ADF STAFF
Dozens of women and girls were lined up in a schoolyard in Port Sudan with AK-47 assault rifles at their feet.
They loaded the weapons with ammunition as a military trainer barked orders, then laid flat on their stomachs with their weapons pointed straight ahead.
Some of the students, teachers and housewives were at the makeshift military camp out of loyalty to relatives fighting in the Sudanese Armed Forces (SAF) against the Rapid Support Forces (RSF). According to Sky News, others had nowhere else to go as jobs in the city are scarce.
“We support the military!” they yelled in unison during an exercise. “They don’t need us, but we are here to support them.”
The camp is one of many training sites for women and girls established after SAF leader Gen. Abdel Fattah al-Burhan called for civilians to take up arms against the rival RSF. Both sides are accused of committing atrocities against civilians during the country’s protracted civil war.
“My son was killed by the RSF,” a tearful trainee told Sky News. “He was an officer.”
Others were determined and angry.
“We’ve come to protect ourselves, our children, all we stand for against all we’ve seen,” said a woman whose nephew was killed, and niece abducted by the RSF. “We’ve seen so much. It’s an insane tragedy.”
As Sky News reported, one initiative behind recruitment in Port Sudan is called “Kandakat,” which means “Nubian Warrior Queens,” a word used to describe women who led anti-regime protests during Sudan’s 2018 revolution. They have seen firsthand the effects of the RSF’s brutality.
“The scale of rape is unthinkable,” one trainee said. “We have met girls in these camps who have been raped. I have three girls. I’m here to defend them and myself.”
The Sudanese Women’s Union in November reported more than 150 cases of rape, forced disappearances and forced marriages by RSF members since the war began. The United Nations in November reported that some abducted women and girls in Darfur were seen chained to cars and trucks.
The number of child abductions also was rising. Inside a schoolroom transformed into a displacement center in Port Sudan, a mother of two described her ordeal.
“The RSF were abducting children in the area,” she told Sky News. “They even took my neighbor’s children. They jumped my wall, broke down my door and forced me out at gunpoint. I have two asthmatic children.”
A woman named Rahma was among 30 women who trained at a military recruitment camp in Wad Madani. She was driven by vengeance.
“I witnessed my mother’s tears as she tended to wounds, and I decided to protect myself and my family,” she told the Sudan Tribune. “Conscription seemed the only available option. There’s an injustice within me that can only be relieved by seeking revenge against those who harmed us and disrupted our lives.”
Other women at the Wad Madani center took first-aid courses to care for themselves and their families. A woman named Amal was motivated to learn first aid after seeing her father severely beaten by RSF members. “I could not save him or relieve his pain,” she told the Sudan Tribune.
A woman learning first aid in Khartoum said RSF troops threatened her family at gunpoint. “They compelled us to treat the injured and forcibly address their wounds within our home,” she told the news website. “When a soldier died, we faced beatings.”
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