told the Guardian Thursday. “If he has done something bad why don’t they tell us?”

It is a question the high court in London will be asked next week when lawyers acting for Jedda seek a writ of habeas corpus to have him returned to Britain.

The Iraqi League, a U.K.-based human rights advocacy group, has dubbed the case “Belmarsh in the desert,” a reference to the controversial long-term detentions at the London jail that embarrassed the government earlier this year.

“This is not about my client’s guilt or innocence. It’s about bringing him back to Britain where he can be questioned in the presence of a lawyer and be either charged or released,” said Phil Shiner of Public Interest Lawyers.

According to his family, Jedda, who is half Arab and half Turkoman, left his hometown of Kirkuk in northern Iraq at age 18 to play and coach basketball in the United Arab Emirates. A decade later he moved to Pakistan and worked at an orphanage in Peshawar before moving to Britain in 1992 and claiming political asylum. He became British in 1998 and with help from his brother Saad, also a naturalized Briton, became a small-time property developer and honey merchant selling boxes of it from his London home.

While visiting relatives in Syria in 2001 he was detained for 11 months but released without charge. The same year he divorced his Syrian-born wife, Ehssan, but kept custody of their four children. He later married another Syrian, Eman, and took a second wife, Asma, 25, a Jordanian.

Authorities at Shaiba declined to speak about the case, but in a letter to Jedda dated May 6 the British army said he was suspected of membership in a terrorist group involved in weapons smuggling and bombings. “Accordingly, on the balance of probabilities, your internment remains necessary for imperative reasons of security,” said the letter, signed by Maj. Gen. J.P. Riley.

A separate letter said the U.N. Security Council, at the Iraqi government’s request, had authorized multinational forces to intern people without trial without necessarily disclosing the reason why. “The justification for internment in each case, including your own, is reviewed very carefully at least once a month and a decision taken by the commanding general which is then communicated to each internee with specific reasons if he or she is to remain in custody,” said the second letter.

Shiner is confident Jedda will be flown home soon. “The government doesn’t have the beginnings of a defense,” he said. Until then Jedda’s family will continue the weekly ritual they performed Thursday. Weary from the previous day’s drive from Baghdad, they queued with relatives of other detainees to enter the base, a sprawling complex of sand, razor wire and watchtowers. Carrying cakes, pita bread and mutton, the family spent an hour inside the base.

“He is not well, not sleeping. He is very stressed. His hands shook when he drank from a glass,” said the Jedda’s sister, Huda Razaq, 48, a retired engineer. “I swear he is innocent. He is more interested in women than politics.”

Jedda’s cell is air conditioned against temperatures exceeding 104 degrees Fahrenheit, but he complained of pain in his left knee, an old basketball injury that has had him on crutches for years. He said he had lost 62 pounds since his arrest.

His four children, Abdullah, Khadija, 13, Himan, 12, and Hesan, 8, have British passports and speak with London accents. They dread the drive from Baghdad, a perilous route during which they have seen corpses and insurgent attacks, but insist on visiting their father. Razaq hosts them in her Baghdad home but worries that their nationality makes them kidnap targets. Threats have been made against the family and a shot was fired at the house.

The children pine for London but refuse to return without their father. “He takes us for walks in Hyde Park. He’s a great dad,” said Himan.

At least eight other Iraqis were killed in a spate of other suicide bombs that rocked the capital Wednesday.

Farther afield, officials acknowledged two grisly discoveries that yielded at least 70 corpses and, if confirmed, would underline the audacity of an insurgency that seems able to slaughter at will, despite coalition claims that it is losing momentum.

President Jalal Talabani said more than 50 corpses had been dragged from the Tigris River. And at Haditha, 140 miles northwest of Baghdad, 19 men were found dead in a stadium.

“We have the full names of those who were killed and those criminals who committed these crimes,” Talabani said of the grim discovery in the Tigris. But he did not specify the location or timing while answering questions about a search for hostages allegedly seized last week in Madaen, 14 miles south of Baghdad.

An unnamed police lieutenant colonel told the Agence France-Presse that 57 decomposing bodies of men, women and children were found between al-Wahda and al-Hafriya, about 10 miles downriver from Madaen. He said police had photographed and buried the bodies outside the town of Suwayrah.

The claim deepened the mystery over what happened at Madaen. Shiite politicians said last weekend that Sunni gunmen had taken dozens of civilians and had threatened to kill them if other Shiites did not leave. Some reported relatives missing. But when Iraqi security forces entered Madaen they found no hostages, but plenty of residents saying the story was untrue. Some mainstream Sunni leaders agreed with militants that Shiite politicians had manufactured the drama. If bodies have been found it will inflame tension between the majority Shiites, poised to assume power after decades of oppression, and the Sunnis.

In Haditha, residents heard gunshots from a football stadium and reportedly found the bodies of 19 men by a bloodstained wall. The men wore civilian clothing but were believed to have been soldiers on their way home for a religious holiday.

More than 400 Iraqi police and soldiers have died in the past two months, many ambushed while off-duty.

On Tuesday night a suicide car bomber in southern Baghdad killed two U.S. soldiers and wounded four others. At least 10 Iraqis died in other attacks earlier that day.

The January election was credited for a relative lull in violence, but there is still no new government and the mayhem is back. President Talabani said he hoped the squabbling coalition of Kurds and Shiites that won the election would announce a cabinet Thursday.

