Watchdog Group Says 221 Women Raped By Sudanese Troops In Darfur

An international watchdog group said this week that Sudanese army troops raped at least 221 women and girls in mass rape incident in the city of Darfur last year.

Human Rights Watch announced the alleged atrocity in a recent report, with the group's Africa director Daniel Bekele calling the sexual attack "a new low in the catalog of atrocities in Darfur."

After conducting numerous telephone interviews with witnesses, Human Rights Watch is reporting that children as young as 10 were raped by Sudanese army forces in Darfur sometime in 2014, with the incidents taking place at times in front of other family members.

The watchdog group said in its report that it "documented 27 separate incidents of rape and obtained credible information about an additional 194 cases."

"Multiple victims and witnesses reported that government officials threatened to imprison or kill anyone who spoke out about the attacks," the report adds.

The report includes accounts by victims of the rape and witnesses. According to The Guardian, one victim's account says she was raped as retribution for the death of a Sudanese soldier.

"Immediately after they [the soldiers] entered the room, they said: 'You killed our man. We are going to show you true hell,'" the woman says in the report. "Then they started beating us. They raped my three daughters and me. Some of them were holding the girl down while another one was raping her. They did it one by one."

Sudan's government has denied the mass rape incident and has prevented the United Nation Security Council from entering the village of Darfur to conduct an investigation.