Sudanese women describe being gang-raped in ethnically targeted attacks by Arab forces

(Reuters) Rape is widespread amid the war in Sudan. Young women from the ethnic-African Masalit tribe say they were sexually assaulted at gunpoint by RSF paramilitary and Arab militia forces during attacks on the city of El Geneina in West Darfur. ‘For three days, they were raping me,’ one teenager said.

A 24-year-old raped by armed men in her home just feet from her mother. A 19-year-old abducted and raped by four men over three days. A 28-year-old women’s rights activist, seized by men on the doorstep of her home and then raped while being held for hours in an abandoned house.

They are among 11 young Masalit women interviewed by Reuters who said they were sexually assaulted amid the war in Sudan by members of the Rapid Support Forces (RSF), an Arab-dominated paramilitary group, and allied Arab militiamen. The assaults, they said, took place during weeks of attacks earlier this year in El Geneina, capital of Sudan’s West Darfur region.

Nine of the women described being raped by multiple men. All 11 said they were assaulted at gunpoint. Another three people said they witnessed women being raped.

Reuters earlier detailed the carnage that erupted in El Geneina from late April to mid-June, when the RSF and its allies targeted the Masalit, a darker-skinned ethnicAfrican tribe that comprised a majority of the city before they were largely driven out. Survivors described civilians slaughtered at home, in the streets and in a river valley – picked off by snipers, mowed down with automatic weapons, hacked with swords, burned alive in their houses. In early November, the RSF and Arab militia fighters waged another wave of ethnically targeted attacks in the city, Reuters recently reported.

Among the survivors of the earlier attacks: a 15-yearold girl who described seeing her parents killed and enduring an hours-long ordeal in which five RSF fighters raped her and a friend – then shot the friend dead.

This report details the accounts of other Masalit women who say they were raped. Taken together with reports of rape cited by international organizations, their allegations point to the specific targeting of Masalit women for sexual assault by the RSF and allied Arab forces in El Geneina.

All 11 women interviewed for this story said the men who attacked them wore either RSF military uniforms, or robes and turbans commonly worn by Arab militiamen.

The women – all in their teens or twenties – were interviewed in the Chadian town of Adre, near the Sudan border, in July and August. All spoke on condition of anonymity, citing the stigma attached to rape or fear of reprisals.

Reuters was unable to independently corroborate all the details of their accounts. But in many instances, relatives and friends confirmed elements of their stories.

Common patterns emerged from their descriptions. Nearly all said they were raped by multiple men.

Eight of the women said their ethnicity was specifically invoked by their assailants. The men mentioned their Masalit identity, they said, or used ethnic slurs for the Masalit and other darker-skinned non-Arabs.

Some believed they were singled out because of their work advocating for the rights of Darfur people. Three told Reuters they were human rights activists. A fourth said she is married to an advocate for displaced people.

Survivors of the renewed attacks on the Masalit in El Geneina in early November also recounted incidents of sexual violence. Three said they witnessed sexual attacks by RSF or Arab militia forces.

Another woman, Hanan Idriss, 22, said that she and her sister narrowly escaped being raped on Nov. 2. They made up stories: Idriss said she was menstruating, while her sister told the militiamen she was HIV-positive.

A 24-year-old mother of a toddler said she became pregnant after two gunmen assaulted her in El Geneina earlier this year. She said she was attacked after she returned to her burned home to salvage some belongings. REUTERS/Zohra Bensemra

“They wanted to rape us,” Idriss said, but the stories put them off. Instead, the attackers beat them and looted their house before leaving, Idriss said.

Emir Massar Aseel, an Arab tribal leader in El Geneina, dismissed the rape allegations as “empty lies.” Aseel is a leader of the Rizeigat – one of the largest Arab tribes in West Darfur and the group from which many RSF leaders hail. Arab tribal traditions prohibit sexual assault and bar Arabs from marrying Masalit, Aseel said in a phone interview, and thus his people couldn’t have committed mass rape.

“If I can’t bring myself to marry” a Masalit woman, Aseel said, “why would I go and take her by force?”

Aseel said the Masalit started the conflict, forcing Arabs to respond.

