Militia fighters who raped and attacked minority groups in Darfur threatened to force them to have “Arab babies” and used ethnic slurs during their attacks, according to a new UN report.
The details of the latest UN fact-finding mission report are accompanied by claims from activists that the Rapid Support Forces paramilitary is attempting a genocide of non-Arab ethnic groups in Darfur.
The report found fighters from the RSF responsible for sexual violence across Sudan, where they have been fighting the army for control since April 2023, with victims aged between eight and 75.
But in Darfur, and particularly against the Masalit ethnic group, victims said there was a clearly racial motivation to the violence.
The fact-finding mission quotes Masalit rape survivors who overheard the fighters stating their intent that “this year, all girls must be pregnant by the Janjaweed”.
Another from El Geneina said her attacker told her: “We will make you, the Masalit girls, give birth to Arab children.”
The city of El Geneina in the state of West Darfur, with its predominantly Masalit population, was the focus of heavy fighting and a long siege by the RSF fighters, who took control of the city in June 2023.
The report said that RSF fighters went door-to-door in Masalit neighbourhoods seeking men to kill. Women were assaulted, raped and subjected to other forms of violence then often told to leave Sudan for neighbouring Chad.
Caroline Buisman, coordinator for the Sudan fact-finding mission, said they found the RSF and allied militias had carried out war crimes against Masalit people, including sexual violence, torture, attacking civilians and forcible displacement.
“We found that rape and other forms of sexual violence committed by the RSF and its allied militias formed part of large-scale attacks which targeted, in particular, the Masalit community, on the basis of their ethnicity,” said Buisman.
Formalised into a paramilitary from militias known as the Janjaweed, the RSF and its leader, Mohamed Hamdan Dagalo, came to prominence following popular protests that ended the three-decade dictatorship of Omar al-Bashir in 2019.
With a power base on the fringe of Sudanese society in Darfur, Dagalo was able to lodge himself into the centre of events in the capital Khartoum as the second-in-power in the transitional government, working alongside army chief Abdel Fattah al-Burhan to sideline civilians until the two began tussling for control themselves last year.
In the 18 months since fighting began, the RSF and Sudanese army have fought bitter battles for power across the country, displacing around 14 million people according to the UN, while at least 19,000 people have been killed.
The RSF has seized almost the entirety of Darfur and embedded itself in Khartoum, forcing the government to relocate to Port Sudan. Services have crumbled, hospitals have been attacked and a lack of humanitarian access has made it difficult to deliver food and medicine to affected areas.
A report in May by Human Rights Watch also found evidence of racially motivated sexual violence, including many fighters using ethnic slurs, calling the women they attacked slaves and telling them they would rape Masalit women until they had their Arab babies.
It also cited an example of fighters leaving after being told a 15-year-old girl they wanted to rape was from a prominent Arab family.
Activists said that the RSF and the Janjaweed militias had a long history of using sexual violence that stretched back to its numerous attacks on non-Arabs in the early 2000s, a period of violence that is under investigation for genocide at the International Criminal Court.
Hala Al-Karib, regional director of women’s rights group Strategic Initiative for Women in the Horn of Africa, said conditions in Darfur had deteriorated since the ending of UN peacekeeping in the region in 2020, empowering Arab militias and their leaders.
“The RSF has used sexual violence as a tool for ethnic cleansing and there are definitely footprints of genocide, particularly in western Darfur. I don’t think the scale of what happened there is still fully known,” said Karib.
“The RSF has in a very structural way used gang rape and other forms of sexual violence and sexual slavery as a tool for landgrabbing, forced evictions and to break communities and kill any possibility of resistance to the utmost domination the RSF is seeking on the region.”
Marwa Gibril, a doctor and Darfuri activist, also said the RSF was using sexual violence across Sudan to break communities but with a particular ethnic focus in Darfur.
She said the tribes that RSF recruit from believed in their superiority over other communities because of their Arab heritage.
“To keep their superiority, they invade these areas and make sure that they kill the men and change the gene pool by raping women and having babies that are Arabs, not Masalit or Fur or any other black ethnicity,” said Gibril.
