The Guardian

Washington, February 27,

The Pentagon has ordered an urgent inquiry into reports that more than 100 American women deployed in Iraq and Afghanistan have been raped or sexually assaulted by fellow soldiers, it emerged yesterday.

There have been 112 cases of sexual assault on women soldiers in units under central command, which oversees operations in the Middle East and central Asia, during the past 18 months. Meanwhile, more than 20 women at an air force training base in Texas have told a local crisis centre they were assaulted in 2002. If only half of the cases are confirmed it will be the worst rape scandal the US military has faced in nearly a decade. The reports provoked outrage in the Senate yesterday.

"What does it say about us as a people, as the nation, as the foremost military in the world, when our women soldiers sometimes have more to fear from their fellow soldiers than from the enemy?' Susan Collins, a Republican Senator from Maine, said. "Why is there less public outrage when servicewomen suffer at the hands of their own fellow servicemen than from the enemy?' Senators said it was particularly shocking that many of the victims had been military police officers and helicopter pilots who had been assaulted in remote parts of the Afghan and Iraqi battlefield.

The extent of the problem emerged over the past few months with a series of reports in the

Denver Post newspaper about servicewomen who had sought help from civilian counselling centres after returning from the front, where they had not been offered help by their officers. Most said they feared retaliation, damage to their careers or being portrayed as disloyal.

In response, military officials said the Defence Secretary, Donald Rumsfeld, had launched an inquiry earlier this month into the apparent epidemic of assaults, and the response of the military. "The principal focus of that review is how we care for the victim,' David Chu, the head of the Pentagon personnel department, told the Senate. "How do we care for the individual who has been harmed?'