Sudan's civil war, now in its fourth year, has been described by the UN as the world's worst humanitarian crisis for women and girls. Sexual violence has reportedly been used as a weapon of war, notably by paramilitaries fighting the Sudanese army. RFI hears from women who have suffered or witnessed "indescribable" violence.
Twenty-year-old Sarah - not her real name - wears a pink floral headscarf. Her eyes fill with tears as she recounts how the war tore her family apart in her home town of Nyala in Darfur: bodies in the streets, harassment by soldiers from both sides, water and food running out within the first week.
In July 2023, her father left to look for food and never returned. Then the family home was hit by shelling.
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"An artillery shell landed on our house. It killed my elder brother and our neighbour's son," she tells RFI from the Gorom camp in South Sudan, which hosts more than 20,000 Sudanese refugees.
Left alone with her mother and her sisters, she says she was repeatedly harassed by the Rapid Support Forces (RSF). In October, paramilitaries entered their home and attacked her.
"They started with my mother, and my sister was with me. We had hidden my younger sisters behind us. They beat my mother while she was pregnant. While they were trying to assault us and hit us, my mother tried to step in to protect us. They beat her and killed her, even though she was pregnant."
Three of Sarah's four sisters later fled and she has had no news of them since.
As for her father, Sarah says she recognised him in a video published by the RSF after the capture of El-Fasher from the Sudanese Armed Forces (SAF) in late October 2025.
He was among prisoners being beaten and summarily executed. As she didn't see him die, she hopes he may have survived.
Sudan's El-Fasher 'an epicentre of human suffering', UN says
Witness to horror
RSF militia seized control of El-Fasher, the capital of the state of North Darfur, after more than a year of siege.
According to eyewitness reports, RSF fighters went from house to house asking residents about their ethnicity, and carrying out arrests, summary executions and rapes.
Insaf Oumar Barakat, a nurse at El-Fasher's Saudi Hospital, managed to flee. "When the RSF entered the city, there was bombing everywhere, people were dying. I was with five women - they had just given birth at the Saudi Hospital," she tells RFI.
"There were no roads left. People were running in every direction. In the end, only about 20 of us managed to get out of our group. There were many more of us."
She says what the paramilitaries did to those who couldn't escape is beyond words - some torn apart by gunfire, others kidnapped, and the girls taken away and raped.
"Sometimes there were 10 soldiers on one victim. I even saw them cut off a woman's breasts. It's indescribable. It was on the roadside. I know a father whose daughters were raped in front of him. They told him: 'We won't kill you, but we will take your women'."
Sudan's El-Fasher under the RSF, destroyed and 'full of bodies'
Lingering nightmares
Some women victims of sexual violence have found refuge with an organisation known as Shama'a. Set up in 2007 in Khartoum by Nour Hussein Al Sewaty Mohammed, who goes by Mama Nour, it provides refuge for single mothers and their children.
But when the conflict broke out between RSF and SAF, Mama Nour was forced to evacuate the women to safer ground in Wad Medani, Al Jazirah state.
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Most of those she now cares for are victims of RSF.
"Some of the girls have nightmares. Others suddenly start crying - screaming in the middle of a meal, like a kind of psychotic episode," she tells RFI. "Their whole bodies are marked - a blow here, a bite, a scratch. What they went through is not human."
Chaima, 23, went to the shelter after being abandoned by her family in Khartoum.
"From the beginning of the war, my family left me on my own. Then the neighbours left too. Some men came and took advantage of my isolation," she says. "I was kept prisoner for three months. They tortured me."
She was later freed by the RSF while pregnant. She's soon to leave Mama Nour's shelter to get married, but she has to leave her two-year-old child behind. Mama Nour has decided to adopt him.
"This marriage now means everything to me," Chaima says. "I will never be alone again."
