Some victims said they were enslaved and sold to work on the farms of RSF commanders, others said they were detained while their families were forced to pay ransoms for them. Some victims said they were seized several times. Witnesses and activists said that among those kidnapped were girls and young women who were bound, shackled, and sold as sex slaves.
Fighting broke out in April after the collapse of a power-sharing arrangement between the Sudanese army, led by Lieutenant General Abdel Fattah al-Burhan, and the Rapid Support Forces, led by Lieutenant General Mohamed Hamdan Dagalo, known internationally as Hemedti. Rival forces overthrew the civilian-led government before turning their weapons on each other. More than 10.7 million people have fled their homes, making Sudan witness the largest displacement crisis in the world.
While both sides have been involved in violence against civilians, witnesses and activists say that the Rapid Support Forces are primarily responsible for the wave of kidnappings. The RSF is composed mostly of Arab militiamen, and the victims interviewed for this story are the Masalit, an ethnic African tribe, although Sudanese from other backgrounds have also been kidnapped.
Reporters Without Borders did not respond to requests for comment.
Mohamed Arbab Musa, 21, said he was hiding under a bed when RSF fighters stormed the military garrison in the Ardamata suburb, outside the Darfur city of El Geneina, in early November. Up to 15,000 people were killed during the attack on El Geneina, according to an unpublished UN report reviewed by The Washington Post, but Musa, a civilian, and his friends managed to survive.
The fighters dragged them from their hiding places, scolded them and called them “slaves,” a term Arab fighters had previously used to describe Africans during the previous Darfur war, which began in 2003 and lasted two decades. Atrocities committed by the army and its Janjaweed allies – a mostly Arab militia that eventually transformed into the Rapid Support Forces – were so widespread that the International Criminal Court charged Sudan's president at the time with genocide.
Moussa, who like others mentioned in this story was interviewed in a refugee camp in Chad, recalls that the RSF fighter “said, ‘Get out, you slaves.’” “One of my friends was killed with an axe. …We were beaten with whips.”
Musa said he was taken to another house, where there were six bodies lying outside, and they ordered him to work repairing cars. His kidnappers told another RSF soldier that Musa's group would be killed when they were finished.
But instead, an hour later, his kidnappers forced Musa onto a motorcycle at gunpoint and took him past El Geneina Bridge, where he said hundreds of people were being executed at the time, before RSF fighters received orders from Abdel Rahim Dagalo, Hemedti's brother. , the second man in the group to take the men to Ibn Sina School. Musa said about 500 people were detained there. Eventually, he and a group of others were forced to work on local farms, he said.
Musa narrates that one evening he heard a man on a motorcycle saying that he had come to own it. The kidnapper asked the man to return the next day after completing the payment. Before he could do so, Musa and his friend fled, hiding in a nearby village for several days before marching into Chad at night.
Adam Hamed, 24, who said he survived a mass execution in El Geneina, was also transferred to the Ibn Sina School after RSF fighters raided his home. They first kidnapped his neighbour's two-year-old daughter and threatened to kill her unless a ransom was paid. He added that five adults in the house handed over money and it was immediately seized.
He added: “One person was killed on the spot, and after that our people were asked to pay 200,000 Sudanese pounds ($330), otherwise we will all be killed.” Their relatives collected the money within about 90 minutes and paid the ransom. The group was released. But an hour later, more fighters came and took them to school. Hamed said the school's dull concrete classrooms were filled with terrified prisoners — men and women, soldiers and civilians.
Hamed said that Dagalo, Hemedti's brother, arrived at the school and assured the prisoners of their safety. But the guards only released the people in exchange for another ransom of $330, which his family eventually paid again. Hamed said that Arab militias took his brother and enslaved him, but the family was eventually able to find him and pay a ransom for him as well.
Khamisa Zakaria Abdel Banat, 37, who went to search for her missing son outside El Geneina to no avail, said she instead found two boys from the Masalit ethnic group working as servants for the city mayor’s sister. One of them, 15, said he was part of a group of 17 Masalit people, divided among Arab leaders and forced to work as domestic servants, two for each family. He begged Banat to find his family in Chad so they could pay for his release.
Fatima Ishaq, 40, said that the Rapid Support Forces killed her 17-year-old son when they raided her home in Ardamata. She said that her youngest daughter, 15 years old, was kidnapped while trying to escape. She paid about $80 for his freedom, but his captor handed him over to another fighter, who ordered her to pay again. In the end, she had to pay three times. Eventually, an RSF fighter told her that he would keep her son enslaved carrying the looted goods, but would not kill him. She said he is still missing.
“I feel so helpless,” Isaac said. “I would die to help him.”
Many witnesses and activists say they also saw captive young women sold in Darfur as sex slaves.
A resident of Kabkabiya in North Darfur, who spoke on the condition of anonymity for fear of retaliation, said he overheard two RSF fighters in the market discussing the sale of two girls in October. He struck up a conversation, and the fighters took him to see two women, ages 18 and 22, locked in a house. The Rapid Support Forces soldiers demanded about $1,000 for the two girls. A local resident said he bargained with them for half this amount and took them home. Out of compassion, he released the women and sent them to search for their families.
Salima Ishaq, Head of the Unit to Combat Violence against Women in Sudan's The Ministry of Social Development said that girls and young women are usually sold from behind cars.
Ishaq said that her unit tracked down kidnapped girls in several regions, including Darfur, Khartoum and other places. “Eyewitnesses saw them chained in cars,” she said. “The families who paid the ransom refused to talk to us.”
The Strategic Initiative for Women in the Horn of Africa said that markets for young women appeared at the beginning of the conflict. Armed ethnic Arabs arrive at dawn in pickup trucks with women and girls tied up in the back, according to accounts from two commercial truck drivers at the scene.
A democratic activist in Sharginil, East Nile State, said that 13 women have been missing from their area since November. Two of them returned with accounts of sexual violence. One of them said that RSF fighters held her for five days and raped her. The other woman told the commission that she was detained in Khartoum near the airport, with about 50 other women in a residential building now used to detain women for rape.
The Strategic Initiative said that it confirmed that fighters of the Rapid Support Forces brought three females to the city of El Fasher in North Darfur. When civilians demanded their release, the RSF soldiers demanded a ransom of about $50,000 and provided phones to call their families, who eventually paid about two-thirds of that amount, SIHA said.
Another woman was released after paying about $1,000, the group said.
