Child Torture and Enslaving Women: Crimes Haunting RSF Militias

Sudanhorizon- Azmi Abbdul-Raziq

Nobody could tell her name. But there is no doubt that anyone who saw the scene of that Sudanese toddler being mercilessly thrashed by Rapid Support Forces militias’ soldiers could possibly forget the sight. Could her picture, raising those little hands trying to ward off torrents of whipping hailing from the grim-faced tormenters, ever be forgotten for years?

The little girl appeared in the video for over sixty seconds, dressed in pail-pink trousers, a red blouse covering an emaciated body, and a terrified face that markedly abhorred beating.

One hand was raised in supplication for the tormenters to end the beating while the screeching child aimlessly used another hand to search the ground beneath their feet, using her bare fingers in search of a chip, supposedly planted there but that existed only in the minds of the abusers. They imagined that a chip was planted there to guide military air strikes against their positions.

During all this time, the child was wailing in a heartbreaking voice, “Okay uncle, I will get it, please enough (beating) please”, but using their heavy boots and think whips, they decided not to listen to her pleas, and they continued kicking her back and viciously attacking her belly. Reports which we could not verify claimed that the child died under torture. What one is sure about is that the glitter of her spirit, her fresh youth blood, would continue haunting that ugly place occupied by the terrorist Daglo clan elements.
Ossified hearted individuals.

The Sudanese Organization for Civilians Protection has commented on the said video on its Facebook page, describing the troops who surrounded the toddler girl as persons with ossified hearts who turned deaf ears to the supplication “of the child girl. The civil society organization has pointed out that the terrorist militias have humiliated and tortured an under-10-year-old toddler by beating and menacing her against an illusory wrongdoing.

But children and women, in particular, through the sadistic scene and violence committed against them, appear to be the number one enemy of the Rapid Support Forces militias. For some ambiguous reasons, the rebel forces have opted to stand hostile against this sector of the community, showing scorn towards mothers, beating and terrorizing them, all besides mass rape that human rights organizations in Darfur, Khartoum and Gazira areas have documented.

What is behind the Umbadda area case?

Last June, when the Sudanese Armed Forces stormed some RSF militia hideouts in the Ummbadda Sabeel area, where fierce battles took place, and freed over 20 women who were held by the militia, short videos of the women who were detained by the RSF militias in underground prisons, were released.

According to the information provided to the “Sudanhorizon” news website, the militia forces were detaining these women inside houses abandoned by their owners. The women were forced to wash clothes and cook food without compensation and were not allowed to leave or communicate with their families for more than a year. The militia members did not stop there but rather beat them on their backs with whips and rifle butts and employed some of them to collect information, endangering their lives. The violent treatment of the Rapid Support Forces soldiers caused deaths and injuries among that group of women before the army reached them. Many video clips of members of the Rapid Support Forces militia raping girls, or beating children, showed cruelty that was not familiar towards women and children in Sudanese norms and ethics. But it was the militia members themselves who documented these crimes using their own cell phones as if this were something to be proud of. This shows the criminal nature and the higher ego of the sadistic macho warriors within the ranks of the Daglo clan militia, according to some opinions.

Shocking stories

The United Nations had accused the rebel SAF forces of kidnapping more than 160 women and girls who were imprisoned in the state of Khartoum under conditions similar to slavery in the past. The United Nations reports indicated that “women and girls who were kidnapped in Khartoum State were transferred to other areas, especially Darfur, bound by chains,” pointing out that the rapid support forces and their allied militias were involved in almost all of these cases.

One of the women told Sudanhorizon a shocking account of what happened to her in Gazira state. She said that a field commander with the Rapid Support Militia stormed her house, was surrounded by a heavily armed force, and asked her to hand him her daughters to go with him. Still, she refused, so they beat her and threatened her with death, and the rebel leader, dressed in the rebel fatigue of a (False Brigade) his head draped in a turban, kadmoul, told her that he was everyone in the house was no longer free. He told them in his words, You are all captives of war; you are mine now, and I can do with you whatever I want,” which made her decide to escape and save her family. The mother, who preferred to withhold her name, said, “I requested him to give me some time to get the girls ready for proper marriage to them, legally. I then arranged the escape at night with an acquaintance and travelled for long distances to avoid the hell of slavery that was waiting for us,” as she described it.

