KHARTOUM — The assault was part of a pattern of atrocities that includes rape and gang rape — and it has been a central feature of the ongoing war in Sudan. In this case, the fighter threatened her with gun: “I’ll shoot you in the eyes.”
It was a painful memory that has been haunting Samar for more than 18 months.
It was in May last year when fighters from the notorious Rapid Support Forces (RSF) stormed a house in the Jabrah neighborhood in Sudan’s capital, Khartoum, kidnapping several women, including Samar. They sexually assaulted and raped them; and during the two-day kidnapping, several of the woman were killed by the RSF soldiers.
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The assault is part of a pattern of atrocities of war-torn Sudan since April 2023, when simmering tensions between the military and the RSF exploded into clashes in Khartoum. The fighting quickly spread across Sudan, especially urban areas but also the western Darfur region. It has so far killed more than 24,000 people and forced more than 14 million to flee their homes, according to the United Nations.
For human rights officials, it is a complicated challenge to get documented and accurate statistics about rape. “Together Against Rape,” a campaign tracking sexual assaults against women, reported 505 cases of rape between April 15, 2023 and July 30, 2024.
Sexual violence on a large scale
Samar described her painful experience of the two-day kidnapping along with multiple other women and girls by the RSF. She was severely beaten until she lost consciousness. She has pieced together what happened since. “They killed seven or eight girls in front of us,” she said of the RSF fighters.
Two days after her kidnapping, the Sudanese military launched strikes on the RSF group that had held them.
As RSF fighters rushed to battle troops, the women and girls managed to flee. Samar headed to her relatives in the Kalaka quarter, in southern Khartoum. She stayed there for a week, then began her trip out of Sudan.
Samar now shelters in a refugee camp in east Africa. She is traumatized and has attempted multiple times to kill herself since she was raped by the RSF fighters.
When she told him, he divorced her.
Aside from social stigma, hundreds of women and girls who have been sexually assaulted, raped or gang raped in Sudan’s war, have suffered from related trauma, including forced pregnancy and abortion, in addition to many cases of forced marriage.
Samar spoke about her trip out of Sudan along with her children. Her husband was separated from the family early in the war, and was trying to meet with them in eastern Sudan.
Once again, she was raped by RSF fighters as she was trying to get out of the east-central Jazira province. “They raped me in front of my children,” she said.
A week after the assault, she met with her husband. When she told him that she was raped, he divorced her.
Sexual violence against women has been rampant since the onset of the war that wrecked Khartoum and other areas across the country, especially the western region of Darfur.
An 80-page report, released last month by the Independent International Fact-Finding Mission for the Sudan, revealed that the Rapid Support Forces are responsible for committing sexual violence on a large scale in areas under their control, including gang-rapes and abducting and detaining victims in conditions that amount to sexual slavery.
Homes stormed
Almost all documented rape cases have been blamed on the RSF, which was born out of the Janjaweed militias that during the conflict in the 2000s were accused of mass killings, rape and other atrocities against Darfur’s Black African communities.
In July 2023 — three months into the war — the Strategic Initiative for Women in the Horn of Africa, SIHA, said it received reports that RSF fighters kidnapped women and girls and held them hostages in specific areas of North Darfur province.
Many of the women who have been assaulted are still living in dire conditions, either in refugee camps in neighboring countries, or inside Sudan at the mercy of violence. Some women have died for lack of healthcare.
Mariam, a 26-year-old woman, was raped in February by RSF fighters who stormed her family’s homes in the city of Wad Madani in Jazira province. Six months later, she died for lack of medical care, according to SIHA.
Victims struggle to receive medical care, according to doctors inside Sudan, who warned about an increase of sexually-transmitted diseases. Still, there are no accurate statistics on the infection of survivors, as some of them did not undergo the necessary tests.
Lasting stigma
The Doctors’ Union in Sudan reported that such challenges include difficulty of movement, insecurity, and social stigma since rape is a sensitive matter in conservative societies, like Sudan.
Women who discover they are pregnant often can’t obtain a legal abortion in time
Women who discover they are pregnant often can’t obtain a legal abortion in time, and then must confront the health risks that may arise during pregnancy or when abortion is performed in an unsafe manner.
SIHA reported in April that 14 pregnancies occurred as a result of rape during the war in several Sudanese provinces, notably in central Darfur, where many women were kidnapped and raped by RSF.
Among those raped in central Darfur was a 17-year-old girl, kidnapped by RSF fighters in October last year while searching for work around the Hamidiya camp for displaced people.
She said that she was able to reach a safe area and obtain medical support only three months after she was raped. At that time, she discovered that she was pregnant.
Now she is the mother of a child, and says they both face stigma and are ostracized in her community.
