The baby bouncing on Nesma’s lap carries his mother’s smile and curious eyes, but no trace of what she endured at the hands of three paramilitary fighters who gang-raped her two years ago in Sudan’s capital.
“I saw their faces. I remember them,” the 26-year-old university graduate told Agence France-Presse (AFP).
Baby Yasser is among thousands of children born to rape survivors during three years of war between Sudan’s army and the paramilitary Rapid Support Forces.
Nesma’s family fled Khartoum at the start of the conflict, but a year later she returned alone to retrieve essential documents, including birth, graduation and death certificates needed to rebuild their lives.
In Khartoum North, RSF fighters stopped her bus near an industrial area, ordered everyone off and separated men from women. She says she lost consciousness as a third fighter assaulted her.
“When I came to, it was morning. I went outside and one of the men from the bus was shot dead on the ground.”
Her account echoes patterns documented by rights groups, which say RSF fighters have been repeatedly accused by U.N. experts of systematic sexual violence.
Such was the trauma that Nesma, whose name has been changed at her request, did not realize she was pregnant until five months later.
She was not sure whether she would keep the baby until the eve of her cesarean section.
“Then I just couldn’t let him go,” she told AFP as Yasser nuzzled into the crook of her neck.
“It’s not my son’s fault, just like it is not mine,” she said.
“I couldn’t handle the thought of him going through pain or ending up in a bad home.”
Rape is being used as a weapon “of war, dominance, destruction and genocide” in Sudan “to destroy the fabric of society and change its makeup,” U.N. Special Rapporteur Reem Alsalem told AFP.
Sudan’s state minister for social affairs, Sulaima Ishaq al-Khalifa, said the vast majority of victims, who she said number in the thousands, do not report their ordeal, with many abortions and adoptions also going undocumented.
In a single town in Darfur, “there are hundreds and hundreds of girls, all raped, none of whom have been to a clinic, most of whom are pregnant,” the U.N.’s top official in Sudan, Denise Brown, told AFP.
The shame many are made to feel in a largely conservative society doubles the injustice of what was done to them, said Alsalem, the U.N. special rapporteur on violence against women and girls.
“Families have abandoned their daughters, husbands have divorced their wives who were victims of rape.”
“We are revictimizing them, and it is not their fault.”
While most families raise the children in secret, other women have been cast out, shunned or even accused of colluding with the RSF.
In a straw shelter in the Darfur refugee town of Tawila, 20-year-old Hayat told AFP her story as she rocked her 4-month-old son to sleep.
She was raped while fleeing the RSF’s capture of Zamzam refugee camp last year near El Fasher. The paramilitaries killed more than 1,000 people in the attack on the camp, which sheltered more than half a million people, and carried out a systematic rape campaign targeting non-Arab ethnic groups, according to the U.N.
RSF fighters posted videos saying raping women from other ethnic groups “honors” their bloodline.
Hayat arrived in Tawila shell-shocked. With her cherub-cheeked son fussing in her arms, she said: “I just want a better future for him. I don’t want him to grow up like us.”
War has been fought on women’s bodies across Darfur for decades. Mass rape was among the crimes against humanity charges leveled at the Janjaweed, government-backed militias that scarred the region with ethnic violence in the 2000s and from which the RSF later emerged.
Halima was first raped as a teenager by herders while working in the fields, then while fleeing to Zamzam in 2022 and again as she escaped the refugee camp.
Now 23, she was spared from carrying a third child of rape after receiving emergency contraceptives from doctors in Tawila.
AFP met several rape survivors in Tawila who became pregnant while fleeing the fall of El Fasher, the capital of North Darfur, to the RSF in October. The paramilitaries killed at least 6,000 people in three days, according to local officials and humanitarian groups.
Rawia, 17, watched as half the group she was fleeing with was killed in the street before, she said, “three of them took everything we had and raped us.” She is now five months pregnant.
Alia, 25, was dragged back to El Fasher with four other girls and held captive for six weeks “until we escaped in the middle of the night.” She later had a miscarriage.
Magda, 22, lost her husband in a rocket attack, then saw her brother shot dead on the road to Tawila.
She has since weighed the life growing inside her after being raped five months ago. “If I lose this baby, it will be another thing to grieve. If he lives, it is fate and I will raise him,” she said.
