Marianne Kearney, Banda Aceh – Wiry, 45-year-old Ainsyah Basyah is not the most typical victim of the Indonesian military's nine-year campaign to wipe out the Free Aceh separatist movement, which marked its 23rd anniversary on December 4.

But she's certainly not an unusual case either in this province that has been home to a guerrilla movement since the 70s and where separatist sentiment has peaked in the last two months.

Ainsyah is now seeking shelter at the Beureunen Mosque in Sigli, located in northern Aceh, the Indonesian province at the northern tip of Sumatra island to the north-east of Jakarta.

She is there because after crack riot troops entered her village of Gameung three months ago, she says she wants to avoid any further military sweeping operations after a fateful operation in 1990 wiped out half her family.

In just one day Ainsyah lost her husband, two of her brothers and her brother-in-law. Her husband, Kasim, two of her brothers and her brother-in-law were out panning for gold when the elite special forces or Kopassus troops, suspecting that they were using a gold pan from the guerrillas, opened fire on them.

Her son Ibrahim, who witnessed the shooting, was taken to the military headquarters, stripped and tortured, then sent to tell his mother about his father and uncle's death. The soldiers joked that Ibrahim must be immune to the bullets because he had been spared.

Like the 5,000 or so other refugees in Signi, Ainsyah still lives in one of the hundreds of plastic and bamboo huts surrounding the mosque.

From just one small town of Geumpang, with only 3,000 residents, 150 claimed to have been tortured, shot or lost family members during the military campaign, say the students organising food and medicines for the camps.

The Indonesian Human Rights commission says at least 2,000 people were killed, and hundreds tortured during the military campaign which officially ended last year.

But local non-government groups say the scale of killing, rape and torture is much higher, estimating that as many as 6,000 people have been killed.

Some months after her husband's killing, Ainsyah was suspected of assisting the rebels and was picked up and held in detention. For four days, she says, she was tied to a chair and told to confess supplying the guerrillas with rice and food. She refused.

Two years later, she became very sick. "I became very depressed. I remembered all my experiences and I couldn't work," says Ainsyah, although two of her six children still depended on her.

Without any men in the family, she also had to think about protecting her young daughter. Rather than risk having her "picked up" by the military, Ainsyah married her off at 12 years of age.

Ainsyah says the local troops often chased young girls and took them to the barracks, where they were raped. She thinks that five or six young girls from her village were raped like this.

Now Ainsyah is "a little mentally unstable, and sometimes has hallucinations", says Dr Nurdin Rahman, the director from the centre for torture victims, RATA.

Jafar Arsyad, another of Beureunen's refugees, was not injured during the 10-year military campaign. But he was in the most recent military campaign to secure the elections, when at least 6,000 additional anti-riot troops were sent to Aceh.

The 41-year-old was only recently released from local military command's prison cell after being picked up in July.

He says the troops arrested him because they could not find the person they were looking for. They removed his fingernails and beat him, he says, as he holds up his hands and stiffly moves his fingers.

Jafar says he has no plans to return to his village as he fears the military will return again. He does not believe the government's promise, made in October, to permanently remove combat troops from Aceh. "I don't believe anything they [the government] says, they still have a roadblock near my village," he says.

But even in the camp, the atmosphere is still tense. A group of Muslim boarding school students, known as Thaliban, have set up a security post just inside the mosque gates to try to limit soldiers or outsiders entering the camp and taking away suspected Free Aceh rebels.

The students say that one night, the local troops removed six young men from the camp, who were badly beaten. Over the last few weeks, it has not unusual to hear random shooting or to find a dead body dumped by the side of the road say the students. The dumped bodies are thought to be either victims of clashes with Free Aceh rebels or victims of military interrogation.

Not far from the mosque lives ex-village head, Abdullah bin Daud, once a proud member of the local government but now a Free Aceh supporter, after a stint in one of Aceh's most famous detention centre.

Accused in May of supplying Free Aceh rebels with rice seed, he was imprisoned for three months at the local military building in Sigli, known as the "slaughterhouse" because so many of its detainees were killed. During his imprisonment, he was hung by his wrists from timber rafters and beaten with a rattan cane, Addullah says.

Now the soft-spoken rice farmer has almost no movement in his right hand, can just move the thumb of his left hand, and struggles to perform even the most basic farming tasks.

When he was released, the wounds of his torture was so severe that the military sent him to Medan, which is south of Aceh, rather than allow him to return to his village in order to avoid the attention of human rights groups and journalists.

Abdullah has little hope that he will ever receive compensation or that the soldiers will be brought to trial. "The Indonesian government has no respect for the law, I just want Aceh to be independent," he says in a resigned manner.

Like the hundreds of other torture victims, Abdullah receives no special government treatment. Instead, he is expected to go to the local health service.

But most victims are too frightened to have any dealings with the government health service, out of fear the military will track them down. At best, the government medical staff are indifferent to the psychological trauma these people carry, says Dr Nurdin Rahman.