Grainy video footage, shot from above barbed-wire fencing, captures the frightening chaos — figures scrambling in the gloom, smoke billowing into the overcast sky. Behind the haze and destruction lies an atrocity of staggering brutality. 

More than 150 female prisoners were raped and then burned to death on January 27 when male inmates staged a mass jailbreak and set fire to a prison at Goma, in the eastern Democratic Republic of the Congo, to join the surging conflict between the government-backed military and the Rwanda-bolstered militia group, M23.