Women & Girls Under Siege

This is the focused argument of DAR Talks: sexual violence against women and girls is not a side-effect of the Sudanese war but a method of it. Both the RSF and the SAF have been documented as perpetrators.

DAR Talks does not align with either armed party. Both the SAF and the RSF have been credibly accused of war crimes. Our position is anti-violence-against-women and pro-accountability — applied without favour to either side.

The evidence is substantial. Amnesty International's April 2025 investigation "They raped all of us" documented 36 cases of women and girls — some as young as 15 — raped, gang-raped, or held in sexual slavery by RSF forces across four Sudanese states between April 2023 and October 2024 (Amnesty International, 2025). Human Rights Watch's July 2024 investigation "Khartoum is not Safe for Women!" documented widespread sexual violence with the majority of cases attributed to the RSF but with the SAF and SAF-aligned forces also implicated in rape and crimes against humanity, and reported an uptick in cases attributed to the SAF after it took control of Omdurman in early 2024 (Human Rights Watch, 2024). The UN Independent International Fact-Finding Mission for the Sudan, in its September 2025 report, found that both the SAF and the RSF have committed direct, large-scale attacks against civilians and acts amounting to war crimes — including documented sexual and gender-based violence and a pattern of detention abuses attributed to both parties (UN Fact-Finding Mission for the Sudan, A/HRC/60/22, 2025). Médecins Sans Frontières' March 2026 report "There is something I want to tell you" records at least 3,396 survivors of sexual violence treated in MSF-supported facilities in North and South Darfur between January 2024 and November 2025, with attacks attributed primarily to the RSF and allied militias (Médecins Sans Frontières, 2026). The UN Human Rights Office, the SIHA Network, and ACJPS have documented further patterns. Incident-by-incident records, mapped and confidence-scored across the same period, are held by our collaborator The Sudan Record, whose category catalogue tracks sexual and gender-based violence among its primary categories and attributes responsibility symmetrically to both armed parties where the open-source evidence supports it.

What the converging evidence shows:

• Sexual violence has been used by both parties to the conflict. The documented caseload against the RSF is significantly larger in volume; the SAF caseload is smaller but credibly attested and rising as monitors gain access.
• Survivors include girls under 15 and women over 60.
• Ethnic targeting is a feature in Darfur; ethnically-coded slurs are reported by survivors during the attacks.
• Where humanitarian access is blocked — by either party — in Darfur, parts of Kordofan, and parts of Khartoum, survivors cannot reach medical care, including emergency contraception and HIV post-exposure prophylaxis.
• Pregnancies resulting from rape are documented; stigma against survivors is intense and is itself a barrier to disclosure.

These are not allegations from one source. They are a converging record across human-rights organisations, medical providers, and the survivors themselves.

Survivor accounts will appear in Voices. The documented record of specific incidents lives at The Sudan Record, with a curated handoff on Documented incidents.

Updated 16 May 2026. Last source review 16 May 2026.