The other day, I was working away at my desk, listening to The Diane Rehm Show on NPR, as I often do. The subject of the hour was a new memoir called Tears of the Desert, written by a Sudanese woman named Halima Bashir.

Diane Rehm led Bashir gently through a line of questioning that became so intense and so painful that it brought me to tears. What follows is the story I heard Bashir tell.

Halima Bashir grew up in small village in Darfur. Her father valued education and made sure that she completed school and went on to college. Dr. Bashir became the first physician in her village.

She spoke at some length about the custom of female circumcision in her culture, and she recounted in fairly excruciating detail her own experience being circumcised at the age of six--the confusion of a party celebrating the occasion, the horrible pain of the procedure, performed by a midwife, crying out for her mother and father, being mocked and made to feel guilty for crying. Did I mention she was six years old?

Fast forward to adulthood. After completing her education and training, she was working in a village health clinic. One day, the Janjaweed militia attacked a local school. Dozens of girls, some as young as eight years old, were raped. The girls came to the clinic for help. After the incident, Dr. Bashir spoke about it with United Nations representatives. She simply could not keep quiet about such horrific abuse.

A few days later, men came for her. They took her to a house where they kept her for about two weeks. She was tortured and she was raped. Repeatedly. By many different men. The men told her, "You want to talk about rape? You don't know about rape, but we will show you. We will give you something to talk about, if you can."

After her release, she returned to her village, only to find that it had been attacked and many of the residents killed, among them her father. She has since left Sudan for London, but her brothers stayed behind and joined in the war against the Janjaweed and the government. Her mother and her sister are also still in Sudan. Halima Bashir is not even her real name. She lives in fear that someone will find her and kill her for continuing to speak out.

Listening to Dr. Bashir tell this story in her own voice was almost unbearable for me. She sounds, for lack of a better word, dead. She has very little inflection, very little emotion. I imagine stepping outside of herself might be the only way she is able to recount these horrors.

It left me wondering if this systematic violence against women as a tactic of war will ever end?

Why do we care so much about purported democracy in Iraq or revenge against Afghanistan that we will basically destroy those countries to prove our point when we do nothing when little girls are raped? Nothing.

This woman's story is not an isolated incident. Woman and girls in the Sudan are raped as a matter of course, just as they were in Bosnia, just as they will be in the next place that implodes.

I'll tell you what I wish would happen. I wish women from all over the world, millions and millions and millions of women, from the United States and Canada and Mexico and Brazil and Argentina and India and China and England and Spain and Russia and Bangladesh and Cuba and Australia and South Africa and Morocco, would descend upon the Sudan like a plague of locusts. I wish we would rain down our freaking outrage on the Sudanese government and the Janjaweed militia. I wish we wouldn't stop coming until we were standing arm in arm across the width and length of Sudan. I wish those Janjaweed bastards would feel that power, the power of woman, and get so scared that their little peckers shriveled up and fell off. Let them try to kill us. Let them try to rape us. Let them try to break our hearts and our spirits and our lives. I wish that all of us, everywhere, would stand with our sisters and say enough is enough. It has to stop.