fought

In a new report, Doctors Without Borders says sexual violence is the ‘defining feature’ of the conflict in Sudan.

Hanaan was 18 years old when she was raped by members of the Rapid Support Forces (RSF), a paramilitary group accused of committing widespread “war crimes” during nearly three years of fighting against Sudan’s army.

She was walking alongside a female friend to her makeshift home in an encampment for displaced people in South Darfur, when four men on motorbikes stopped them and asked where they were going.

“Two took each girl, and they raped us,” she told Doctors Without Borders, an international medical NGO known by its French initials MSF.

“I feel uncomfortable in my body, heavy. I don’t feel pain, apart from in my back – because they beat me, they beat me with their guns on my back,” she said.

Hanaan – not her real name – shared her testimony as part of a report released by MSF on Tuesday, which details the widespread use of sexual violence as a weapon in Sudan’s ongoing brutal civil war.

The NGO said 3,396 survivors of sexual violence sought treatment in MSF-supported health facilities across North and South Darfur between January 2024 and November 2025.

The data, presented in the report titled, There is Something I Want to Tell You…, was drawn from MSF programmes in just two of Sudan’s 18 states and reflects only a fraction of the crisis, while the true scale of the phenomenon remains unknown.

Women and girls accounted for 97 percent of survivors treated in MSF programmes. The RSF and allied militias were found to be primarily responsible for the systematic abuse.

Children among the survivors

“Sexual violence is a defining feature of this conflict – not confined to front lines, but pervasive across communities,” Ruth Kauffman, MSF emergency health manager, said in a statement.

“This war is being fought on the backs and bodies of women and girls. Displacement, collapsing community support systems, lack of access to healthcare and deep-rooted gender inequalities are allowing these abuses to continue across Sudan.”

Following the RSF’s capture of el-Fasher, the capital of North Darfur, on October 26, 2025, MSF treated more than 140 survivors fleeing to Tawila. Among them, 94 percent were attacked by armed men, with many reporting assaults along escape routes.

The assaults “deliberately targeted non-Arab communities as a means of humiliation and terror, echoing previous RSF atrocities such as the dismantling of Zamzam camp”, the report said. The RSF took control of famine-hit Zamzam camp in the western Darfur region after two days of heavy shelling and gunfire in April 2025.

Survivors described attacks not only during fighting, but in everyday settings, such as fields, markets and displacement camps.

Children were also among the survivors. In South Darfur, one in five survivors was under 18, including 41 children younger than five, the organisation said.

MSF called on the United Nations, donors and humanitarian actors to urgently scale up health and protection services in Darfur and all of Sudan, and on all parties to the conflict to cease and prevent sexual violence and hold perpetrators accountable.

Owalai, Uganda – Martha Apolot navigates a dusty path through fields of cassava and millet under the searing hot sun. She carries a hoe on one shoulder, the blade carefully balanced, and over the other, her eight-year-old son, Aaron.

Every day, the 21-year-old mother takes Aaron to the fields where she works.

“Aaron is so weak, so I have to carry him from the house and lay him somewhere so I can work,” Martha says quietly, holding Aaron on her lap as she sits on the bare earth inside their tiny, single-room hut in Owalai, a rural hamlet in eastern Uganda.

They return home when it’s time to feed Aaron or when he has soiled himself, not when the tilling is done.

Aaron has an undiagnosed disability. He cannot walk, talk, eat solid foods or hold up his head without support. The back of his head is balding from lying down and prone to sores. He needs constant care, but Martha has no one else to look after him while she works.

Martha was 13 when a man lured her from her schoolyard and raped her. She did not know the man and never saw him again, she says. Her memories of that day are traumatic, and she goes quiet, breathing deeply and looking skyward.

Her pregnancy created an immediate rift within her family.

“My dad did not want me to come home, but my mother pleaded with my father to [let me] stay,” she explains after a long pause.

The seventh of eight children, Martha ran away, spending months at friends’ homes. Eventually, her older brother Paul, with whom she is close, tracked her down and told her their parents had accepted the situation and she could return home.

Aaron’s birth was long and complicated. After 15 hours of labour, doctors at the hospital in the city of Soroti admitted the teenager for an emergency caesarean section

Martha remembers the love she felt when she first saw her baby. “I felt so good, receiving my child. He was so handsome,” she recalls.

But Aaron was placed on oxygen shortly after birth. When he was taken away, she thought he had died. As he spent the first week of his life on oxygen, doctors warned Martha of future complications.