Strong evidence has emerged of children and adults being used as slaves in Sudan's Darfur region, a study says

Kidnapped men have been forced to work on farmland controlled by Janjaweed militias, a coalition of African charities says. Eyewitnesses also say the Sudanese army has been involved in abducting women and children to be sex slaves and domestic staff for troops in Khartoum. 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. Thousands of people from non-Arabic speaking ethnic groups in Darfur have been targeted, says the report, published by the Darfur Consortium. The group of 50 charities says it has around 100 eyewitness accounts from former abductees. 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, which are then repopulated with Arabic-speaking people, including nomads from Chad, Niger, Mali and Cameroon, it says. 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, says the report. 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.