Alex de WaalAfrica analyst
Anadolu via Getty Images
Mohamed Hamdan Dagolo, known as “Hemedti”, has emerged as a dominant figure on Sudan’s political stage, with his paramilitary Rapid Support Forces (RSF) now controlling half of the country.
The RSF scored a notable victory recently when it overran the city of el-Fasher, the last garrison held by the Sudanese army and its local allies in the western region of Darfur.
Feared and loathed by his adversaries, Hemedti is admired by his followers for his tenacity, ruthlessness, and his promise to tear down a discredited state.
Hemedti has humble origins. His family is from the Mahariya section of the camel-herding, Arabic-speaking Rizeigat community that spans Chad and Darfur.
He was born in 1974 or 1975 – like many from a rural background, his date and place of birth were not registered.
Led by his uncle Juma Dagolo, his clan moved into Darfur in the 1970s and 80s, fleeing war and seeking greener pastures and were allowed to settle.
After dropping out of school in his early teens, Hemedti earned money trading camels across the desert to Libya and Egypt.
At the time, Darfur was Sudan’s wild west – poor, lawless and neglected by the government of then-President Omar al-Bashir.
Arab militiamen known as the Janjaweed – including a force commanded by Juma Dagolo – were attacking the villages of the indigenous Fur ethnic group.
This cycle of violence led to a full-scale rebellion in 2003, in which Fur fighters were joined by Masalit, Zaghawa and other groups, saying they had been ignored by the country’s Arab elite.
In response, Bashir massively expanded the Janjaweed to spearhead his counter-insurgency efforts. They quickly won notoriety for burning, looting, raping and killing.
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The atrocities of the Janjaweed militia caused international outrage
Hemedti’s unit was among them, with a report by African Union peacekeepers saying it attacked and destroyed the village of Adwa in November 2004, killing 126 people, including 36 children.
A US investigation determined that the Janjaweed were responsible for genocide.
The Darfur conflict was referred to the International Criminal Court (ICC), which brought charges against four men, including Bashir, who has denied carrying out genocide.
Hemedti was one of the many Janjaweed commanders deemed too junior to be in the prosecutor’s sights at that time.
Just one, the Janjaweed “colonel of colonels”, Ali Abdel Rahman Kushayb, was brought to court.
Last month he was found guilty on 27 counts of war crimes and crimes against humanity and he will be sentenced on 19 November.
In the years following the height of the violence in 2004, Hemedti played his cards skilfully, rising to become head of a powerful paramilitary force, a corporate empire, and a political machine.
It is a story of opportunism and entrepreneurship. He briefly mutinied, demanding back-pay for his soldiers, promotions and a political position for his brother. Bashir gave him most of what he wanted and Hemedti rejoined the fold.
Later, when other Janjaweed units mutinied, Hemedti led the government forces that defeated them, in the process taking control of Darfur’s biggest artisanal gold mine at a place called Jebel Amir.
Rapidly, Hemedti’s family company Al-Gunaid became Sudan’s largest gold exporter.
In 2013, Hemedti asked – and got – formal status as head of a new paramilitary group, the RSF, reporting directly to Bashir.
The Janjaweed were folded into the RSF, getting new uniforms, vehicles and weapons – and also officers from the regular army who were brought in to help with the upgrade.
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The RSF was an ally of the army, before they fell out
The RSF scored an important victory against the Darfur rebels, did less well in fighting an insurgency in the Nuba Mountains adjacent to South Sudan, and took a subcontract to police the border with Libya.
Ostensibly curbing illicit migration from Africa over the desert to the Mediterranean, Hemedti’s commanders also excelled in extortion and, reportedly, people-trafficking.
In 2015, Saudi Arabia and the United Arab Emirates (UAE) called on the Sudanese army to send troops to fight against the Houthis in Yemen.
The contingent was commanded by a general who had fought in Darfur, Abdel Fattah al-Burhan, now the head of the army at war with the RSF.
Hemedti saw a chance and negotiated a separate, private deal with both Saudi Arabia and the UAE to provide RSF mercenaries.
The Abu Dhabi connection proved most consequential. It was the beginning of a close relationship with the Emirati president, Mohamed bin Zayed
Young Sudanese men – and increasingly from neighbouring countries too – trekked to the RSF recruiting centres for cash payments of up to $6,000 (£4,500) on signing up.
Hemedti struck a partnership with Russia’s Wagner Group, receiving training in return for commercial dealings, including in gold.
He visited Moscow to formalise the deal, and was there on the day that Russia invaded Ukraine. After the war in Sudan broke out, he denied the RSF was getting help from Wagner.
