Breaking: Over 100 Sudanese Women Detained Without Charge in Wad Madani as War Enters Third Year
At least 100 Sudanese women are among 1,800 to 1,900 civilians detained in prisons in large-scale arrests by Sudanese Armed Forces (SAF) in the city of Wad Madani after the country’s official military force recaptured the city from Rapid Support Forces (RSF) paramilitary militias earlier this year, human rights monitors have confirmed. Conditions in the prison are reportedly dire, with some observers warning that the detentions echo patterns of abuse—including sexual violence and torture—documented earlier this year in Khartoum.
Many of the detainees, including children and elderly men and women, have been accused — reportedly without formal charges — of collaborating with the RSF. A separate humanitarian source also confirmed that 110 women are being held under similar accusations in El Gedaref prison in Sudan’s southeast, and 170 women are being held in a prison in Al Jazeera State in the country’s east-central region.
A UN official familiar with the ongoing investigations noted there are serious concerns about the absence of due process, overcrowding, and denial of medical care, with conditions disproportionately harming women and girls.
Survivors, aid workers, and legal monitors say many of these women were not collaborators—but victims of forced marriage, rape, and abduction by RSF fighters during the paramilitary group’s occupation of central and western Sudan. As the SAF reasserts territorial control, particularly from its newly regained territory in Khartoum earlier this month, those same women are being targeted as suspected traitors.
For over 20 years, the Sudanese people have been caught in cycles of conflict and authoritarian rule, from the Darfur genocide in 2003 to decades under ruler Omar al-Bashir, who relied on militias like the Janjaweed, later the RSF, to control the country. After Bashir’s ouster in 2019, the SAF entered into a fragile power-sharing agreement with the RSF. The alliance collapsed in early 2003, sparking a devastating civil war for control, killing thousands, displacing millions, and reigniting ethnic violence.
Trapped in their own homes
Hala Al Karib, regional director of the Strategic Initiative for Women in the Horn of Africa (SIHA), explained that many of the most recent victims were trapped in their homes while RSF soldiers imposed themselves by force. Families had no real choice but to find ways to survive, she said, sometimes negotiating arrangements like early marriages to RSF fighters to protect their daughters or exchanging compliance for basic necessities like food. One father described to Al Karib how RSF fighters moved into their home for multiple months, sexually assaulted his two daughters, impregnated them, and left the family powerless to seek action or justice.
Women in similar situations, Al Karib said, risk being branded as collaborators despite having been victims with no meaningful alternatives. A source familiar with these developments also confirmed an increase in cases of child marriage and female genital mutilation in fragile attempts to protect their daughters from RSF retribution.
Laetitia Bader, Horn of Africa director at Human Rights Watch, described this pattern as “double victimization”—a term she says captures how women are being punished not only for the violence inflicted upon them by RSF fighters, but also for surviving the violence. In areas reclaimed by SAF, perceived RSF sympathizers and survivors are still being denied access to healthcare and essential services, human rights monitors confirmed. In addition, human rights monitors have raised concerns that women perceived as being RSF sympathizers are being arrested and detained.
Al Karib echoed this concern. Her organization is currently preparing a report, expected to be published in the coming weeks, on the criminalization of women in the parts of Sudan formerly occupied by the RSF. The report, she said, will focus on “the delegitimization of women through war” — and the ways in which survivors of violence are being punished instead of protected.
“These women have already endured unspeakable brutality under RSF occupation,” Al Karib told More to Her Story. “Now, instead of receiving support or legal redress, they are being reframed as enemies of the state. It’s a deliberate erasure of their suffering,” adding that it sets a terrifying precedent for how gender-based violence is being rewritten as a political betrayal.
Services decimated by loss of U.S. and European aid
In North Darfur’s Tawila town, a local protection group supporting survivors of sexual violence was forced to close in March after the U.S. government suspended aid to Sudan earlier this year. “They had to fire their entire staff,” Bader said. “It’s catastrophic. These are the only people some women trusted to help them.”
Across central Sudan, doctors report a surge in women fleeing RSF-held areas — many suffering from untreated injuries, injuries consistent with rape and gang rape, or complications from pregnancy and childbirth. “The withdrawal of [humanitarian aid] support has affected everything from the availability of essential medical supplies to the availability to conduct surgeries and manage emergency cases. We're doing our best to adapt and operate with extremely limited resources,” Safari Ali, a specialist in obstetrics and gynecology and one of the very few doctors left in the city of Omdurman, Sudan, told More to Her Story.
Al Kharib echoed these concerns, noting that U.S.-funded aid programs, delegated mainly to services that offered physical protection to humanitarian workers and local volunteers, have “essentially been shut down.”
Mounting ethnic violence
A humanitarian source also expressed concern over mounting ethnic violence at the hands of RSF forces against the Zaghawa community in North Darfur, whom RSF leaders accuse of affiliation with SAF forces. The source said that despite months of warnings, attacks on Zaghawa villages have continued. Sexual violence remains pervasive across Sudan, with consistent accounts of the use of rape and gang rape as a weapon of war continuing to be documented by the UN and other actors.
According to the agency’s interviews with displaced men, women, and children from West and North Darfur, incidents of sexual violence were particularly prevalent in North Darfur. The source also noted that escape routes out of Sudan remain perilous, with civilians facing arbitrary detention, torture, summary executions, and sexual violence at checkpoints along the way.
“There’s a long-standing history of military intelligence in Sudan targeting civilians from these areas,” Bader said. During a documentation mission last December in South Sudan, Bader found that displaced Sudanese were fleeing a new SAF offensive on RSF-controlled territory near the border. “We documented certain ethnic profiles — communities from Western Sudan — being perceived as RSF supporters,” Bader said. “I think refugees are also likely to be targeted for that reason.”
Those dynamics are being used by the SAF to justify arrests and disappearances of Sudanese civilians, blurring the line between victim and enemy, experts said.
The next front
As RSF started a new, large-scale offensive on El Fasher — creating a semblance of government control — humanitarian groups brace for a new wave of violence and displacement. “Hundreds of women and children arrived in Tawila just last week,” said Bader, noting that some were attacked by allied RSF militia en route.
Humanitarian watchdogs have warned that the collapse of humanitarian infrastructure across Sudan will continue to leave women especially vulnerable.
Al Karib added that until the international community acknowledges the full scope of gendered violence in Sudan, not only as a byproduct of conflict but as a systemic tool of control, there will be no path to real accountability: “Women are the center of peacemaking. They have a very good understanding of the concept of justice and collective justice.”
“If we are talking about peace, and if we’re talking about rebuilding Sudan’s social fabric, [we must] start with the women because they are the ones who saw it all,” she said.