Sudan’s civil war sees RSF forces rape women and girls on shocking ‘scale and scale’, rights group says
Johannesburg – Sudan’s Rapid Support Force, one on one side civil war It divided the African nation for over a year and made one of them worst humanitarian crises on the planetaccused of raping many women and girls and using some as new sex slaves Human Rights Watch report. The New York-based legal group says the use of sexual violence by paramilitary forces in the country’s South Kordofan state since September 2023 constitutes war crimes and possible crimes against humanity.
HRW released a report on Monday detailing new allegations of horrific abuses in Sudan, where both sides of the civil war are at war, detailing the findings of an investigation into the cases of nearly 80 women and girls. accused of war crimes.
According to HRW, the researchers collected evidence of 79 women and girls between the ages of 7 and 50 who were raped, most of which took place at the RSF military base in Dibeibat, near the town of Habila in South Kordofan.
Survivors and witnesses said those who carried out the attacks on the group were all uniformed RSF forces or members of allied militias.
“Survivors described being gang-raped in front of their families and for long periods of time, including being held as sex slaves,” said Belkis Ville, HRW’s Associate Director for Crisis and Conflict, who conducted numerous interviews with survivors.
Ezzaddean Elsafi, the RSF’s chief adviser, denied the accusations in a report by HRW to CBS News, claiming that “people wearing RSF uniforms” were behind the alleged attacks, not real RSF forces, but impersonators.
“RSF takes this very seriously and will investigate. We are very sensitive to sexual violence against women and the perpetrators will be brought to justice,” Elsafi said, denying the group had a significant presence in South Kordofan, admitting that it had forces “in the Debibat region,” bordering North Kordofan province. near
“This is completely disinformation,” the HRW report said.
HRW said it shared a summary of the findings of its investigation with the RSF’s overall commander, General Mohamed Hamdan Dagalo, but did not receive a response.
Wille has spent years documenting sexual violence by ISIS militants in conflicts around the world, including against Yazidi women in Iraq, but she told CBS News, “What really struck me after meeting these women and girls was the scope and scale.” Crimes in Sudan.
CBS News has seen a video of the full interview HRW conducted with the 18-year-old woman, identified by the group as Hania. She said she was pregnant in February when RSF fighters broke into her home in Habila and captured her, her 17-year-old neighbor and 16 other girls she knew from her neighborhood. According to him, they were taken to the military base in Dibeybat in 10 vehicles.
Human Rights Watch
When they arrived, Haniya said he recognized more than 30 girls from the town where about 100 fighters had held them captive.
When she tried to resist the assault, one of the gunmen “started beating me with a metal whip,” she said. For the next three months, she said, “the fighters would take several girls in groups of three every morning to rape them, and then in the evening another group of three would come and take another group of girls to rape them.”
Hania said the RSF men held her and other women and girls in a sort of animal tower constructed of wire and tree branches, where they were chained in groups of ten.
“What is clear from these cases is that nowhere in RSF-controlled areas is safe — if you run away or even in your home. Women and girls are at risk of rape wherever they are,” Wille told CBS News. .
Another woman, Hasina, 35, told HRW that six uniformed RSF men shot and killed her husband and stole their cattle and money. She said the cows were her family’s investment, so with their cows and money stolen, she felt she had no way to escape like many of her neighbors did, and she and her six young children, some of them just babies, had no choice but to keep the cows. let them stay at home.
The RSF fighters returned three days later, he said, and “all three men raped me and left.”
Later that evening, “three more people came back and raped me again and told me to stay in my house.”
She said she was gang-raped almost every day for the next month before she escaped.
Human Rights Watch
HRW met Hasina in Al-Haylu camp, a makeshift facility for internally displaced people in South Kordofan with no resources.
“She’s really barely able to wake up and go through what she’s been through. Her children are now in camp with little food and when I saw them they looked very malnourished. … She’s struggling to function as a mother,” she said. Wille added that the women living in the tents next to Hasina helped take care of their children.
Wille said there is no psychological support for traumatized women in the camp or in much of the country.
“When I brought up the issue of justice and accountability to these women, they all looked at me blankly, because justice is a meaningless concept for them. “The scale of what is happening here means that this has become normalized behavior by the RSF. None of these women have ever heard of a soldier or combatant being held accountable.”
Haniya and her pregnant friend managed to escape from their captors. They were interviewed by HRW in the Nuba Mountains. They said 49 girls were still being held at the base and had heard that girls were also being held at two other RSF bases.
“We have no way to find out more about these women because access is very difficult and dangerous, and there is no electricity, no mobile phone network in these areas, so no information is given. There is complete silence about these abuses.” Ville said. “We will never know what happened to these women and girls.”
The humanitarian crisis caused by Sudan’s civil war was the largest on record for the second consecutive year in 2024, with more than 30 million people in need of humanitarian assistance, the charity International Rescue Committee says. It is estimated that nearly half of Sudan’s 50 million people are suffering from severe hunger.
Fighting intensified last week, nearly 20 months into the war, with both sides accusing the other of committing new atrocities. International efforts to broker a peace deal have stalled, and there is no end in sight to the fighting.
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