South Sudanese armed forces loyal to President Salva Kiir last year abducted and raped women “on a large scale,” United Nations human rights workers said in a report Thursday, citing cases of enslavement, gang-rape, torture and forced abortion.

The report by the UN Mission in South Sudan (UNMISS) and the United Nations High Commissioner for Human Rights says that throughout last year, but particularly during an SPLA offensive in Unity State starting in late April 2015, soldiers raped women and girls on a large scale.

Opposition forces are also blamed for cases of rape, but “SPLA and its affiliated militias were responsible for the majority of incidents,” the report says, citing witness and survivor acounts.

“In the second quarter of 2015, following the SPLA offensive into the southern counties of Unity, reports of cases of sexual violence against women by armed men escalated. Most of the respondents interviewed reported that their villages had been attacked by a mixture of SPLA soldiers and armed militia who, among other violations, abducted and raped girls and women on a large scale.”

In total, the UNMISS Human Rights Department documented 194 incidents of conflict-related sexual violence, involving at least 280 victims, including approximately 70 minors. But the report also cites an estimate by the UN Protection Cluster in South Sudan that at least 1,300 women and girls were raped between April and September 2015 in Unity State.

“The types of the most heinous acts of sexual violence documented include: gangrape and killing; gang-rape and abduction; rape and killing; gang-rape and stripping; sexual assault and stripping; rape; sexual slavery; and forced abortion,” reads the UN report.

Rights workers collected testimonies from women in private and group interviews. During a meeting between UN rights workers and 30 women in Koch, “all participants” in the front-line state openly said they had been raped, including pregnant women, lactating mothers and minors.

“Many respondents reported seeing women being raped and then killed. Sometimes, as reported in Koch County, women and girls were burned in their tukuls after being gang-raped. One survivor reported: ‘If you look them in the face when they are doing it, they will kill you’.”

Sexual slavery and humiliating treatment

“A survivor’s testimony revealed that four Nuer women, three of whom were lactating mothers, had been abducted by a group of armed Dinka SPLA soldiers a few days after the outbreak of the conflict in Juba and taken to Bor in Jonglei, where they were kept in captivity and subjected to sexual slavery in very harsh living conditions with limited access to food and water,” the UN reported.

Another survivor, a Nuer woman, “reported how she had been forced to marry an SPLA soldier, and then subjected to sexual slavery and torture. A group of Dinka SPLA soldiers reportedly murdered her husband and 10 other Nuer soldiers in December 2013, and then forced her and the other widows into sexual slavery. She was regularly beaten, denied meals and water and kept in isolation.”

File photo: A protest in Bor against gender-based violence (GBV), October 2015