Sudan civil war sees RSF forces rape women and girls on a shocking “scope and scale,” rights group says

Johannesburg — Sudan’s Rapid Support Forces, one side in a civil war that’s torn the African nation apart for more than a year and created one of the worst humanitarian crises on the planet, are accused of raping scores of women and girls and using some as sex slaves in a new report by Human Rights Watch. The New York-based rights group says the paramilitary forces’ use of sexual violence in the country’s South Kordofan state since September 2023 constitutes war crimes and possible crimes against humanity. 

HRW lays out the findings of an investigation based on the cases of almost 80 women and girls in a report published Monday, detailing horrific new allegations of abuse in Sudan, where both sides in the civil war had already been accused of war crimes.

Researchers gathered evidence on 79 women and girls between the ages of 7 and 50 whom HRW says were raped, with most incidents occurring 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 forces or members of allied militias. 

“Survivors described being gang raped in front of their families and over prolonged periods of time, including while being held as sex slaves,” said HRW Associate Crisis and Conflict Director Belkis Wille, who conducted many of the interviews with the survivors.

Ezzaddean Elsafi, a senior RSF adviser, denied the accusations in the HRW report to CBS News, claiming “people wearing RSF uniforms” behind the alleged attacks were impersonators, not actual RSF forces.

“RSF takes this very seriously and will investigate. We are highly sensitive to sexual violence against women and the perpetrators will be held accountable,” said Elsafi, denying that the group even has a significant presence in South Kordofan, though acknowledging it has forces “in the Debibat area,” near the boarder with North Kordofan state. 

“This is absolutely disinformation,” he said of the HRW report.

HRW said it had shared a summary of its investigation’s findings with the RSF’s overall commander, General Mohamed Hamdan Dagalo, but had not received a response.  

Wille has spent years documenting sexual violence in conflicts around the world, including by ISIS militants against Yazidi women in Iraq, but she told CBS News, “What is really astonishing to me after meeting these women and girls is the scope and scale” of the crimes in Sudan.

CBS News has seen video of the full interview HRW conducted with an 18-year-old woman whom the group identified as Hania. She said she was pregnant in February when RSF fighters burst into her home in Habila and grabbed her, her 17-year-old neighbor and 16 other girls she knew from her neighborhood. She said they were taken in 10 vehicles to the military base in Dibeibat.

When they arrived, Hania said she recognized more than 30 other girls from her town already there, with about 100 fighters holding them captive. 

She said when she tried to resist being raped, one of the militants “started beating me with a metal whip.” Over the next three months, she said “the fighters came in groups of three every morning to take some girls to rape them, and then in the evening another group of three would come and take another set of girls to rape them.”

Hania said the RSF men held her and the other women and girls in a type of animal pen constructed with wire and tree branches, where they were chained up in groups of ten.

“What was clear from these cases is that in areas with RSF with control, absolutely nowhere is safe – not if you flee, or even in your home. Woman 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 and killed her husband and stole all their cattle and money. She said the cows were her family’s investment so, with them and her money stolen, she felt she had no means to flee like many of her neighbors had done, and she and her six young children, some just 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 gang-raped almost every day for the next month before she fled.

HRW met Hasina at Camp Al-Hailu, a makeshift facility with little to no resources for internally displaced civilians in South Kordofan.

“She really is barely able to wake up and keep going because of what she lived through. Her kids are now in a camp with little food and looked very malnourished when I saw them. … She is struggling to function as a mother,” said Wille, adding that women living in tents next to Hasina were helping to care for her kids. 

Wille said there was no psychological support for traumatized women in the camp or across much of the country.

“When I brought up the question of justice and accountability to these women, all of them looked blankly at me, as justice is a meaningless concept to them,” she said. “The scale with which it happens here means it’s become normalized behavior by the RSF. None of these women have ever heard of a 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 she’d heard of girls being held at two other RSF bases, as well. 

“We have no way of finding out more about these women, as access is very difficult and dangerous, and in these areas there is no electricity, no cellphone networks, so no information comes out. There is an absolute silence on these abuses,” said Wille. “We will likely never know what happened to these women and girls.” 

The International Rescue Committee charity says the humanitarian crisis driven by Sudan’s civil war has been the biggest ever recorded for the second year in a row in 2024, with more than 30 million people in need of humanitarian aid. It’s estimated that roughly half of Sudan’s 50 million people are suffering from severe hunger.

Last week, some 20 months into the war, the fighting appeared to intensify, with both sides accusing the other of carrying out fresh atrocities. International efforts to broker a peace agreement have stalled and there is no end in sight to the fighting.