The RSF didn’t respond to detailed questions for this report. The group has said the violence against civilians in Darfur arose from tribal disputes and blamed the Sudanese army for fuelling the fighting. Of the broader Sudan conflict that erupted in April, the RSF has said it opposes any abuses against civilians.

The sexual-assault reports come amid the war that broke out in April between the Sudanese army and the RSF in the capital of Khartoum. The fighting has killed more than 10,000 people and displaced more than 6 million, the United Nations estimates. It has also set off a surge of violence in Darfur, the western Sudan region where the RSF has its power base. The area has been plagued by decades of conflict, driven often by competition for land, water and other scarce resources.

Human Rights Watch has reported that several dozen women were raped during the El Geneina violence earlier this year and appear to have been targeted because of their Masalit ethnicity. The U.N. in November said that across Sudan it has received credible reports of conflictlinked sexual violence involving at least 105 victims. The International Criminal Court (ICC) in The Hague said in July it is investigating the hostilities in Darfur, including reports of killings, rapes and crimes against children.

The accounts of rape by the women Reuters spoke to could constitute war crimes under the Rome Statute that established the ICC, which prohibits sexual violence in conflict, said Noelle Quenivet, professor of international law at the Universtiy of the West of England in the UK. The sexual violence, as reported by Reuters and relief organizations, “looks like it is widespread,” Quenivet said. Under the Rome Statute, she said, widespread or systematic sexual violence could amount to crimes against humanity.

“I didn’t want this baby”

A 24-year-old single mother of a toddler was living at her parents’ home in Al Tadhamon, a mostly Masalit district of El Geneina. On June 8, some six weeks after Arab forces began attacking the Masalit community, RSF fighters and Arab militiamen stormed the neighborhood.

A contingent swept into their home and set it ablaze. She, her child and her mother managed to escape. But not her 60-year-old father: As he ran for safety, she said she later learned from her uncles, the gunmen shot him dead.

Three weeks later, on June 27, the 24-year-old and her mother decided to venture back to their torched house to salvage belongings. On the way they encountered a group of Arab militiamen, faces covered, and two followed them home, she said.

The two armed men – both wearing the traditional clothing and turbans worn by Arabs – interrogated the woman and her mother: Were they hiding Masalit fighters and weapons? The men then ordered them to sit on the floor, she said. The fighters said they were going to kill them: Recite the shahada, they said, referring to the Islamic declaration of faith, which is also recited when death seems imminent.

Instead, the men grabbed the young woman by the arm and pushed her into a room, threatening her at gunpoint when she resisted.

The room had blackened walls and smelled like burnt wood, she said. The militiamen pulled up her dress. Standing at the open door, her mother screamed for her to resist. The militiamen turned their guns on the mother and threatened to shoot her.

The two men then proceeded to take turns raping the young woman. The assault continued until a third man entered the house and put a stop to it, ordering everyone out of the house. The two militiamen chased the young woman and her mother out, beating and whipping them.

The woman was one of three Masalit who described being assaulted upon returning to their damaged homes after attacks by Arab forces. She spoke in an interview outside her tent at the camp in Adre, her barefoot daughter playing nearby. She said she described the assault to a cousin shortly after the incident. Reuters also interviewed the cousin in Adre. She gave a matching account of the story, and said she herself was raped.

Days after the assault, the 24-year-old fled to Chad with her daughter. In July, she said she began suffering headaches, dizziness and nausea. She confided in her cousin that she feared she was pregnant.

After a test confirmed the pregnancy, she went to a camp medical center and got medication that she used to terminate the pregnancy. A woman who works with rape survivors at the camp confirmed seeing the 24-year-old receive the medication.

“I cried for three days” after learning of the pregnancy, the woman said. “I couldn’t eat or sleep. I didn’t want this baby.”

“I was let go on the fourth day”

Her first brush with the RSF and Arab militias, a 19year-old woman told Reuters, came in an earlier ethnic attack.

In 2016, RSF and militia fighters shot and wounded her father, an El Geneina merchant, in a camp for displaced people in the east of the city. She said she then witnessed the fighters place him in a bread oven and burn him to death.

On June 15 of this year, the young woman, her five younger siblings and their mother were among thousands of Masalit residents of El Geneina who tried to flee en masse to a Sudanese army base in the city’s north amid