RAPE and sexual violence remain ‘part of everyday life’ in areas of Sudan even when fighting in the country’s civil war has moved elsewhere, according to a new report by medical charity Médecins Sans Frontières (MSF).
Calling rape a ‘defining feature’ of the conflict, it says sexual assault was overwhelmingly carried out by armed men and is often accompanied by acts of brutality and humiliation.
But MSF says rape persists as an ‘insidious’ part of life for communities in the western region of Darfur that are no longer on the front line.
The report is the most comprehensive account yet on sexual violence in Sudan’s nearly three-year war.
It is based on testimonies from 3,396 victims who sought treatment in MSF-supported facilities across North and South Darfur between January 2024 and November 2025.
The warring parties – Sudan’s army and the paramilitary Rapid Support Forces (RSF) – are both accused of sexual violence. But Darfur is the stronghold of the RSF and the vast majority of perpetrators identified by survivors were their fighters.
Many of the cases in the report took place in the conflict hotspot of North Darfur last year, following the RSF takeovers of the displaced persons camps of Zamzam and Abu Shouk, and of the city of el-Fasher in October, which MSF calls “one of the most shocking iterations, unfolding the most unimaginable brutality”.
The charity says more than 90 per cent of victims it treated were assaulted while travelling from these areas to safety in the town of Tawila.
The attacks often involved multiple rapists and included other forms of extreme violence and intimidation such as beatings or the murder of relatives.
The report reinforces numerous accounts of an ethnic dimension to the attacks, saying non-Arab communities such as the Zaghawa, Massalit and Fur were “systematically targeted” in these atrocities.
The RSF leadership has admitted ‘individual violations’ were committed during the takeover of el-Fasher but says these are being investigated and the scale of atrocities was exaggerated.
It notes that sexual violence does not subside after front lines shift, sustained by a heavily militarised environment with entrenched gender inequalities that has fostered a sense of impunity among perpetrators.
According to the report, more than 1,300 survivors, 56 per cent of those who sought help at MSF clinics in the state, were raped while carrying out activities such as collecting firewood or water, working in fields or travelling to farms.
—BBC
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