The Pentagon has ordered an urgent inquiry into reports that more than 100 American women deployed in Iraq and Afghanistan have been raped or sexually assaulted by fellow soldiers, it emerged Thursday.

There have been 112 cases of sexual assault on women soldiers in units under central command, which oversees operations in the Middle East and central Asia, during the past 18 months. Meanwhile more than 20 women at an Air Force training base in Texas have told a local crisis center they were assaulted in 2002.

If only half of the cases are confirmed it will be the worst rape scandal the U.S. military has faced in nearly a decade. Read more.

The reports provoked outrage in the U.S. Senate yesterday.

"What does it say about us as a people, as the nation, as the foremost military in the world, when our women soldiers sometimes have more to fear from their fellow soldiers than from the enemy?" asked Susan Collins, a Republican senator, the Guardian newspaper reports.

"Why is there less public outrage when servicewomen suffer at the hands of their own fellow servicemen than from the enemy?"

Senators said it was particularly shocking that many of the victims had been military police officers and helicopter pilots who had been assaulted in remote parts of the Afghan and Iraqi battlefields.

Intellpuke: "Americans from one end of the country to the other should be outraged by this, or any other rape; but is particularly nefarious that this is happening to those trying to serve their country. The soldiers who participated in these crimes, as well as those who merely witnessed them without saying anything, should be immediately court martialed, and their next mailing address should be the military prison at Leavenworth, Kansas."