Women are the main victims of abuse in Sudan's war, facing "the world's worst" violence, Sudan's social affairs minister has told AFP.

The Sudanese army and the paramilitary Rapid Support Forces (RSF) have been locked in a devastating war since April 2023 that has killed tens of thousands of people and displaced around 11 million others.

Sulaima Ishaq al-Khalifa said abuses against women routinely accompanied looting and attacks, with reports of rape often perpetrated.

The minister said that women were also being subjected to sexual slavery and trafficked to neighbouring countries, alongside forced marriages arranged to avoid shame.

'Humiliating people'

Khalifa said sexual violence is "systematic" among the RSF, who she says use it "as a weapon of war" and for the purposes of "ethnic cleansing." The RSF's leadership said in October 2025 that it had launched an investigation into these allegations.

The Sudanese social affairs ministry has documented more than 1,800 rape cases between April 2023 and October 2025 – a figure that does not include atrocities documented in western Darfur and the neighbouring Kordofan region from late October onwards.

"It's about... humiliating people, forcing them to leave their houses and places and cities. And also breaking... the social fabrics," Khalifa said.

"When you are using sexual violence as a weapon of war, that means you want to extend... the war forever", because it feeds a "sense of revenge", she added.

ICC opens an investigation into Sudan 'war crimes'

A report by the SIHA Network, an activist group that documents abuses against women in the Horn of Africa, found that more than three-quarters of recorded cases involved rape.

Many of these cases remain difficult to document because the war has disrupted the functioning of state institutions.

The United Nations has repeatedly raised alarm over what it describes as targeted attacks on non‑Arab communities in Darfur, while the International Criminal Court (ICC) has opened a formal investigation into "war crimes."

Briefing the UN Security Council in mid‑January, ICC deputy prosecutor Nazhat Shameem Khan said investigators had uncovered evidence of an "organised, calculated campaign" in Al Fasher – the army's last stronghold in Darfur captured by the RSF in late October.