Zürcher Nachrichten - 'No one could stop it': Sudanese describe mass rapes while fleeing El-Fasher

Following an 18-month siege marked by starvation and bombardment, El-Fasher -- the last army stronghold in the western Darfur region -- fell on October 26 to the paramilitary Rapid Support Forces (RSF), which have been at war with the military since April 2023.

Reports have since emerged of mass killings, sexual violence, attacks on aid workers, looting and abductions in a city where communications have largely been cut off.

"The rapes were gang rapes. Mass rape in public, rape in front of everyone and no one could stop it," Amira said from a makeshift shelter in Tawila, some 70 kilometres (43 miles) west of El-Fasher.

The mother of four spoke during a webinar organised by campaign group Avaaz with several survivors of the recent violence.

Avaaz gave the survivors who participated in the webinar pseudonyms for their safety.

Doctors Without Borders (MSF) said more than 300 survivors of sexual violence had sought care from its teams in Tawila after a previous RSF assault on the nearby Zamzam camp, which displaced more than 380,000 people last spring.

"The RSF have carried out widespread sexual violence across towns and villages in Sudan to humiliate, assert control and to forcefully displace families and communities from their homes," Amnesty International warned in April.

The rights group has documented conflict-related sexual violence by both the army and RSF -- particularly in the capital Khartoum and Darfur -- and denounced "over two decades of impunity for such crimes, particularly by the RSF".

- Nighttime assaults -

In Korma, a village about 40 kilometres northwest of El-Fasher, Amira said she was detained for two days because she could not pay RSF fighters for safe passage.

Those unable to pay, she said, were denied food, water and the ability to leave, and mass assaults took place at night.

"You'd be asleep and they'd come and rape you," she said.

"I saw with my own eyes people who couldn't afford to pay and the fighters took their daughters instead.

"They said, 'Since you can't pay, we'll take the girls.' If you had daughters of a young age, they would take them immediately."

Sudan's state minister for social welfare, Sulimah Ishaq, told AFP that 300 women were killed on the day El-Fasher fell, "some after being sexually assaulted".

The General Coordination for Displaced People and Refugees in Darfur, an independent humanitarian group, had documented 150 cases of sexual violence since the fall of El-Fasher until November 1.

"Some incidents occurred in El-Fasher and others during the journey to Tawila," Adam Rojal, the organisation's spokesman, told AFP.

- Raped at gunpoint -

Last week, the UN confirmed alarming reports that at least 25 women were gang-raped when RSF forces entered a shelter for displaced people near El-Fasher University in the city's west.

"Witnesses confirmed that RSF personnel selected women and girls and raped them at gunpoint," Seif Magango, spokesperson for the UN human rights office, said in Geneva.

Mohamed, another survivor who joined the Avaaz webinar from Tawila, described how women and girls of all ages were searched and humiliated in Garni, a town between El-Fasher and Tawila.

"If they found nothing on you, they beat you. They searched the girls, even tearing apart their (sanitary) pads," he said.

In Garni, before reaching Korma, Amira said that RSF leaders would "greet people", but as soon as they left, the fighters who stayed behind began torturing them.

"They start categorising you: 'You were married to a soldier.' 'You were affiliated with the army,'" she said.

She also described seeing men slaughtered with knives by RSF fighters. "My 12-year-old son saw it himself, and he is now in a bad psychological state," she said.

"We wake up shivering from fear, images of slaughter haunt us."

More than 65,000 people have fled El-Fasher since its fall, including more than 5,000 who are now sheltering in Tawila, which was already hosting more than 650,000 displaced people, according to the UN.

In Tawila, hundreds of people have huddled together in makeshift tents in a vast desert expanse, scrounging together what they can to prepare food for their families, AFP video shows.

Rojal of the General Coordination for Displaced People and Refugees in Darfur warned that the situation "needs immediate intervention".

"People need food, water, medicine, shelter and psychological support," he said.

P.Gashi--NZN