Between January 2024 and November 2025, 3,396 victims of sexual violence in Sudan sought help from Doctors Without Borders (MSF). This is evident from a report published on Tuesday by the aid organization, which maps sexual violence in the Sudanese regions of North and South Darfur.
“No place is safe for women in Darfur,” said Myriam Laaroussi, MSF emergency coordinator in Sudan, during a press conference Tuesday morning. “We don’t have data for the whole of Sudan because we face a lack of physical access. Most of the health infrastructure has been destroyed. Food, water, electricity: there is no trace of anything left.”
Laaroussi emphasizes that the figures represent “only a fraction” of the actual scale of the violence. “It is just the tip of the iceberg. Many victims cannot reach care safely. In addition, there is a major taboo on sexual violence.” The violence often occurs along ethnic lines and is used as a form of collective punishment. Particularly against the marginalized Masalit, Fur and Zaghawa groups.
Sexual violence often takes place in regions where there is fighting, but it does not stop there. In South Darfur, far from the front lines, 522 survivors were attacked while gathering wood or looking for water and food. Another 803 people were attacked on their way to or on farmland. Women describe to MSF how they feel trapped in their own home, knowing that rape is an almost unavoidable risk once they go outside.
Of all the people reporting to MSF facilities in Darfur, 97 percent were women or girls. A significant portion of the victims were children. In South Darfur, for example, one in five victims was under the age of 18, including 41 children under the age of five. In 68 percent of cases in South Darfur, survivors identified their attackers as armed, non-civilian men. Often there were several men at the same time. Closer to the front lines, in North Darfur, the figure was 95 percent. They regularly pointed to the paramilitary Rapid Support Forces (RSF) as the perpetrator.
In two weeks, on April 15, the armies of the two main warlords will have been fighting each other for power and resources in the country for three years. The RSF of General Mohamed Hamdan Dagalo (better known as Hemedti) faces the government army (SAF) of Abdel Fattah al-Burhan.
Sudan, with natural resources such as gold in abundance, is also a geopolitical plaything. The country is a crossroads between Southwest Asia, North Africa and Sub-Saharan Africa. Due to its location on the Red Sea, it is also a gateway to the Mediterranean Sea and Europe.
Estimates of the number of deaths since the war began are in the hundreds of thousands. Fourteen million people have fled, there is famine and ethnic cleansing is taking place. Some human rights organizations speak of a genocide.
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Testimonials
The MSF report extensively documents the fall of the city of Al Fasher on October 26, 2025. After the RSF took the city after a siege of five hundred days, revenge was taken on the civilian population. The violence mainly targeted non-Arab communities.
MSF teams provided assistance to more than 140 victims of sexual violence who fled the city in November. “Women suspected of having ties to the government army were explicitly singled out,” the report says. “The fact that they had not fled Al Fasher was in itself used to justify acts of collective punishment through sexual violence.” Almost all of these women say that they were attacked by armed men.
Testimonies describe how women were taken at night on the pretext that they would be given items or had to be registered. They describe how attacks took place in public and in front of family members, and how non-Arab communities were targeted as targets, including racist statements.
MSF also documented widespread sexual violence during the RSF attack on the Zamzam refugee camp in April 2025, home to almost half a million displaced people at the time. Specific ethnic groups were also attacked there. Survivors who fled the camp were attacked again along the way.
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