SYDNEY: An Australian academic held in Iran for more than two years has been returned to Tehran’s notorious Evin prison, friends said Friday, prompting fresh concern about her wellbeing.
Kylie Moore-Gilbert — who is serving a 10-year sentence on charges of espionage — had disappeared inside Iran’s prison system a week ago, sparking frantic efforts to learn her whereabouts.
“I’m relieved that the Australian government has finally managed to locate Kylie six days after she went missing,” friend and fellow Middle East expert Dara Conduit told AFP. “But make no mistake: this is not a win for Kylie.”
Conditions at Evin are believed to be marginally better than Moore-Gilbert’s previous jail at Qarchak — a women’s facility that has been blacklisted under UN human rights sanctions and is notorious for the ill-treatment of political prisoners.
During a previous stint at Evin, Moore-Gilbert reported being held in restrictive conditions and needing psychiatric medications for “gravely damaged” mental health.
Friends believe she is now being held in the same ward as before, a facility controlled by Iran’s hard-line Islamic Revolutionary Guards Corps.
Australia’s foreign ministry has said securing her release is an “absolute priority,” but was forced to admit this week that her whereabouts were unknown.
“We do not accept the charges upon which Dr. Moore-Gilbert was convicted, and want to see her returned to Australia as soon as possible,” the ministry said after ambassador Lyndall Sachs was able to visit her in Qarchak Prison on October 19.
Throughout Moore-Gilbert’s internment, friends and family have become increasingly critical of what they say is Australia’s ineffective diplomatic approach.
According to Conduit: “Not one iota of progress has been made in her case, despite the government’s assurances that Kylie’s case is under control.”
She called Moore-Gilbert’s transfer back to Evin “an utter indictment of the Australian government’s failure on Kylie’s case.”
“After 778 days, she is back at square one in the prison in which she was originally held.”
Moore-Gilbert was reportedly arrested at Tehran airport by the Islamic Revolutionary Guards Corps in September 2018 after attending a conference in Qoms.
She is just one of several Westerners being held in Iran on national security grounds.
Negotiations with Tehran are notoriously difficult, with governments and families forced to decide if quiet discussions are less likely to antagonize captors, often against a fraught geopolitical backdrop.
Iran’s complex political and judicial system — which sees hard-liners, reformists and myriad state institutions vying for influence — can make things more complex still.
Australian academic Kylie Moore-Gilbert moved to notorious Tehran jail
https://arab.news/bus46
Australian academic Kylie Moore-Gilbert moved to notorious Tehran jail
- During a previous stint at Evin, Moore-Gilbert reported being held in restrictive conditions and needing psychiatric medications for “gravely damaged” mental health
- Friends believe she is now being held in the same ward as before, a facility controlled by Iran’s hard-line Islamic Revolutionary Guards Corps
Women main victims of Sudan conflict abuses: minister to AFP
- Khalifa said sexual violence has been reported on both sides, but she insisted it is “systematic” among the RSF
- Her ministry has documented more than 1,800 rapes between April 2023 and October 2025
PORT SUDAN: Women are the main victims of abuse in Sudan’s war, facing “the world’s worst” sexual violence and other crimes committed with impunity, a rights activist turned social affairs minister for the army-backed government told AFP.
The Sudanese army and the paramilitary Rapid Support Forces (RSF) have been locked in a brutal conflict since April 2023 that has killed tens of thousands of people, displaced around 11 million and been marked by widespread sexual violence.
Sulaima Ishaq Al-Khalifa said abuses against women routinely accompanied looting and attacks, with reports of rape often perpetrated as “the family witnessed” the crime.
“There is no age limit. A woman of 85 could be raped, a child of one year could be raped,” the trained psychologist told AFP at her home in Port Sudan.
The longtime women’s rights activist, recently appointed to the government, said that women were also being subjected to sexual slavery and trafficked to neighboring countries, alongside forced marriages arranged to avoid shame.
Khalifa said sexual violence has been reported on both sides, but she insisted it is “systematic” among the RSF, who she says use it “as a weapon of war” and for the purposes of “ethnic cleansing.”
Her ministry has documented more than 1,800 rapes between April 2023 and October 2025 — a figure that does not include atrocities documented in western Darfur and the neighboring Kordofan region from late October onwards.
“It’s about... humiliating people, forcing them to leave their houses and places and cities. And also breaking... the social fabrics,” Khalifa said.
“When you are using sexual violence as a weapon of war, that means you want to extend... the war forever,” because it feeds a “sense of revenge,” she added.
- ‘War crimes’ -
A report by the SIHA Network, an activist group that documents abuses against women in the Horn of Africa, found that more than three-quarters of recorded cases involved rape, with 87 percent attributed to the RSF.
The United Nations has repeatedly raised alarm over what it describes as targeted attacks on non?Arab communities in Darfur, while the International Criminal Court (ICC) has opened a formal investigation into “war crimes” by both sides.
Briefing the UN Security Council in mid-January, ICC deputy prosecutor Nazhat Shameem Khan said investigators had uncovered evidence of an “organized, calculated campaign” in El-Fasher — the army’s last stronghold in Darfur captured by the RSF in late October.
The campaign, Khan added, involved mass rapes and executions “on a massive scale,” sometimes “filmed and celebrated” by the perpetrators and “fueled by a sense of complete impunity.”
Darfur endured a brutal wave of atrocities in the early 2000s, and a former Janjaweed commander — from the militia structure that later evolved into the RSF — was recently found guilty by the International Criminal Court of multiple war crimes, including rape.
“What’s happening now is much more ugly. Because the mass rape thing is happening and documented,” said Khalifa.
RSF fighters carrying out the assaults “have been very proud about doing this and they don’t see it as a crime,” she added.
“You feel that they have a green light to do whatever they want.”
In Darfur, several survivors said RSF fighters “have been accusing them of being lesser people, like calling them ‘slaves’, and saying that when I’m attacking you, assaulting you sexually, I’m actually ‘honoring’ you, because I am more educated than you, or (of) more pure blood than you.”
- ‘Torture operation’ -
Women in Khartoum and Darfur, including El-Fasher, have described rapes carried out by a range of foreign nationals.
These were “mercenaries from West Africa, speaking French, including from Mali, Burkina Faso, Nigeria, Chad, as well as Colombia and Libya” — allegedly fighting alongside the RSF, Khalifa added.
Some victims were abducted and held as sexual slaves, while others were sold through trafficking networks operating across Sudan’s porous borders, said Khalifa.
Many of these cases remain difficult to document because of the collapse of state institutions.
In conservative communities, social stigma also remains a major obstacle to documenting the scale of the abuse.
Families often force victims into marriage to “cover up what happened,” particularly when pregnancies result from rape, according to the minister.
“We call it a torture operation,” she said, describing “frightening” cases in which children and adolescent girls under 18 are forced into marriage.