Although the RSF’s main combat units were increasingly professionalised, it also encompassed a coalition of irregular old-style ethnic militia.
As the regime faced mounting popular protests, Bashir ordered Hemedti’s units to the capital Khartoum.
Punning on his name, the president dubbed him himayti, “my protector”, seeing the RSF as a counterweight to potential coup makers in the regular army and national security.
It was a miscalculation. In April 2019, a vibrant camp of civic protesters surrounded the military headquarters demanding democracy.
Bashir ordered the army to open fire on them. The top generals – Hemedti among them – met and decided to depose Bashir instead. The democracy movement celebrated.
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The RSF leader turned on then-President Omar al-Bashir, helping to depose him
For a time, Hemedti was lionised as the fresh face of Sudan’s future. Youthful, personable, actively meeting diverse social groups, and positioning himself as the challenger to the country’s historic establishment, he tried to change his political colours. That lasted just a few weeks.
As he and the joint head of the ruling military council, Burhan, stalled on handing power to civilians, the protesters stepped up their rallies, and Hemedti unleashed the RSF, which killed hundreds of people, raped women, and threw men into the River Nile with bricks tied to their ankles, according to a report by campaign group Human Rights Watch (HRW).
Hemedti has denied the RSF committed atrocities.
Pressed by the quartet of countries formed to promote peace and democracy in Sudan – the US, UK, Saudi Arabia and the UAE – the generals and the civilians agreed to a compromise drafted by African mediators.
For two years, there was an unstable coexistence of a military-dominated sovereign council and a civilian cabinet.
As a cabinet-appointed committee investigating the companies owned by the army, security and RSF closed in on its final report – which was set to expose how Hemedti was fast expanding his corporate empire – Burhan and Hemedti dismissed the civilians and took power.
But the coup-masters fell out. Burhan demanded that the RSF come under army command.
Hemedti resisted. Days before a deadline in April 2023 to resolve this issue, RSF units moved to surround the army headquarters and seize key bases and the national palace in the capital, Khartoum.
The putsch failed. Instead, Khartoum became a war zone as the rival forces fought street by street.
Violence exploded in Darfur, with RSF units mounting a vicious campaign against the Masalit people.
The UN estimates as many as 15,000 civilians died, and the US described it as genocide. The RSF denied the allegation.
RSF commanders circulated videos of their fighters torturing and killing, advertising the atrocities and their sense of impunity.
The RSF and its allied militia rampaged across Sudan, pillaging cities, markets, universities, and hospitals.
An avalanche of looted goods are for sale in what are popularly known as “Dagolo markets” reaching beyond Sudan into Chad and other neighbouring countries. The RSF has denied its fighters are involved in looting.
Trapped in the national palace under attack from artillery and airstrikes, Hemedti was badly injured in the early weeks of the conflict and disappeared from public view.
When he reappeared months later he showed no remorse for atrocities and was no less determined to win the war on the battlefield.
Reuters
The war in Sudan has forced millions of people to flee their homes
The RSF has acquired modern weapons including sophisticated drones, that it has used to strike Burhan’s de facto capital, Port Sudan, and which played a crucial role in the assault on el-Fasher.
Investigative reporting by, among others, the New York Times, has documented that these are transported through an airstrip and supply base built by the UAE just inside Chad. The UAE denies that it is arming the RSF.
With this weaponry, the RSF is locked in a strategic stalemate with its former partner, the Sudanese army.
Hemedti is trying to build a political coalition, including some civilian groups and armed movements, most notably his former adversaries in the Nuba Mountains.
He has formed a parallel “Government of Peace and Unity”, taking the chairmanship for himself.
With the capture of al-Fasher, the RSF now controls almost all the inhabited territory west of the Nile.
Following escalating reports of mass killings and widespread condemnation, Hemedti declared an investigation into what he called violations committed by his soldiers during the capture of el-Fasher.
Sudanese speculate that Hemedti sees himself either as president of a breakaway state, or still harbours ambitions to rule all of Sudan.
It’s also possible that he sees a future as an all-powerful political puppet master, head of a conglomerate that controls businesses, a mercenary army and a political party. By these means, even if he isn’t acceptable as Sudan’s public face, he can still pull the strings.
And as Hemedti’s troops massacre civilians in al-Fasher, he is confident that he enjoys impunity in a world that does not care much.
Alex de Waal is the executive director of the World Peace Foundation at the Fletcher School of Law and Diplomacy at Tufts University in the US.
More about the conflict in SudanGetty Images/BBC
