Survivor of the Sudanese rape camps reveals thousands of women are raped by up to ten men at a time and only freed once they are so badly injured from sexual assaults they can have sex no longer
Sam Mathew for MailOnlikne and Afp Reporter
Thousands of Sudanese women and girls abducted and repeatedly raped
- Carried out by government soldiers and their allied militia during offensive
- At night soldiers have their pick of the women who are tied up
- Victims as young as 12 years being assaulted by up to ten men
One woman was abducted by soldiers and taken to a military camp, tied up and raped repeatedly for two months.
Another was kidnapped with her 15-year-old sister and raped every night for five nights. A third was taken to a forest with her 12-year old daughter where both were raped.
The abduction of women and girls for use as sex slaves -– some of them held indefinitely, tied up with hundreds of others in secret rape camps -- is a disturbing new aspect of South Sudan's 21-month conflict, already characterised by well-documented war crimes and human rights abuses.
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A young woman carries firewood after returning to the United Nations base outside Bentiu
Nigeria's 'Chibok girls', abducted by Boko Haram in April 2014, and Iraq's Yazidi women taken as sex slaves by Islamic State are well-known.
But the plight of perhaps thousands of South Sudanese women and girls from just a single state, abducted and subjected to repeated, brutal rape and slave-like working conditions has remained hidden until now.
Dozens of interviews conducted by AFP in the northern Unity State reveal a systematic pattern of abduction and rape perpetrated by government soldiers and their allied militia during a recent offensive.
The investigation focused on attacks by government forces but both sides have perpetrated ethnic massacres, recruited and killed children and carried out widespread rape, torture and forced displacement of populations to 'cleanse' areas of their opponents.