At a safe house in Turkey, near the Syrian border, I was introduced to a 25-year-old Sunni woman named Nada whose ordeal was especially horrific because of the length of her detention. “Eight months and three days,” she explained very slowly when I first met her in late spring. (I’ve changed her name here to protect her identity.) A member of a Syrian youth organization allied with rebel forces, she told me she had witnessed and been subjected to vast human-rights abuses, including repeated beatings, while imprisoned by the government. At one point she was hit in the face with such force that her orthodontia broke through her skin. I wondered how such a fragile-looking young woman could endure months of abuse. Her shoulders were the width of a child’s. Her waist was minuscule. Her head was covered with a lavender hijab, and she wore a thick sweater over her tight jeans, but you could see the thin outline of her almost adolescent body.

It requires extreme sensitivity to interview victims of rape and other sexual abuses and to verify their accounts. I have spent large amounts of time over two decades collecting information on rape during the conflicts in Bosnia, Kosovo, Rwanda, Sierra Leone, Liberia, Iraq, and Afghanistan, often working in collaboration with human-rights organizations. There is a methodology to collecting data, but mainly one must rely on patience and repeat interviews to make sure details are correct and victims are not changing their stories, exaggerating, or lying. Years of experience working in war zones hones one’s intuition, and I would be shocked, given Nada’s extreme reactions to telling her story, if she were lying, though I should note that I had no independent way to corroborate her account.

Nada’s first days in detention were largely spent without sleep, she said, while she was relentlessly interrogated for names, for dates, for occasions where she had met others in her organization. She could hear the screams of fellow prisoners being beaten. She was continually threatened with sexual violence.

“They would say, ‘Talk or we will strip you,’” she told me, covering her eyes, unable to look at me. Her interrogators brought her to a cell full of male prisoners in their underwear. Leering, the jailers told her that they would leave her alone with the prisoners “to take care of me.” To a conservative young Sunni woman, this was unthinkable. She began to scream for them to let her out of the jail.

“I thought I was being given to these men for them to rape me,” she said. “I think I screamed for three hours. They wanted to break me. Finally, I said, ‘O.K., I will tell you the truth.’”

Whatever she told them wasn’t enough. For eight months Nada was held at various prisons and detention centers, a journey that finally ended in one of the most renowned torture centers in Damascus. When telling me of the degradations she experienced, she would not use the word “rape,” although a Syrian-American N.G.O. worker who had been caring for Nada whispered to me that she had been subject to sexual abuse and had “probably been raped” while there. “But she needs to rebuild her life, and you know what rape means in Syrian society,” the woman told me privately. “It means no one will marry her. So she cannot say it.”

At one point during a detailed interview that lasted hours, while Nada described being forced to watch a male prisoner being sodomized, she ran from the room and vomited. When she came back, she shook for several minutes and was silent. In appearance, she seemed to shift from a young girl to an old and debilitated woman.