Johannesburg — Sudan’s rapid support forces, one page in one Civil War This tore the African nation apart for more than a year and created one of the… worst humanitarian crisis on the planetThey are accused of raping numerous women and girls in a new year and abusing some of them as sex slaves Human Rights Watch report. The New York-based human rights group says the use of sexual violence by paramilitary forces in the country’s South Kordofan state since September 2023 constitutes war crimes and possibly crimes against humanity.
In a report published on Monday, HRW presents the results of an investigation based on the cases of almost 80 women and girls. It details horrific new allegations of abuse in Sudan, where both sides of the civil war have already fought accused of war crimes.
Researchers collected evidence on 79 women and girls between the ages of 7 and 50 who were raped, according to HRW. Most of the incidents occurred at an RSF military base in Dibeibat, near the town of Habila in South Kordofan.
Survivors and witnesses told the group that the men who carried out the attacks were all uniformed RSF troops or members of allied militias.
“Survivors reported being gang raped in front of their families and over extended periods of time, including while being held as sex slaves,” said Belkis Wille, associate crisis and conflict director at HRW, who conducted many interviews with the survivors.
Ezzadean Elsafi, a senior RSF adviser, denied the allegations in the HRW report to CBS News, claiming that the “individuals in RSF uniforms” behind the alleged attacks were copycats and not real RSF -troops acted.
“RSF takes the matter very seriously and will investigate. We are very sensitive to sexual violence against women and the perpetrators will be held accountable,” Elsafi said, denying that the group had any significant presence in South Kordofan but admitting that it had forces. in the Debibat area, near the border with North Kordofan State.
“This is absolute disinformation,” he said of the HRW report.
HRW said it had shared a summary of the investigation’s findings with RSF commander-in-chief Gen. Mohamed Hamdan Dagalo but had received no response.
Wille has spent years documenting sexual violence in conflicts around the world, including by ISIS fighters against Yazidi women in Iraq, but she told CBS News: “What really amazes me after meeting these women and girls is is the scope and scale” of violent crimes in Sudan.
CBS News has seen video of the full interview HRW conducted with an 18-year-old woman the group identified as Hania. She said she was pregnant in February when RSF fighters entered her home in Habila and abducted her, her 17-year-old neighbor and 16 other girls she knew from her neighborhood. She said they were taken to the military base in Dibeibat in 10 vehicles.
Human Rights Watch
When they arrived, Hania said she recognized more than 30 other girls from her town there who were being held captive by about 100 fighters.
She said that when she tried to resist the rape, one of the militants “started hitting me with a metal whip.” For the next three months, she said, “The militants came every morning in groups of three to take a few girls and rape them, and then in the evening another group of three came and took another group of girls to rape them.”
Hania said the RSF men held her and the other women and girls in a kind of animal enclosure made of wire and branches, where they were chained in groups of ten.
“It became clear from these cases that in areas controlled by the RSF there is absolutely no safe place – neither on the run nor at home. Women and girls are at risk of being raped no matter where,” Wille told CBS News.
Another woman, Hasina, 35, told HRW that six uniformed RSF men shot her husband and stole all their livestock and money. She said the cows were her family’s investment. Because she and her money had been stolen, she felt she had no way to escape like many of her neighbors, and she and her six young children, some of whom were still babies, had no choice but to stay in their home.
The RSF fighters returned three days later, she said, and “all three men raped me and left.”
Later that evening, “three more came back and raped me again and told me to stay in my house.”
She said she was raped multiple times almost every day for the next month before she fled.
Human Rights Watch
HRW met Hasina at Camp Al-Hailu, a makeshift facility with little or no resources for internally displaced civilians in South Kordofan.
“Because of what she has been through, she is barely able to wake up and move on. Her children are now in a camp with little food and looked very malnourished when I saw them. … She is struggling to function as a mother,” she said. Wille added that women living in tents next to Hasina helped care for her children.
Wille said there was no psychological support for traumatized women in the camp or in much of the country.
“When I raised the issue of justice and accountability to these women, they all looked at me blankly because justice is a meaningless concept to them,” she said. “The extent to which it is happening here means it is normal behavior for the RSF. None of these women have ever heard of any soldier or fighter ever being held accountable.”
Hania and a friend who was also pregnant 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 they had heard of girls also being held at two other RSF bases.
“We have no way of finding out more about these women as access is very difficult and dangerous and there is no electricity or mobile phone network in these areas, so no information comes out. There is absolute silence about this abuse,” said Wille. “We will probably never know what happened to these women and girls.”
The charity International Rescue Committee says the humanitarian crisis caused by Sudan’s civil war in 2024 was the largest on record for the second year in a row, with more than 30 million people in need of humanitarian assistance. It is estimated that around half of Sudan’s 50 million people suffer from severe hunger.
Last week, some 20 months after the war began, fighting appeared to be heating up, with each side accusing the other of committing new atrocities. International efforts to negotiate a peace agreement have stalled and there is no end to the fighting in sight.
