March 31, 2026, 10:45 p.mMarch 31, 2026, 10:45 p.m
The war in Sudan is about to enter its fourth year – and it is marked by brutal human rights violations. In a report, the aid organization Doctors Without Borders (MSF) documents sexual violence that has become a “defining and pervasive feature of the conflict”.
“In many ways, this war has been fought on the backs and bodies of women and girls,” says the report, which is based on survivor testimony and medical data from MSF hospitals and facilities in Sudan.
Between January 2024 and November 2025 alone, almost 3,400 survivors of sexual violence were treated in MSF-supported facilities in the Sudanese regions of North and South Darfur. However, this is only a fraction of the true extent because many people cannot access the help they need, says MSF. The tense security situation, but also stigma and shame as well as a lack of safe offers of help made it difficult to provide appropriate help.
Internally displaced people gather on the grounds of a church in South Sudan.Image: keystone
“Unimaginable brutality” after the fall of Al-Fashir
Rape and weapons of war and sexual assaults against women and girls, some of them small children, took place not only in Darfur but also in other parts of Sudan in the now three-year conflict between the government army SAF and the militia RSF. But the RSF fighters – emerging from militias that played a role during the genocide in Darfur more than 20 years ago – are accused of systematic violence against Darfur’s non-Arab population groups such as the Massalit, Zaghawa and Fur.
The capture of Al-Fashir, the capital of North Darfur that had been under siege for a year and a half, last October was accompanied by “unimaginable brutality,” the MSF report said. More than 90 percent of survivors of sexual violence were attacked by armed men and many were victims of gang rape. Hundreds of attacks also occurred while fleeing Al-Fashir. Many women and girls experienced severe violence in front of their family members.
Meanwhile, the front lines of the Sudan war have shifted from Darfur to the Kordofan region in the center and south of the country. Non-Arab populations also live here. “We fear that more atrocities lie ahead,” says the MSF report. (sda/dpa/fwa)