Not everyone can make that choice.
Some women came to Gloria Endreo, a midwife with Doctors Without Borders, “already bleeding, after trying unsafe abortions.”
She has treated hundreds of survivors in two months in Tawila, many pregnant as a result of rape.
“Some of them could not say it,” she told AFP. “Some who gave birth, in spite of themselves, feel resentment and disconnection. They cannot show their babies love or attention. Then they are forced to raise a child that is a constant reminder of what happened to them.”
In the blistering heat of a Khartoum afternoon, Fayha’s 5-month-old slept soundly, clinging to an AFP journalist’s finger.
“But of course he keeps me up all night,” the 30-year-old mother said, half-laughing as she described how she has “to be both mother and father.”
She was raped by a civilian while his friend, an off-duty army soldier carrying a gun, stood guard.
“I was terrified he would shoot me,” she said, tears flowing at the memory.
Sexual violence and abuse of detained women by the army are underreported for fear of retaliation, the U.N. has warned.
But observers say it is not comparable to the RSF’s systematic strategy.
“The RSF rapes to subjugate society, to displace and dominate; army soldiers rape because they know they will get away with it,” one activist told AFP on condition of anonymity.
Fayha, whose name has been changed, learned she was pregnant at the end of her first trimester and has barely slept since.
“Sometimes I get upset with him. It is time to nurse and I am sick of him. Recently I have started to feel more of a motherly instinct. But motherhood itself is just so hard.”
Fayha, Nesma and countless others have struggled to obtain birth certificates for their children, without which they cannot access medical care, education or social services.
Legally, “this should not be an issue,” with emergency procedures in place, according to Khalifa, a veteran activist turned minister.
But conservative social norms and bureaucratic collapse are failing many.
“What is going to be the legal status of these children?” the U.N.’s Brown asked. “It is a long-term issue. How will they be cared for within families? What will this do to communities?”
The wounds are particularly raw in conservative Al Jazira state, southeast of Khartoum, where many families have left their villages to escape gang rape, forced marriage and sexual slavery attributed to RSF fighters.
Lighter-skinned girls from ethnic groups different from RSF fighters were “explicitly requested and treated as trophies or spoils of war,” according to the women’s rights coalition SIHA.
When the army recaptured central Sudan last year, the government relaxed abortion restrictions in an effort to mitigate the impact of sexual violence.
“There was some leniency regarding abortion, but many did not know, and a permit was still required. Because of stigma, many did not report it,” Alsalem said.
Abu Aqla Kaykal, who led RSF forces in Al Jazira during much of the violence and later switched sides, is now a senior commander aligned with the army in the region.
One volunteer in Al Jazira said she helped 26 women and girls obtain abortions, most after taking dangerous drugs without supervision.
Among those forced to carry pregnancies to term, Khalifa recalled a 16-year-old whose mother stepped in immediately after the baby was born.
“She scooped him up, handed him to us and said, ‘We are not taking this RSF baby home.’ His mother never held him.”
“She just wanted it all erased.” Khalifa’s team placed the baby with a foster mother.
Other families lost both daughters and grandchildren. Many women and girls forcibly married to RSF fighters were taken to Darfur when the fighters retreated.
Those whose families could not pay ransoms remain in captivity.
In Nyala, the capital of South Darfur, “there are dozens of girls and women whose children are now a year or two old, and they are trapped,” Khalifa said.
Others were left behind in Khartoum and Al Jazira after the RSF retreat, already pregnant or with children.
“Some families kept the children to raise them,” Khalifa said, adding that displacement has in some cases allowed families to present the child as a sibling or an adopted war orphan.
“Many did not have the same neighbors around, so she could give birth without anyone knowing.”
The minister said the number of informal adoptions is unknown. Many take place quietly, particularly in eastern Sudan where fostering is culturally common.
Procedures exist, she said, as the government tries to place abandoned children with families.
Still, Alsalem said children are often placed with little follow-up or vetting.
Nesma said she could not imagine giving Yasser up, even in the most difficult moments of early motherhood.
Yasser is now 13 months old, and she thinks only of the next steps: finding stable work with her degree and building a life for her son.
“He deserves a good life,” she said, holding his hands as he tried to take his first steps.