Iraq’s deputy health minister, Amer al-Khuza’i, Monday urged Iraq’s most revered cleric, Grand Ayatollah Ali al-Sistani, to issue a fatwa against misuse of the chemicals and poison.

Originally twice the size of the Florida Everglades, the 8,000 square miles of marshes were fed by the Tigris and Euphrates rivers and were home to hundreds of species of birds and fish.

The 5,000-year-old marsh Arab culture, based on artificial islands and houses made from tall reeds, is considered a cradle of civilization. The marsh Arabs were accused of helping and harboring rebels and outlaws during the failed Shiite uprising against Saddam Hussein after the 1991 Gulf War, prompting a devastating crackdown.

Thousands were killed and a gargantuan dike-building program drained the marshes to just 7 percent of their original extent, a catastrophe compared to the drying up of the Aral Sea in Central Asia and the deforestation of the Amazon.

When coalition troops overthrew the regime, the surviving marsh Arabs broke many of the dikes and water flooded back, restoring much of the wetland. Earlier this year the journal Science reported the return of giant reeds, waterbirds and otters, prompting optimism that recovery was underway. But Iraq Nature researchers who have visited the region each month for the past year said thousands of fishermen were boosting their catch by connecting cheap car batteries with cables to 6-foot poles with nets. The 12-volt shock electrocuted fish within a 5-meter radius, yielding 20 kilograms of fish each day per fisherman.

“They know it is wrong, but they are poor and say it is the only way to feed their families,” said Raied Hameed, one of the researchers. “It is a very serious problem for the marshes.”

The Iraqi police and army seldom venture into the countryside and the British forces know better than to inflame protests by intervening, he added. With few schools, clinics, roads or jobs, the region sees little reason to obey authorities — which historically have been at best neglectful, at worst murderous.

Anna Sophia Bachmann, an advisor to Iraq Nature, said electroshocking probably started in the ’80s during the chaos of war with Iran and resumed with a vengeance with the partial restoration of the marshes two years ago.

In a separate warning, Qais al-Salman, head of the National Institute of Environmental and Water Technology, said the marsh’s farmers and hunters could unleash a “complete disaster” for public health and the environment.

Birds that recently started to return are being poisoned and sold in markets. Veterinary chemicals intended for sheep are being used to dust crops and poison fish, he said.

The bomb incinerated a dozen vehicles and hurled metal shards through cars, windows and flesh. Stunned, the police fired into the air. Guards from the Al-Hamra Hotel raced out and joined the shooting, though at what nobody knew. Then the second bomb, apparently packed into a Volkswagen 200 meters from the first, sent more shrapnel hissing up the street. Bodies burned in cars while the wounded staggered and slumped. Some survivors described a sudden, deep silence, but they had been deafened. Jadriya was filled with shouts and moans and sirens.

The twin blasts killed at least 15 people, including several children, five trash collectors and one policeman, and wounded dozens. A bad day in Baghdad but far from its worst and not enough to dent U.S. optimism that things are getting better.

Earlier this week President Bush told cheering American troops that the establishment of a “free Iraq” would crush tyranny and terror. U.S. and British commanders claim the insurgency is weakening and cite a steep fall in the number of daily attacks and coalition casualties.

Thursday’s atrocity in Jadriya will not alter those calculations, nor will the gunning down of five policemen and a civilian in the northern city of Kirkuk.

Al-Qaida in Iraq, a group led by Jordanian militant Abu Musab al-Zarqawi, claimed responsibility in an Internet statement: “Two lions from the martyrs’ brigade launched themselves [on] an apostate police patrol.” In other words, one of the most feared and effective insurgent groups had launched a big attack but had managed to kill just one policeman and injure two, a good result for homegrown security forces trained by coalition troops.

It was not so good for the civilians of Jadriya, which lies on the Tigris River. The dead and the body parts went straight to the morgue while ambulances ferried most of the wounded to Yarmuk Hospital. The sirens alerted staff, who were ready for the stream of patients into the emergency ward, some limping, some on stretchers.

A 12-year-old boy called Abbas had lost his father and was in shock. Shrapnel was lodged in his forehead and behind his right ear, his head was bandaged and his face was speckled with blood. Seated on a bed, he watched the other casualties with no apparent interest.

Firas Rahman, a 35-year-old businessman, considered himself lucky. After the first blast he ducked under his dashboard. The second blast destroyed his Audi but, thanks to the airbag, he escaped with a chest and face peppered with gashes. “They are not Muslims, those who did this,” he said. Like many Iraqis, Rahman distinguishes the “bad resistance,” which targets Iraqis, from the “good resistance,” which targets only Americans.

According to police there was a third car bomb that failed to detonate, possibly because the driver was injured in one of the first two blasts. The suspect was also treated at Yarmuk.

There was no panic, barely even a bustle, at the hospital, which had enough staff, medicine and stocks of blood. “I wouldn’t call this an especially busy day,” said one nurse, Raha Hussein.

A policeman watched his wounded colleague being hooked to a drip. “Bitterness fills my mouth,” he said. But he too was phlegmatic about his sixth bomb in nine months on the force. Did he like his job? “Love it. I want to serve Iraq.”

At the bomb site a familiar choreography unfolded. Apache helicopters circled overhead as American Humvees and Iraqi police cars sealed off the road. Military bulldozers moved in to clear away charred vehicles. Onlookers huddled and spoke in low voices before drifting away. By dusk the roadblocks were lifted and traffic returned. A warm wind scattered the soot and ash.