A coalition of African charities have confirmed that children and adults are subject to slavery in Sudan’s Darfur region.
It is reported that the Sudanese army has been involved in abducting women and children to be sex slaves and domestic staff for troops in Khartoum while men have been kidnapped and forced to work on farmland controlled by Janjaweed militias,
The group of 50 charities who made the discoveries say it has around 100 eyewitness accounts from former abductees.
Thousands of people from non-Arabic speaking ethnic groups in Darfur have been targeted, its report says.
Victims have been rounded up during joint attacks on villages by the Arabic-speaking Janjaweed and the Sudanese Armed Forces.
According to the study, civilians are also tortured and killed while their villages are razed, to ethnically cleanse areas.
The “cleansed” areas are then repopulated with Arabic-speaking people, including nomads from Chad, Niger, Mali and Cameroon.
The reports also claim that most of the abductees are women and girls, but there is new evidence in Darfur of kidnappers targeting men and boys for forced agricultural labour.
The abducted women and girls, meanwhile, are raped and forced to marry their captors as well as carry out household chores and sometimes cultivate crops, according to the study.
Up to 300,000 people have died since conflict began in Darfur in 2003 and
at least 2.7 million people have fled their homes.
