Last week, the Sudanese Doctors Network confirmed 32 rape cases in a single week involving girls forcibly taken from El Fasher to the town of Tawila after the Rapid Support Forces (RSF) seized control of the city.
As I was researching violence against women in Sudan’s two-year war, one sentence in a UN document stopped me:
“The RSF, during the siege of El Fasher and surrounding areas, committed myriad crimes against humanity, including murder, torture, enslavement, rape, sexual slavery.”
In 2025?
To verify these reports, I spoke with Sudan’s Minister of State for Social Welfare, Suleima Ishaq. She said the first month of the war, which began in April 2023, saw a surge in abductions.
“We have 34 survivors whose cases have been documented,” she said. “They were held in extremely harsh conditions. Their mental, physical, and emotional health was destroyed. Many were subjected to repeated rape. They were eventually rescued from RSF-controlled zones in Khartoum. This is organized sexual slavery. And it’s being used as a weapon of war.”
“Women’s enslavement isn’t a new phenomenon in Sudan,” said Hala al-Karib, regional director of the Strategic Initiative for Women in the Horn of Africa. “It’s happened before. Now it’s happening on a much wider scale, and it’s moved from the margins of Sudan to its center, to places like Khartoum and Al Jazira.”
According to Hala, the RSF is the primary force behind these acts. I hesitated before asking her something more direct: Are women being sold?
“In the early months of the war,” she said, “we received eyewitness reports from North Darfur about women being trafficked. In May and June, people saw convoys transporting women from Khartoum to Darfur. Then we heard those women were sold across the border.”
No survivor of cross-border trafficking has been located or interviewed. But the testimonies persist.
One location is mentioned repeatedly: Khor Jahannam (Hell’s Creek), allegedly a site used for selling women in Darfur.
Sadiq al-Razigi, head of Sudan’s Journalists Union, said he found strong parallels between these disappearances and practices used by foreign mercenaries aligned with the RSF. “We know Boko Haram fighters have been recruited by the RSF,” he said. “They have a history of kidnapping and enslaving women. This fits a pattern.”
Al-Razigi cited testimony from fieldwork near Lake Chad and Niger, where recruits said they were promised payment, weapons, and a “Sudanese wife” in exchange for joining the RSF.
Every source, every interview, every report points to the same reality: sexual slavery is happening. And no one is being held accountable.
“The international community’s failure to act decisively sends a dangerous message,” international human rights expert Tatiana Kotlyarenko told Al Hurra. “It tells perpetrators they can commit atrocities against women and girls with impunity.”
To understand why accountability really matters, I spoke with Mozn Hassan, a feminist activist and founder of the Nazra Organization.
“We can’t have collective healing for Sudanese society without accountability for the impact this war has had on its most vulnerable people,” she said.
