Johannesburg — The Sudanese Rapid Support Force, one side in a civil war which tore the African nation apart for more than a year and created one of the the worst humanitarian crises on the planetare accused of raping dozens of women and girls and using some as sex slaves in new Human Rights Watch report. The New York-based human rights group says the use of sexual violence by paramilitaries in the country's South Kordofan state since September 2023. constitutes war crimes and possible crimes against humanity.

HRW laid out the findings of an investigation based on the cases of almost 80 women and girls in a report published on Monday detailing horrifying new allegations of abuse in Sudan, where both sides in the civil war have already been accused of war crimes.

The researchers collected evidence of 79 women and girls aged between 7 and 50 who HRW said were raped, with most of the incidents occurring at an RSF military base in Dibeybat, near the town of Habila in South Kordofan.

Survivors and witnesses told the group that all the men who carried out the attacks were uniformed RSF forces or members of allied militias.

"Survivors described being gang-raped in front of their families and for extended periods of time, including while being held as sex slaves," said Belkis Will, HRW's Associate Crisis and Conflict Director, who conducted many of the interviews with survivors.

Ezzaddean Elsafi, a senior advisor to the RSF, rejected the allegations in the HRW report to CBS News, claiming that "people wearing RSF uniforms" behind the alleged attacks were impersonators and not actual RSF forces.

“RSF takes this very seriously and will investigate. We are very sensitive to sexual violence against women and the perpetrators will be held accountable," Elsafi said, denying the group even had a significant presence in South Kordofan, though admitting it had forces "in the Debibat area, near the state border North Kordofan.

"This is absolute misinformation," he said of the HRW report.

HRW said it had shared a summary of the findings of its investigation with RSF commander-in-chief General Mohamed Hamdan Dagalo, but had not received a response.

Will has spent years documenting sexual violence in conflicts around the world, including by ISIS fighters against Yazidi women in Iraq, but she told CBS News, "What's really amazing to me after meeting these women and girls, is the scope and scale' of crimes in Sudan.

CBS News saw video of the full interview HRW conducted with an 18-year-old woman the group identified as Hanya. She said she was pregnant in February when RSF fighters stormed her home in Habila and grabbed her, her 17-year-old neighbor and 16 other girls she knew from her neighborhood. She said they were taken in 10 vehicles to the military base in Dibeybat.

When they arrived, Khanya said she recognized more than 30 other girls from her town already there, with about 100 fighters holding them captive.

She said that when she tried to resist being raped, one of the fighters "started beating me with a metal whip". For the next three months, she said, "the fighters came in groups of three every morning to take some girls to rape them, and then in the evening another group of three came and took other girls to rape them."

Hania said the RSF men kept her and the other women and girls in an animal pen made of wire and tree branches, where they were shackled in groups of ten.

“What has become clear from these cases is that in RSF areas with control, absolutely nowhere is safe – not if you are running, not even in your home. "Women and girls are at risk of being raped no matter where," Will told CBS News.

Another woman, Hasina, 35, told HRW that six uniformed RSF men shot and killed her husband and stole all their livestock and money. She said the cows were her family's investment, so with them and the stolen money, she felt she had no means to escape, as many of her neighbors had done, and she and her six young children, some of whom were just babies , had no choice but to stay in their home.

The RSF fighters returned three days later, she said, and "all three men raped me and left".

Later that night, "three more came back and raped me again and told me to stay in my house."

She said she was raped almost every day for the next month before she escaped.

HRW met Hasina in Al-Khailu camp, a makeshift facility with little or no resources for internally displaced civilians in South Kordofan.

“She's really barely able to wake up and go on because of what she's been through. Her children are now in a camp with little food and they looked very malnourished when I saw them. … She struggles to function as a mother,” Will said, adding that women living in tents next to Hasina help care for her children.

Will said there was no psychological support for traumatized women in the camp or in much of the country.

"When I raised the issue of fairness and accountability to these women, they all looked at me blankly because to them fairness is a meaningless concept," she said. “The scale at which this is happening here means that this has become normalized behavior by RSF. Not one of these women ever heard of a soldier or combatant being held accountable."

Hania and a friend who was also pregnant managed to escape from their captors. They were interviewed by HRW in the Nuba Mountains. They said 49 girls were still being held at the base and she had heard of girls being held at two other RSF bases as well.

"There is no way to find out more about these women because access is very difficult and dangerous, and in these areas there is no electricity, no mobile phones, so no information is coming out." There is absolute silence about these encroachments,” Will said. "We will probably never know what happened to these women and girls.

The charity International Rescue Committee says the humanitarian crisis sparked by Sudan's civil war is the largest ever recorded for a second consecutive year in 2024, with more than 30 million people in need of humanitarian assistance. It is estimated that approximately half of Sudan's population of 50 million are suffering from acute hunger.

Last week, some 20 months since the war began, fighting appeared to have intensified, with both sides accusing the other of committing new atrocities. International efforts to reach a peace agreement have stalled and there is no end in sight to the fighting.