Sudanese Women Recount Abduction, Rape and Ransom by RSF Fighters Amid Civil War

A 38-year-old woman said RSF fighters ambushed her and her brother on the road while she fled el-Fasher in September after her husband, a soldier, had been killed. The fighters separated women and children from men, forced everyone to strip, and when they tried to kill her brother she offered herself in his place.

She said she was bound, beaten and driven with four other women and teenage girls to an abandoned village in the desert.

There the women lay naked and bound in a shelter for two days, urinating on themselves while different men raped them multiple times. On the second day the captors demanded about $1,500 for her release. The woman transferred about $200 from her bank account and called her cousin on Facebook while the fighters pressed a metal object on her fingernails.

They accepted about $700 total and freed her in September. She is now in Khartoum and took photos of her battered face and body to serve as evidence. A 30-year-old woman said RSF fighters abducted her from a market in Khartoum in 2024.

She was held in a hut with other women for two weeks, forced to cook, clean, tend cattle and sometimes bathe the fighters. She and the others were raped every night. After a relative in the United States transferred about $1,250, one fighter smuggled her out of the compound at night.

A third woman said she was abducted outside Dilling in South Kordofan, held for nine days in a compound, raped once and beaten. Her family paid for her release in September. The United Nations calls sexual violence one of the “most defining features” of Sudan’s war and says assaults have soared since fighting began.

N. and rights groups say the majority of sexual violence has been committed by the RSF, particularly in Khartoum, Darfur and Gezira state, and that South Kordofan has become a hot spot as the war expands there. The Armed Conflict Location and Event Data Project recorded that ransom incidents, including a small number involving sexual assault, jumped nearly 195 percent from the start of the war until May, with the majority of perpetrators identified as RSF fighters.

The Trump administration stopped funding for the United Nations Population Fund last year, cutting more than $370 million in grants for more than 25 countries including Sudan. S. for other humanitarian needs.

The 38-year-old woman said she struggles with internal bleeding and fluid buildup but cannot afford surgery. She mentors women and girls in a displacement camp and wants to repay those who helped her, including some later killed in the war.