While having a chat with a girlfriend under a mango tree about 50 meters from his home and having a good view of his compound from where they were both in the village of Bèzèrè in western CAR, the 32-year-old said he was watching from a distance about twelve Russian paramilitaries, appearing out of nowhere, dragged the wives of two of his neighbors out of the compound, stabbed them in the abdomen, and then disemboweled the two women. “The women were screaming and begging for mercy,” Ali, who now lives as a refugee in Cameroon, told The Daily Beast. “The white soldiers [as many in CAR refer to Wagner mercenaries as] he didn’t listen. They killed the women and removed their stomachs and intestines.” The incident, according to Ali and another witness, happened on December 6 last year. They said at least six other women in Bèzèrè were killed in the same way across the village. “As I was leaving the village, I saw the body of a woman who was pregnant,” Malik Tete, a 29-year-old mason who fled Bèzèrè in Cameroon after the incident, told the Daily Beast. “They had cut her open, removed her baby and her intestines and left them on top of her dead body.” After the violence in Bèzèrè, thousands of people, according to Ali and Tete, fled the village to Bocaranga, a town located about 27 kilometers southeast of Bèzèrè. Many others, including the witnesses, sought refuge in refugee camps in the eastern part of Cameroon. “We were afraid that these white soldiers would come back and kill us all, so we had to leave the village,” said Ali, who fled to the town of Ngaoundere in Cameroon’s central Adamawa region. “If we didn’t run, we’d probably be dead by now.” It was not only in Bèzèrè that the Russians were said to have slaughtered women last December. In the nearby community of Létélé, locals told The Daily Beast they found the disembowelled bodies of four women dead in different locations the day Russian mercenaries stormed the village looking for rebels from the Return, Reclamation, Rehabilitation (3R) group. “I saw with my own eyes when a white soldier stabbed a woman with a knife in her abdomen,” Bissafi, a 30-year-old farmer who now lives in CAR’s capital, Bangui, told the Daily Beast. “They said she was punished for marrying a man who works for a rebel group.” Given the manner in which the victims were allegedly killed, the Russians “obviously wanted to torture the women to death,” said Sylvestre, who—like other witnesses living in the CAR—the Daily Beast chooses to identify with the small his name to protect him from possible retribution. Those who identified some of the alleged victims in both Bèzèrè and Létélé said they were women who lived in areas in the two villages where rebels from the 3R faction, one of CAR’s most powerful armed groups posing as the Fulani Self-Defense Militia, have been active. “They [Russian mercenaries] you think all the men in the areas where the 3R rebels are present are part of the rebel group,” Souleyman, a local vigilante in Létélé, told The Daily Beast. “Whenever they meet people from these areas, they accuse them of supporting the rebels and even physically attack them.” Some of the victims, according to Souleyman, who has been in contact with their families as well as people who witnessed the killings, are the wives of young men accused of being “very friendly” with 3R militants. Made up of mainly Muslim herders, the 3R group was originally founded in 2015 to protect the minority Puehl population in northwestern CAR, where clashes with farmers are recurrent. In December 2020, the group joined the Coalition of Patriots for Change (CPC), an alliance of CAR armed groups that launched an offensive shortly before the country’s presidential election to stop the re-election of President Faustin Archange Touadera and overthrow his government. The rebels are constantly targeting CAR forces and allied Russian paramilitaries who, in response, are launching a counter-offensive against the militants. But, as several locals have claimed, the Russians may now be fighting civilians who live in the very communities where these rebels are operating. “It is unfortunate that [Russian mercenaries] they are now targeting our women,” Djibril, a Bèzèrè-born artisan miner based in the southwestern town of Berbérati, told The Daily Beast. “I know two people whose wives were brutally killed in December by them [Russian] troops.” Neither the CAR government nor Yevgeny Prigozhin, a close friend of President Vladimir Putin who reportedly runs the Wagner Group, responded to The Daily Beast’s request for comment on the alleged disembodiment of women in Bèzèrè and Létélé. Emails sent to a representative of the CAR Ministry of Communications and Media and to Concord Management, a company primarily owned by Prigozhin, went unanswered. “I have no words to describe these [Russian] the soldiers have done it.’ A local official in Ouham district, which covers Bèzèrè and Létélé, told The Daily Beast that the prefecture government was aware of the alleged incidents in the two areas and had informed authorities in Bangui about them. “No one [in Bangui] it even condemned what was done to women in the communities involved,” said the official, who spoke on condition of anonymity because he was not authorized to speak on the matter. “This is so unfortunate.” There have been reports of Russian-linked forces targeting women in the CAR in the past. In May, The Daily Beast reported how Wagner mercenaries allegedly stormed a hospital in the capital Bangui last month and attacked mothers recovering from childbirth, as well as medical staff caring for them, on multiple occasions. One of the victims, according to a local independent news outlet that spoke to an eyewitness, was allegedly sexually assaulted for hours by the mercenaries. Sources who spoke to The Daily Beast about the alleged incidents said they were horrified that the victims might not even be related to those for whose crimes they were being punished. “Seeing helpless women begging for their lives and seeing them slaughtered like animals is the worst thing a man can do to a fellow human being,” Ali said. “I have no words to describe these [Russian] the soldiers have done it.’
