It started as a trickle, but the whispers about rapes have soon became a flood in Sudan after more than days of incessant war.
For 26-year-old Alaa (name changed to protect the identity of the victim), it was one of the most special moments of her life as she gave birth to her child in Sudan’s North Kordofan late this June.
Yet, little did she know that her joy and excitement over motherhood would be too short-lived, raped as she was, just two weeks after the childbirth.
“She was shivering when she came to us, in a state of complete shock,” Sara Abdelrazig, head of implementation at Save the Children, an NGO, in North Kordofan, told Al Arabiya English.
Alaa is one of several hundreds of women subjected to rape and sexual violence in Sudan since the war broke out on 15 April between the Sudanese Armed Forces (SAF) and the paramilitary Rapid Support Forces (RSF).
The conflict erupted as a result of rising tensions between SAF leader General Mohammad Fattah al-Burhan and RSF leader General Mohamed Hamdan Dagalo, known popularly as “Hemedti,” over plans to transition to a civilian rule, following their joint coup in October 2021 that ousted the then civilian Prime Minister Abdalla Hamdok.
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Due to the war, more than four million people have been displaced in Sudan since mid-April this year, according to the United Nation’s International Organization for Migration (IOM).
About 926,000 people have fled Sudan for neighboring countries, with more than three million displaced internally, according to IOM data.
Around 25 million people in Sudan – more than half the country’s population – are in dire need of humanitarian aid, with an estimated 20 million facing an acute hunger crisis.
More than 3,000 people have been killed since the war began, according to the Sudanese Ministry of Health, with at least 435 children killed and 2,025 injured, says UNICEF.
According to Save the Children, children as young as 12 have not been spared from sexual assault.
So far, there have been 60 documented and verified cases of sexual abuse in the capital Khartoum alone, while 43 cases have been reported in South Darfur and 21 in El Geneina in West Darfur, Sudan’s Combating Violence Against Women (CVAW) said.
“These numbers don’t represent the real picture. They tell us only about 2 percent of what is really happening in Sudan,” CVAW’s director Sulaima Sharif said.
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Like many residents of the capital, Khartoum, architect Husna* stayed in her Khartoum North neighbourhood until it became too dangerous. On the day she tried to leave, RSF fighters moved into the neighbourhood.
“I’d only been married for a few months when the war broke out,” she says. Most of her family members had already fled Khartoum, but Husna’s husband was in Omdurman, a sister city to the capital, so she stayed behind, waiting for him.
The RSF fighters were dressed as civilians, she explained, but she guessed they were RSF from how they spoke and behaved.
“They’d caught some South Sudanese girls who lived in another building but the head of the troops kept me separate from them. He kept calling me sister: ‘You’re my sister, you’re an Arab girl, you’re safe’.”
“But then he’d flip and call me a liar, say that I wasn’t from the area, and who was I, really? He warned the other soldiers to stay away from me, that I was one of them.”
The soldiers took Husna and the other women to another building, where Husna’s sister lived. The South Sudanese women were directed into one apartment. The RSF team’s leader ordered Husna to show him where her sister lived.
“I have one request,” he then said. “If you say yes, great; if you don’t, that’s not a problem either.” Then he pointed his assault rifle at Husna. “I want to sleep with you. I asked you and now you’re going to do it. Where’s the bedroom?”
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Husna says she begged him to let her go. “Didn’t you say I was your sister? Would you do that to a sister,” she asked.
Then a soldier came into the apartment and said the South Sudanese girls were all screaming and they didn’t know what to do. “Shut them up and get out,” the leader said. “No one comes here.”
Husna knew then she at least wouldn’t be gang-raped, that only he intended to rape her. “I started to pray. I had my prayer beads with me and I just kept praying.”
Once the RSF soldiers left, Husna ran to the home of a friend who lived nearby.
“I couldn’t stop wailing and crying. I told her what happened and she quickly took me to the bathroom, bathed me with salt water, wrapped my soiled clothes in a plastic bag, gave me Panadol, and then bathed me again.”
Another friend helped get a rape kit, and the Sudanese government’s Unit for Combating Violence against Women (CVAW) helped her get a morning-after pill.
“I keep replaying the whole thing in my head. I can’t stand to be alone. I constantly need someone with me just to feel OK, to feel safe,” Husna says. “My husband has been a rock. I told him everything … it took him a week to be able to reach me by phone. He consoles me, telling me: ‘None of this is your fault, you will come out stronger, we will come out stronger.'”
The earliest whispered rape reports were about “foreign” women. One foreign woman was raped in her apartment in an upscale neighbourhood, people told each other.