MORE than 840 women have been arbitrarily detained across government-controlled Sudan between August 2024 and December 2025, accused of collaborating with the Rapid Support Forces – often on no basis beyond their ethnicity, neighbourhood, or economic status. That figure, documented by the Strategic Initiative for Women in the Horn of Africa (SIHA), is widely believed to be a fraction of the true toll.
The detentions span Wad Madani, Gedaref, Port Sudan, Dilling, Kadugli, El Obeid, and Khartoum. Inside overcrowded cells, women report racist abuse, humiliation, and physical violence during interrogation by Sudanese Armed Forces (SAF) military intelligence. Pregnant women are among those held. So are foreign nationals.
Collaboration charges are only part of the picture. Women are also being arrested under public order laws targeting street vendors and brewers, and under morality statutes criminalising adultery and indecency – laws long weaponised against women in Sudan, now enforced with renewed force in the chaos of war. Some women have been sentenced to death. Several of those verdicts were overturned only after independent legal counsel intervened. Without that intervention, they would likely have been executed.
On January 9, 2026, 402 women were released from Omdurman Women’s Prison following a directive from the President of the Transitional Sovereignty Council, citing difficult humanitarian conditions. Advocates welcomed the move but warned it changed nothing structurally. No charges were dropped. No policy shift. Detention without due process continues across multiple facilities where independent monitoring is nearly impossible.
In Wad Madani alone, approximately 170 women and girls – including pregnant women — were detained on collaboration charges as of March 2025. In Gedaref, 110 women were held by military intelligence, among them four foreign nationals. Fifty had already been sentenced; sixty more were awaiting verdicts. Most were household heads from marginalised communities.
SIHA’s newly released report, More Than Numbers, calls for the immediate release of arbitrarily detained women, the establishment of grassroots legal networks to provide independent representation, and systemic accountability. The report’s title is deliberate: behind every statistic is a mother, a vendor, a daughter detained not for any act of violence, but for who she is and where she lives.
The 840 documented cases, SIHA stresses, are a floor. In RSF-controlled areas like al-Geneina and Nyala, the information vacuum is near-total. Women there are not merely detained – they are disappeared. The real number of women held across both sides of Sudan’s war remains, for now, unknown.
