Fighters on both sides of Sudan’s civil war have carried out a wave of rapes, including attacking women in front of their families, sexually assaulting them in the hospital and fatally injuring them during gang rapes, according to a report by Human Rights Watch released on Monday.
During a recent trip to Sudan, Washington Post journalists interviewed survivors who said they had been assaulted, including a woman and a girl in the city of Omdurman who recounted that fighters with the paramilitary Rapid Support Forces had raped them and threatened their families to force them to become spies. The RSF has been engaged in a withering conflict with Sudan’s military after a power-sharing arrangement collapsed 15 months ago.
The woman, who had graduated from a university after studying hospitality, said RSF fighters had detained her at a checkpoint and took her to a building with 15 other women and girls.
“They suspected me” of being a spy, she said. “They beat my knees, then they beat my back. They beat me in the face,” she added, pointing to her missing teeth. “Then the rapes began.”
Every three days, she said, a girl would vanish from detention. Sometimes they came back, and sometimes they didn’t. When asked, jailers said the girls had “gone to God,” she said.
The women who were interviewed by The Post spoke on the condition of anonymity for fear of reprisals, and all the interviews were conducted in the presence of a Sudanese security officer.
The university graduate, who spoke while in military detention, said the RSF had pressured her to spy for them and threatened her five young children, saying they knew where she lived. After 13 days of abuse, she agreed, but soon after she turned herself in to the military. She hasn’t seen her children since.
“I just want to go home. I just want to see my children again. I want to bring them here,” she whispered, shredding a tissue between her bitten fingernails.
The woman was held in the same military detention center as a 15-year-old girl who said she had also been detained by the RSF at a checkpoint and raped for two days. Her brother was beaten, she said, and the fighters threatened to kill him unless she became a spy. She agreed, she said, but was arrested when she arrived in a neighborhood controlled by the military.
Neither victim had received medical attention since being detained, despite reporting their rapes, they said.
The HRW report accuses both the Sudanese military and the RSF of committing rapes and focused on assaults that occurred in the capital, Khartoum. The report relies on testimony from 42 people who tended to the women, including health-care providers, counselors and social workers, because the war prevented HRW researchers from traveling to Sudan to speak with survivors.
The group notes that most of its research focused on events that occurred in areas under RSF control but that rapes by the military increased after it took control of the city of Omdurman, across the Nile River from Khartoum.
Among the cases cited by the report was a girl who sought help on social media after being raped but later died by suicide; a mother and her four daughters repeatedly raped in their own home; and a girl, her mother and her grandmother who were raped together. The report says some men had also been sexually abused.
In a statement, the RSF said it “does not claim to eliminate all violations, but it seeks vigorously and professionally, in accordance with international humanitarian law and international human rights law, to eliminate them or reduce them.” A military spokesman said he had not seen the report and could not comment.
The report says both warring parties had threatened and detained doctors, nurses and emergency-care responders because of their work, including providing support to survivors of rape. The military blocked the provision of medical supplies to RSF-held areas, the report says, a complaint repeated by other medical aid groups.
The report says RSF fighters had also sexually attacked health-care providers and arrested and threatened to kill a health worker who documented rapes. Another doctor told The Post by phone that she had been raped when the RSF invaded her hospital.
One women’s rights activist told HRW about two sisters held by RSF fighters for three days with many other women and girls from South Sudan and Ethiopia. They described being raped, beaten and starved. An emergency room volunteer in northern Khartoum said a teenage girl had been seized by the RSF in early June 2023, raped and held for a month alongside other women.
In the town of Shendi, Post journalists spoke with an RSF fighter accused of committing rapes. While the fighter was stationed on the island of Tutti, once an upmarket Khartoum neighborhood, local residents alleged on Facebook that he carried out gang rapes, extortion and other crimes. The Facebook post, shared by a Sudanese intelligence officer, included the fighter’s name and photograph.
The fighter, who was held by the military at the time of the interview, confirmed he had been stationed on Tutti but denied taking part in rapes. He said other RSF fighters would often enter homes and “then you would hear a woman screaming for help.”
