Women fleeing Sudan’s el-Fasher city have reported killings, systematic rape, and missing children after its capture by the paramilitary Rapid Support Forces, the U.N. women’s agency said Tuesday.
Al-Fashir's fall on Oct. 26 has cemented the RSF's control of the Darfur region in its 2 1/2-year war with the Sudanese army. People fleeing the city have described civilians being shot in the streets and attacked in drone strikes.
Women escaping from el-Fasher say they have witnessed killings, rape and the disappearance of their children – "horrors that no one should ever endure," the U.N. Women Regional Director for East and Southern Africa, Anna Mutavati, told reporters in Geneva via video link from Nairobi.
Sexual violence was widespread, she said.
"There is mounting evidence that rape is being deliberately and systematically used as a weapon of war," she added.
"Women's bodies become a crime scene in Sudan. There are no safe spaces that are left, nowhere for women to gather safely, to seek protection or even access even the most basic psychosocial care," she said.
Around 11 million women and girls are facing acute food insecurity in famine-struck Darfur and U.N. Women warned they even face sexual violence while searching for food.
Field reports from Darfur describe women foraging for wild leaves and berries to boil into soup.
"While doing this, they face additional risks of violence, including abduction and sexual and gender based violence," Mutavati said.
Famine was declared by a global food monitor in el-Fasher and Kadugli, another besieged city in Sudan's south, this month.
The U.N. Human Rights Chief said Friday that he feared summary executions, rape and ethnically motivated violence are continuing in the town.
About 82,000 people have fled el-Fasher and surrounding areas since Oct. 26, according to the U.N., while as many as 200,000 people may still be trapped inside the city, according to estimates of its population toward the end of the 18-month siege.
