In Sudan, sexual violence is a “weapon” among many

By Rédaction Africanews with AFP

Sudan’s paramilitary Rapid Support Forces and allied militias are using sexual violence as a “weapon of war” in Darfur to control civilians, medical charity Doctors Without Borders said Tuesday.

The Sudanese army and RSF have been locked in a brutal conflict since April 2023 that has killed tens of thousands, displaced around 11 million people and has been marked by widespread sexual violence. Between January 2024 and November 2025, at least 3,396 survivors of sexual violence – 97 percent of them women and girls – sought treatment at facilities supported by MSF in North and South Darfur.

The figure is “only a fraction of the true scale” of atrocities, MSF warned in its report, which documented numerous testimonies using medical data revealing the “deliberate nature of sexual violence in Darfur.” Survivors have “frequently and clearly” identified those responsible as RSF fighters, the report said.

“Sexual violence is being used as a weapon of war and a systematic means of controlling civilians, in violation of international humanitarian law,” the NGO said. Testimonies from 150 victims during the RSF’s April attack on Zamzam camp – which sheltered nearly 500,000 people – indicate they targeted ethnic groups, particularly the non-Arab Zaghawa community.

A 28-year-old woman said: “They were four and each raped me, while some held my arms and others my legs”.

Other survivors were in El-Fasher – the army’s last stronghold in the sprawling western region that fell in October 2025 and where a UN fact-finding mission reported “acts of genocide.” Many women described being assaulted away from the frontlines while going about their daily activities: on roads, in farms, markets and displacement camps.

“There is no way to stop the rapes. The only way is to try to stay home, and to not go out as much,” a 40-year-old woman in Jebel Marra said.

MSF identified 732 survivors of sexual violence in displacement camps in the month between December 2025 and January this year, some assaulted while fleeing or within the camps.

“This war is being fought on the backs and bodies of women and girls,” said Ruth Kauffman, MSF’s emergency health manager describing the assaults as a “defining feature” of the conflict entering its fourth year in April.