What happened in Geneina?

Serious confessions were made by one of those kidnapped by the RSF rebels in Sudan regarding what she described as horrific sexual practices and violations against her and to the right of 25 other women who are still in secret hideouts owned by the Daglo gang in Khartoum. Human Rights Watch stated that the rebel “Rapid Support Forces” raped dozens of women and girls in Geneina, West Darfur State, and survivors who were able to make it to Chad in late April 2023. The organization reported that “It seems that the attackers targeted them because of their affiliation with the ethnicity of the Masalit.”

That same year, fighters from the rebel Rapid Support Forces attacked the Geneina area, where Halima lived with her family. She then heard gunmen on motorbikes approaching her house. “They found me in my room. Four of them threatened me with guns. One of them choked me on the neck and raped me, and then the rest took turns,” Halima said, according to Western press reports.
Women Selling Markets
The most horrific of all are the stories circulating about victims that have not been documented, whether they were children who were recruited by force, forced to carry arms and ammo, and take drugs, as is currently happening in Gazira and Sinnar, or what is rumoured about markets for selling and trading in women, where social media reports have been circulating different stories about those markets.
We obtained an audio recording, the source of which we could not ascertain, in which one of the traders, as he described himself, recounts an experience he said he witnessed in Darfur, where he saw a market for selling girls kidnapped from Khartoum during the first days of the war, set up by the Rapid Support Militia, and among those he saw was a little girl, 11 years old, who he said was crying while other men were haggling over her price. The witness confirmed that they were from Niger or Chad, according to their accent. He added, “I felt sorry for her and decided to save her by paying sums of money. I took her to my house and then returned her to her family, who lived in Khartoum Bahri.” The African Centre for Peace and Justice Studies published a detailed report on sexual slavery and a market for selling women in an area called “Khor Jahannum- the Hell Creek” in Darfur. It included shocking accounts of armed men kidnapping women from war zones in northern Sudan, specifically from Khartoum and its suburbs, and taking them to rebel-controlled areas, where they are sexually enslaved, some of them sold for the same purpose, and in some cases bargaining with the families of some of them to pay ransoms in exchange for their release.

This was confirmed by Musaed Mohammed, Director of the African Center (to Radio Dabanga), that they were able to collect evidence and eyewitness accounts and conducted interviews with 45 victims and families of survivors of kidnapping who were freed either by the Sudanese army or through ransom payments to the kidnappers. The investigation also led to reports of women and girls being seen in cars, some of them chained, suggesting that they were kidnapped from the capital, Khartoum.
The most vicious picture

Perhaps the scenes of rape documented on the criminals’ phones painted a bleak picture of what could happen if the Rapid Support Forces took control of Sudan by force, especially since Hemaidti no longer has any control over his forces, which do not abide by the customs and conventions of war, or even Sudanese morals and values, and boast about these heinous crimes, and may use them as a weapon to take revenge on those who stand against their brutality and deceptive slogans. So what is the problem of the Rapid Support Forces militia with women, to humiliate them and treat them in such a hideous manner? What the Rapid Support Forces are doing to women and children is beyond cruelty. The governor of Darfur confirmed this, Minni Arko Minawi: “The Rapid Support Forces are torturing children and women, killing without mercy, and not distinguishing between a young child and an elderly person.”

But the most brutal image of the Janjaweed was drawn by the writer and novelist Abdel Aziz Baraka Sakin in his novel “The Messiah of Darfur”, saying: “A people with dirty clothes, soaked with sweat and dust, surrounding themselves with large amulets, on their shoulders rifles that fire for the most trivial reasons, they have no respect for the human spirit, they do not differentiate at all between humans and other creatures, they do not have women, children or girls with them, there is no civilian, educated or religious person among them, and there are no homes to which they yearn to return at the end of the day.” These are almost the same specifications of the militia soldiers who have been waging a sadistic war on Sudanese society for more than a year, and the phones of the rapists themselves have turned into tools of condemnation against them. However, many Sudanese had not realized the seriousness of the situation in Darfur, western Sudan, until the Khartoum war broke out, then its scope expanded, and the same scenes appeared in plain sight and hearing: killing, enslavement and assault on children while the bodies of women were transformed into another battlefield, in which the militia soldiers enjoy the screams, and do not care about international condemnations.