The Rapid Support Forces (RSF) and its allies are guilty of widespread sexual violence in southern Sudan, claims Human Rights Watch (HRW).
The human rights organization has documented tens of cases since September 2023, where women and children – the youngest seven years old – in the Kordofan region have been subjected to sexual violence.
According to the report, many of the victims have been subjected to gang rapes in their own or their neighbors' homes, often in front of family members. Others have been kidnapped and subsequently held in slave-like conditions where they were raped on a daily basis.
Chained together
A 35-year-old woman describes how she was raped by six men belonging to the RSF who stormed her home. When her husband and son tried to intervene, they were killed.
"They just kept raping me, all six of them", says the woman in the report.
An 18-year-old woman tells how she and 17 others were taken to a military base in February, where over 30 women and girls were already being held. For three months, they were raped and beaten daily by RSF soldiers, according to the 18-year-old. At times, the victims were chained together.
Similar allegations have been made several times during Sudan's nearly two-year-long civil war. In November, Tom Fletcher, head of the UN agency Ocha, sounded the alarm about an "epidemic of sexual violence" against women in Sudan.
Humanitarian crisis
In a separate report last week, HRW accused the RSF and allied militias of gross abuses and war crimes against mainly ethnic Nubans in South Kordofan state.
The war in Sudan is between the RSF and its allies and the country's regular army, with all parties repeatedly accused of abuses, torture, and sexual violence.
The fighting has led to what the US has called the world's largest humanitarian crisis, with tens of thousands dead and over eight million people displaced within the country.
The fighting in Sudan broke out in April 2023 and is between arch-rivals General Abd al-Fattah al-Burhan and his former deputy, Mohamed Hamdan Daglo, who is the leader of the Rapid Support Forces, RSF.
The RSF was formed in 2013 from the janjaweed militias, the armed groups that Sudan's former dictator Omar al-Bashir had sent out to spread terror and quell the uprising in conflict-ridden Darfur in western Sudan in the early 2000s.
Both parties have repeatedly been accused of war crimes.
Sources: AFP and AP
