Collective Sexual Violence in Arab Sudan - and Elsewhere

Against the backdrop of Hamas – and Western feminist organizations’ - denials of mass rape by Hamas fighters and Gazan civilians who followed in their wake during the invasion of southern Israel on October 7, 2023, it is worth looking at a just-published UNICEF report on sexual violence against children in Sudan during the past year. I believe it tells us something – which many in the West don’t want to hear – about behavioral norms of Arab combatants in wartime, even in civil wars in Arab countries.

The report published yesterday by the United Nations Children’s Fund, which provides humanitarian and developmental aid for the world’s children, states that 221 children were raped since the start of 2024 by soldiers of the Sudanese Armed Forces or its rival for control of the Republic of Sudan, the Rapid Support Forces. The two groups have been at war since 2023. Many of the rapes occurred in the Darfur region. Among the recorded rape victims were four children aged one year and one-third of the 221 recorded victims were boys. The report adds that many more cases of rape of children likely went unrecorded and many of the victims probably died. The 221 cases “represent only a small fraction of the total cases,” states the report. Sudan’s national anthem states: “We are soldiers of God (Allah), Soldiers of the Homeland.”

The report does not deal with the many hundreds, and probably thousands, of adult Sudanese women and men raped during the past 15 months. The report states that sexual violence is used by the Sudanese combatants – and the report avoids identifying the perpetrators’ affiliations - as a “tactic of war.”

The Sudanese are not alone among the Arab world’s organized perpetrators of sexual violence. Widespread sexual violence was reported in recent years in the Yemeni civil war. The UN secretary-general enumerated many cases, including rape and sexual mutilation, in a report to the Security Council in March 2021. The report described many cases in Sana’a’s Central Prison and Al-Saleh Prison in Ta’iz, in the Houthi-controlled areas. The rapes and sexual slavery were reportedly used to “terrorize communities and assert dominance.”

Many cases of sexual violence were also reported in the recent Libyan Civil War, especially against Sudanese refugees who had fled to that country. Rape against women and men was reportedly common in the Libyan National Army’s prison system.

It is worth noting that mass sexual violence, which included thousands of cases of rape and abduction to Muslim homes, characterized the fundamentalist Muslim ISIS assault on the Sinjar district of northern Iraq in 2014. Thousands of Yazidi women and children were then “enslaved” by the ISIS fighters and an unknown, but large, number still remain in Muslim Arab hands, according to a BBC report from 2023. Many of the women were handed around among the ISIS fighters while others were trafficked for profit around the Middle East. The Yazidis are a very small Kurdish-speaking monotheistic minority with roots in pre-Zoroastrian Iran dating to the 12^th century; they were seen by ISIS as “infidels.”

A 21-year-old Yazidi woman, Fawzia Sido, was freed from captivity by the Israeli army fighting the Hamas in the Gaza Strip in October 2024. She was kidnapped as a child by ISIS fighters in August 2014 and was then trafficked across a number of countries. Hamas denied that she had been a captive in Gaza and said she was married to a young Palestinian fighter who died fighting “opposition forces” in Syria and then was married off to that fighter’s brother, who apparently died in the recent fighting in Gaza. Sido had subsequently been a ”guest” of the Hamas government, Hamas stated. Sido was recently flown home to Iraq.