NAIROBI — Thousands of women and girls in Sudan have sought treatment after surviving sexual violence in the country’s civil war, Doctors Without Borders has found, in what it called “a pattern of deliberate tactics designed to humiliate and terrorize.”
The testimony of survivors collected across medical sites in Sudan’s North and South Darfur regions indicates “pervasive conflict-related sexual violence” targeting civilians, particularly by the Rapid Support Forces, the Geneva-based organization reported this week. The paramilitary fighters, who control the area, have been at war with the Sudanese Armed Forces since 2023.
Patients detailed harrowing, sometimes deadly, attacks, including gang rapes by armed assailants, according to the organization, also known as MSF, its initials in French. “Survivors frequently and clearly identified the perpetrators as RSF fighters.”
“What we have seen is not easy,” a 26-year-old woman from Tawila told MSF. “We need to forget what we have seen. For this reason we need psychosocial support. Also we need sexual violence care. And support for human rights.”
MSF documented more than 3,396 cases of sexual violence at facilities it supported in Darfur in 2024 and 2025, but that’s a portion of the full picture. “This number is not a representation of the total population,” Gloria Endreo, an MSF midwife in North Darfur, told The Washington Post. “These are just the few of those who managed to reach our facility despite the limitations and the constraints that they face.”
The report builds on previous allegations by local and international rights and relief groups of sexual violence in the Sudanese conflict.
The war, described by the World Health Organization this year as the world’s worst humanitarian crisis, has left more than 150,000 people dead and more than 12 million displaced. The U.S. and Israeli war on Iran has compounded the hardship by disrupting the global aid system. The United States, the United Arab Emirates, Egypt and Saudi Arabia have attempted to broker peace in Sudan. All are now parties in the war on Iran.
Out of survivors who spoke to MSF, 97 percent were women or girls. Most reported being assaulted by armed individuals. In South Darfur, 20 percent were under 18; 41 individuals were under 5.
RSF fighters attacked camps for internally displaced people in North Darfur and then sexually assaulted those who fled, MSF reported. Ninety percent of those who escaped the El Fashir, Zamzam and Abu Shouk camps for the relative safety of Tawila reported being raped. Tawila, where Endreo works, has swollen with the arrival of more than 500,000 displaced people.
Some women Endreo encountered at her facility came “not because they wanted care for being raped” but because they were now pregnant as a result. The youngest rape survivor she encountered was 13, she said, “but stories from other women also testified that there were girls who were way younger.”
The report focuses on attacks by the RSF as they fought the Sudanese Armed Forces to gain territory in Western Sudan in 2024 and 2025. The conflict has effectively split the country in two.
When El Fashir, the capital of Darfur and a Sudanese Armed Forces stronghold, fell to the RSF in October, the paramilitaries massacred 6,000 people, the U.N. Office of the High Commissioner for Human Rights said. Survivors and witnesses recounted executions, beatings and rape. MSF said it treated 732 survivors of sexual violence at the Tawila facility in one month.
U.N. investigators in February said the RSF’s actions bore “hallmarks of a genocide.”
The RSF, which is dominated by Arab tribes from Darfur, grew out of the Janjaweed, militias funded by President Omar Hassan al-Bashir in 2003 to crush an uprising by non-Arabs groups in Western Darfur. The non-Arab groups fought to end what they said was decades of political and economic discrimination.
The Janjaweed became the Rapid Support Forces in 2013 and were incorporated into the Sudanese Armed Forces in 2017. Bashir, indicted by the International Criminal Court on charges of war crimes, crimes against humanity and genocide, was ousted by the military in 2019, and the RSF eventually split from the government. Violent clashes between the RSF and the Sudanese Armed Forces in 2023 spread from Khartoum, the capital, to Darfur and other regions.
The United Arab Emirates, the largest importer of Sudanese gold, is accused of supplyingthe RSF with weapons. RSF leader Gen. Mohamed Hamdan Dagalo, former chief of the Janjaweed, has been accusedof trading millions of dollars in Sudanese gold for arms and military support.
The accounts gathered by MSF show the terror experienced by women in Sudan daily. A 20-year-old woman from South Darfur said that RSF soldiers rape women every time they leave the IDP camp. She said that she has been raped twice, along with her sister, who is now pregnant.
“I feel a deep pain,” she said. “This is happening to girls, every day — every day, in our area.”
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