The head of the U.N. children’s program, UNICEF, said Thursday that 16 million children in Sudan are suffering horribly from the country’s civil war, with many facing daily threats of violence, starvation, disease and sexual assault.

Armed forces in Sudan’s civil war are perpetrating systematic sexual violence against young children, with one-year-olds the youngest survivors of rape, according to a new report from UNICEF, the United Nations’ (UN) children’s agency.

Armed men are raping and sexually assaulting children as young as one during Sudan's civil war, says the UN children's agency, Unicef. So traumatised are the survivors that some say they have attempted to end their lives. Mass sexual violence has been widely documented as a weapon of war in the country's nearly two-year conflict.

Children as young as 1 are being raped and sexually assaulted by armed forces in Sudan, according to a new report by UNICEF.