At least 19 people raped in previously undocumented war crime, eye witnesses tell The Telegraph. Copy link. twitter. facebook. whatsapp. *The Telegraph has changed the names of the victims to protect them from possible reprisal. A disabled four-year-old boy was among at least 19 people raped at gunpoint by members of Sudan’s Rapid Support Forces (RSF), according to eye witness accounts gathered by The Telegraph.
The attack, which almost certainly constitutes a war crime, occurred in a small town in Sudan’s South Kordofan state, soon after the country’s civil war erupted in April 2023. It was documented by Telegraph reporters through recorded interviews with victims and eye witnesses earlier this month.
In addition to the disabled boy, three other children and 15 women were raped in the street, many by multiple soldiers. Others were killed and beaten. The attack started at around 4am when 35 RSF militants dressed in light brown uniforms and turbans stormed Habila, a small rural village made up of straw-roofed huts in the country’s Nuba mountains.
One victim, Najwa*, described how she hid in her car with seven of her eight children, including her disabled son Emmanuel, as the RSF attacked in the dark. Her older sister, Fatou, who witnessed the immediate aftermath of the attack, fled into the nearby bush with her sister’s eighth child.
According to Najwa, who was speaking to The Telegraph via a translator, the RSF troops surrounded the car and pulled her from the front seat. They then dragged her to a nearby clearing with 14 other women. The soldiers then forced the women to strip and ordered them to “lie down on your front and look down,” Najwa told The Telegraph. “If somebody wants to talk, we will kill you”, they threatened.
Najwa said the soldiers broke into groups of two to three and took it in turns to gang rape the women, beating them with their guns as they did so. Najwa was raped by three different RSF soldiers, she said. “They were just doing it in front of everyone, they don’t care who is harmed,” she said.
A soldier then took Emmanuel, who was born with a birth defect affecting both legs that makes it difficult for him to walk. The child had climbed from the car when he saw his mother being attacked. He was then tossed into the same clearing where his mother was being raped.
“They raped him from behind,” Najwa told The Telegraph, her eyes now turned away and fixed on the ground. “I called out to him, but he couldn’t speak. He was only crying,” she said. “They were beating him, shouting ‘stop crying! Stop crying!”.
Emmanuel later told his mother through tears: “They took off my clothes and started attacking me. They used me by force,” she recalled. Najwa was left in agony, experiencing severe pain in her back and chest, she said. Emmanuel is still haunted by the attack. He wakes up crying in the night and suffers spasms of pain in his spine and chest.
After raping all 15 women the RSF soldiers released them and fled the village. Many of the men in the village were murdered. When she heard the soldiers leave, Najwa’s sister Fatou returned to the clearing where the soldiers had left the naked women covered in blood.
She saw Emmanuel lying on the floor with three young girls, aged 11, eight and seven. All four children had been stripped naked. “They were all bleeding and crying,” she told The Telegraph. All four children told Fatou and Najwa that the RSF soldiers had raped them.
The Telegraph met the sisters in a displacement camp. They live nearby with their 14 children and two husbands. The previously unreported incident adds to a mounting body of evidence that the RSF – which is backed by the United Arab Emirates and has been accused of genocide – has weaponised sexual violence as a tool to terrorise non-Arab communities across the country.
At least 150,000 people have been killed in the conflict and some 12 million people have been uprooted from their homes. Famine has been declared in two areas of the country, including the western Nuba mountains, in what the UN has declared the “world’s worst humanitarian crisis”.
The attacks by the RSF – whose members are predominantly drawn from Sudan’s Arab-dominated north – on the Nuba and other indigenous African ethnic groups constitute war crimes. In January, the US formally declared that the militia – once known as the Janjaweed (“devils on horseback”) and infamous for committing ethnic cleansing in the early 2000s in Darfur – have committed genocide.
The United Nations has also warned that sexual violence is taking place on a “staggering scale” in Sudan. A recent investigation by Human Rights Watch (HRW) found that gang rape and sexual slavery are being used as tools of “systematic abuse”. Researchers recorded dozens of attacks carried out by the RSF, with most of the women describing being raped in front of their families or being being held as sex slaves where they were “raped repeatedly” by fighters for extended periods.
