Rights group says Sudan’s civil war is seeing the Rapid Support Forces rape women and girls on a shocking scale and scope.

Johannesburg — The Sudanese Rapid Support Forces on one side civil war This tore apart the African nation for over a year and created one of the African nations The worst humanitarian crises on the planetThey are accused of raping dozens of women and girls and using some of them as sex slaves in a new crime Human Rights Watch report. The New York-based human rights organization says that paramilitary forces’ use of sexual violence in the country’s South Kordofan state since September 2023 constitutes war crimes and potential crimes against humanity.

Human Rights Watch presents the findings of an investigation based on the cases of nearly 80 women and girls in a report published on Monday, detailing horrific new allegations of abuse in Sudan, where both sides in the civil war were already embroiled. Those accused of war crimes.

Researchers collected evidence on 79 women and girls between the ages of 7 and 50 who, Human Rights Watch says, had been raped, with most of the incidents occurring at a Rapid Support Forces military base in Dibibat, near the town of Habila in South Kordofan.

Survivors and witnesses told the group that the men who carried out the attacks were all uniformed Rapid Support Forces or members of allied militias.

“Survivors described being gang-raped in front of their families for long periods of time, including while being held as sex slaves,” said Belkis Wille, crisis and conflict director at Human Rights Watch, who conducted numerous interviews with survivors.

Izz al-Din al-Safi, a senior advisor to the RSF, denied the accusations in a Human Rights Watch report to CBS News, claiming that the “people wearing RSF uniforms” behind the alleged attacks were impersonators, not the actual RSF. .

Al-Safi said, “The Rapid Support Forces take this matter seriously and will investigate it. We are very sensitive to sexual violence against women and its perpetrators will be held accountable,” denying that the group has any significant presence in South Kordofan, although he acknowledged the presence of its forces. In the Al-Dabaibat area, near the border with North Kordofan State.

“This is completely misleading information,” he said of the Human Rights Watch report.

Human Rights Watch said it submitted a summary of the results of its investigation to the Commander-in-Chief of the Rapid Support Forces, Lieutenant General Mohamed Hamdan Dagalo, but did not receive a response.

Willey has spent years documenting sexual violence in conflicts around the world, including by ISIS militants against Yazidi women in Iraq, but she told CBS News: “What really struck me after meeting these women and girls was the scope and scale” of sexual violence. Crimes in Sudan

CBS News watched a video of the full interview conducted by Human Rights Watch with an 18-year-old woman identified by the group as Hania. She said she was pregnant in February when RSF fighters stormed her home in Habila and arrested her, her 17-year-old neighbor, and 16 other girls she knew from her neighborhood. She added that they were transported in 10 vehicles to the military base in Al-Dabaibat.

When they arrived, Haniyeh said she recognized more than 30 other girls from her town already there, with about 100 fighters holding them.

She said that when she tried to resist being raped, “one of the armed men started hitting me with a metal whip.” She said that over the next three months, “the fighters would come in groups of three every morning to take some girls to rape them, and then in the evening another group of three girls would come and take another group of girls to rape them.”

Haniyeh said that RSF men held her and the other women and girls in an animal pen made of wire and tree branches, where they were chained in groups of ten.

“What was clear from these cases is that in areas controlled by the RSF, there is absolutely no place that is safe — not if you run away, or even in your own home,” Willie told CBS News. “Women and girls are at risk of rape regardless.” About the place. .

Another woman, Hasina, 35, told Human Rights Watch that six uniformed RSF men shot her husband dead and stole all their livestock and money. She said the cows were an investment for her family, so with her money stolen, she felt she had no way to escape as many of her neighbors did, and she and her six young children, some of whom were just babies, had no choice but to flee. Stay in their house.

She said that the Rapid Support Forces fighters returned three days later, and “the three men raped me and left.”

Later that evening, “three others came and raped me again and told me to stay in my house.”

She said she was gang-raped almost every day for the next month before she escaped.

Human Rights Watch met with Hasina at Camp Al-Hilu, a temporary facility with few or no resources for internally displaced civilians in South Kordofan.

“She is barely able to get up and go on with life because of what she went through,” she said. “Her children are now in the camp with little food and they looked severely malnourished when I saw them. … She is struggling to do her job as a mother.” Willie added that women living in tents next to Hasina help take care of her children.

Willie said there is no psychological support for traumatized women in the camp or in most parts of the country.

“When I brought up the issue of justice and accountability to these women, they all looked at me frankly, because justice is a meaningless concept to them,” she said. “The scale of what is happening here means that it has become normal behavior by the RSF. None of these women have ever heard of a soldier or fighter ever being held accountable.”

Hania and her pregnant friend also managed to escape from their kidnappers. Human Rights Watch interviewed them in the Nuba Mountains. They said 49 girls were still being held at the base, and they heard of girls being held at two other RSF bases as well.

“We have no way to know more about these women, as access is very difficult and dangerous, and in these areas there is no electricity and no mobile phone networks, so no information comes out. There is absolute silence on these violations.” Willie said. “We will likely never know what happened to these women and girls.”

The humanitarian crisis caused by Sudan’s civil war was the largest on record for the second year in a row in 2024, with more than 30 million people in need of humanitarian aid, the International Rescue Committee says. It is estimated that nearly half of Sudan’s population of 50 million people suffer from extreme hunger.

Last week, after nearly 20 months of war, the fighting appeared to intensify, with both sides accusing the other of committing new atrocities. International efforts to broker a peace deal have faltered and there is no end in sight to the fighting.