Sudanese women describe being gang-raped in ethnically...

attacks by the RSF and Arab militias. They failed to make it after coming under heavy gunfire.

The teenager said she watched her mother fall dead in the street, hit by sniper fire. In the chaos, the teen became separated from her siblings.

The next morning, June 16, she said she was fleeing the city along the main road to Chad when armed men seized her and three other young women. The men covered her face with a head scarf, she said, and carried her and the other women to a landcruiser. They were driven to a crude hut made of tree branches, with mattresses spread on the ground.

She was taken to a room on her own. There, four armed men in RSF uniforms took turns raping her. The next day, two of the men raped her again. The third day, she was raped once more by one of the men.

“For three days, they were raping me,” she said in an interview in Adre in a tent made of sticks, cloth and plastic sheeting.

When she tried to resist, she said, the men beat and flogged her. She pushed up the sleeve of her black abaya, the loose-fitting long robe worn by some Muslim women, to show a deep dark scar from the beating on her arm.

“I was let go on the fourth day,” she said, breaking into tears.

The men tossed her out into the street, she said. An older woman persuaded a passing driver to take the teen to Adre.

The 19-year-old is among three women interviewed by Reuters who said they were assaulted while trying to escape El Geneina. Her 17-year-old sister, sitting beside her in the tent in a refugee camp, corroborated elements of her account from before and after the rape, including details of the deaths of their parents.

All six siblings managed to reach Adre. With both parents dead, the 19-year-old said she, as the eldest, is raising the other five. The youngest is 7.

They escaped with almost nothing. The 19-year-old said the only clothing she has left is the black robe she was wearing when she was raped.