Women accuse RSF fighters of raping them

Sudan is at its peak.

After 17 months of brutal civil war that devastated the country, the army launched an attack on the capital Khartoum, targeting areas held by its rivals, the paramilitary Rapid Support Forces.

The RSF captured most of Khartoum early in the conflict, while the army controlled the neighboring town of Omdurman, just across the Nile River.

Soldiers have attacked two bridges so far that have been closed and contested. Reports say it has found a bridge on the eastern side for the first time since the conflict began.

But there are still places where people can, and do, fall between the two sides.

Once, I met a group of women who had walked four hours to a market in a military-held area on the outskirts of Omdurman, where food is cheap.

The women were from a region in Sudan called Dar es Salaam, which is controlled by the RSF.

Their husbands no longer left the house, they told me, because RSF soldiers beat them, took whatever money they earned, or imprisoned them and demanded payment for their release.

“We endure this hardship because we want to feed our children. We are hungry, we need food,” said another.

Warning: Some details in the story may be disturbing.

And women, I asked them, were they safer than men? What about rape?

A chorus of voices descended.

Then one exploded.

“Where is the world? Why aren’t you helping us?” she said with tears in her eyes.

“There are too many women who have suffered here but they don’t talk about it. What difference would it make?”

“Some girls, the RSF makes them sleep on the streets at night,” he continued. “If they come back late in this market, RSF keeps them for five or six days.”

While his mother was talking, she was holding her head in her hand and crying. The other women who were around him also started to cry.

“You in your world, if your child comes out, can you leave it?” he asked forcefully. “Weren’t you going to look for him? But tell us, what can we do? Nothing is in our hands, nobody cares about us. Where is the world? Why don’t you help us!”

The crossing was a window into a world of hopelessness and despair.

The travelers explained that they had experienced lawlessness, looting and brutality in the war that the UN says has forced more than 10.5 million people to leave their homes.

But sexual violence has become the hallmark of a long-running conflict, which began as a power struggle between the army and the RSF but has since drawn in local armed groups and fighters from neighboring countries.

The High Commissioner of the Organization for Human Rights, Volker Turk, said that rape is used as a “weapon of war”.

The latest UN fact-finding mission he documented several cases of rape and threats of rape from members of the army, but found that most of the sexual violence was perpetrated by the RSF and allied militants, and was a violation of international law.

Another woman the BBC spoke to accused RSF of raping her.

We met him at the market at the crossing, aptly named Souk al-Har – the Heat Market.

Since the start of the war, the market has expanded in the desert country on the desert road out of Omdurman, attracting the poorest at low prices.

Miriam, not her real name, had fled her Sudanese home in Dar es Salaam to seek refuge with her brother.

He now works in a tea shop. But at the beginning of the war, he said, two armed men entered his home and tried to rape his daughters – one 17 years old and the other 10.

“I told the girls to stay behind me and I said to RSF: ‘If you want to rape anyone, it should be me,'” she said.

“They beat me and told me to undress. Before I undressed, I told my girls to leave. They took other children and jumped over the fence. Then one of the men lay on top of me.

RSF has told international investigators that it has taken all necessary measures to prevent sexual violence and other forms of violence including human rights violations.

But accounts of sexual abuse are many and varied, and the damage has lasting effects.

Sitting on a low stool in the shade of a row of trees, Fatima, not her real name, told me that she had come to Omdurman to deliver the twins, and planned to stay.

One of his neighbors, he said, a 15-year-old girl, also became pregnant, after she and her 17-year-old sister were raped by four RSF soldiers.

People were woken up by crying and went out to see what was happening, he said, but the armed men told them that they would be shot if they did not return to their homes.

The next morning, they found two girls with signs of trauma on their bodies, and their older brother locked himself in one of the rooms.

“During the war, since the RSF arrived, we immediately started hearing about rape, until we saw it in front of our neighbors,” said Fatima. “At first we were skeptical [about the reports] but we know that it was RSF who raped the girls.”

Some women are coming together to start a journey back home to RSF-controlled areas – too poor, they say, to start a new life like Miriam did by leaving Dar es Salaam.

As long as this war continues, they have no choice but to return to their horrible state.