Mark McDonald, Jinjiem – The soldiers came for Mira Rasyid on a warm March evening and hauled her off to an interrogation center built into a thick grove of bamboo. Throughout that night in 1998, and every night for the next five months, she says, they tortured and raped her.

Whenever she resisted, the soldiers set their attack dogs on her. They burned her hair while they raped her. They made other prisoners rape her. They raped her in front of her parents.

"Every day I wanted to die," says Rasyid, 19, knuckling tears out of her eyes. "I have such a big wound on my heart. Sometimes I cannot recognize myself."

Rasyid's tale of sexual slavery by the notorious Kopassus troops – elite Indonesian commandos assigned to hunt down rebels in the restive province of Aceh – is one of many such stories easily heard in the tin-roofed towns and jungle villages of the province, horrific stories of torture, disappearances, rape, murder.

"Everybody is aware of these terrible things, so terrible," says Syamsuddin Mahmud, the governor of Aceh, the Indonesian government's top official in the province. "Kopassus was a killing machine."

Kopassus battalions were withdrawn from Aceh in August, three months after the fall of President Suharto. But with the murderous commandos now assigned to units elsewhere in the country, it has become virtually impossible for Acehnese victims and legal-aid workers to pursue them – legally or otherwise.

Fatimah Abbas, 43, the mother of six, says Kopassus men gang-raped her for four days while they also tortured her elderly father, a rice farmer. She sobs as she recalls how she was raped repeatedly in front of him. She was forced to watch as soldiers threw him into a pond, ran a fishhook and line through his nose and, as they roared with laughter, he was made to splash around like a struggling fish.

Villagers told Abbas they later saw soldiers cut off her father's penis and put it in his mouth – just before they shot him. Abbas says she believes he was thrown into one of the mass graves now being discovered in Aceh, in places with macabre names like Skulls Hill.

President B.J. Habibie and Defense Minister Wiranto have issued public apologies in recent months for the military's past abuses in Aceh. The provincial government says some 5,000 Acehnese have been killed or made to disappear over the last decade. Human rights workers put the number at 40,000, while the increasingly active Free Aceh Movement says it's 53,000.

Rasyid has been out of the clutches of her Kopassus torturers for almost a year now. She's a pale young woman who speaks softly, which is also how she weeps – softly. And when she cries, which is often, she covers her face with her traditional Muslim head scarf.

She lives near the rural village of Jinjiem, in a military camp run by the Free Aceh Movement. Under Muslim traditions, she has no prospects for marriage and a family.

"Muslim men want to marry a virgin, and everyone here knows that the military men raped me," she says. "I'll never be married. Who would marry me? Who could?"

The night Kopassus grabbed her from her home, Rasyid says, the soldiers accused her of having given food to wandering rebels from the Free Aceh Movement. Enraged, they sexually assaulted her with bananas, candles, even Coke bottles.

For the next five months the troopers kept her bound and naked in a concrete cell with no bed, no water, no toilet. When she asked for soup, the soldiers would urinate in it. Near starvation, she says, she ate the soup anyway.

The military commander for Aceh, Col. Johnny Wahab, dismisses Rasyid's tale as "impossible ... just propaganda."

"But if this event did happen, she should have reported it to the military police," Wahab says in an interview at his command post.

When it's suggested that it might have been difficult for a traumatized 18-year-old woman to report five months of sexual assaults to the very authorities who supervised her torture and imprisonment, Wahab says dismissively, "Well, she can always report it now."

Rasyid was kept at the Rumohgudong detention complex. "There were lots of such places, but Rumohgudong was different because there were people living nearby," says Darmen Syah, the mild-mannered editor of Serambi Indonesia, Aceh's only newspaper. "The people told us they could hear the screams of those being tortured. Every night they heard people screaming, "Stop! Please stop!' "

After the Kopassus soldiers left, villagers burned the place down.