When I landed in Khartoum in late February, the city was tense. On the short journey to my family home in the suburbs of Sudan’s capital, our car was stopped twice at checkpoints that in recent months have been erected after midnight. A car full of women – my mother, my sister and me – was clearly not the threat the officers were looking out for, so we were ushered onwards. Those manning the checkpoints were an inconsistent crew. Some were in plainclothes, others in military fatigues, the rest in police uniform. You never quite knew who you were dealing with, or exactly what they were afraid of. The only common feature they shared was a jittery menace. They were keeping a close eye on movements in a city where tensions had been rising between the two most powerful men in the country.
Sudan’s leader, Gen Abdel Fattah al-Burhan, the head of the Sudanese army, and the country’s deputy leader, Gen Mohamed Hamdan Dagalo (known as Hemedti), the head of a paramilitary organisation called the Rapid Support Forces (RSF), had been sharing power since late 2021, when they had jointly carried out a coup that had ejected civilians from a transitional government. But their alliance soon frayed and they began to regard each other with suspicion.
By February, inside Sudan, people were growing increasingly afraid that Burhan and Hemedti could come to blows and plunge the country into armed conflict. Still, life went on. Alongside the heavy security presence, there existed a broadly functioning city, kept afloat by families and communities pooling resources as inflation soared and public infrastructure crumbled. Khartoum’s shops and restaurants shone late into the night, casting their colours on to the checkpoints. As we pulled into our street just before dawn, a single bright makeshift light hung over a table on the side of the road. Gathered around, some of the neighbourhood teens were playing cards.
Over the next few weeks, tensions rose. Protests against the military and paramilitary junta – a regular occurrence since the 2021 coup – continued. In early March, a protester in Khartoum was filmed being fatally shot in the chest at close quarters by an army officer. More than 100 protesters had been killed since the coup, but this killing seemed even more gratuitous than usual, an indication of the rising tension and nervousness within and between different security forces. Locals found themselves adapting to the growing threat of violence. Warnings came through on WhatsApp and phone calls, telling people to avoid certain roads blocked by angry citizens and patrolling security forces, and we all found alternative routes as people made their way to weddings, funerals, work, friends.
Meanwhile, the two generals escalated their war of words, both attempting to portray themselves as the tribune of the people. Hemedti seized upon the shooting caught on video and called for the proper trial of the officer who shot the protester. Hemedti’s brother, the head of the RSF, said that his forces would not permit the killing or detention of protesters “from now on”. Burhan, in a pointed reference to a power-hungry Hemedti, claimed that the army was now ready to withdraw from politics altogether, and break the cycle of “support[ing] dictatorial governments”. Neither meant it. I left Sudan in mid-March, and a little over six weeks after I had passed the boys playing cards, the main road we took home from the airport would be struck by a missile launched from an army plane, and the airport would be in ruins.
It happened quickly. Both sides claim they were provoked and had no choice, but the big moves were made by the RSF. On the morning of Saturday 15 April, I started receiving messages from friends and family in Khartoum saying that they were hearing the sounds of gunfire. Within hours, the RSF had taken over the airport. Civilian aircraft were bombed on the asphalt. Two passengers died in their seats. RSF troops were posting videos from other airports and locations across the country, holding their machine guns aloft. Shortly after the attacks began, as citizens cowered in shock, Hemedti gave an interview to Al Jazeera. He was angry, ranting. Burhan, he said, was a criminal who wants to destroy the country. He would be arrested and brought to justice or “die like any dog”.
Hemedti only appeared on the national political scene four years ago. In that short time, he has drawn the army, and all of Sudan, into an unprecedented confrontation – in which the country’s army, under Burhan, now finds itself at war with a large paramilitary force that it cannot dominate, under a leader that it cannot control. How did Hemedti, seemingly overnight, come to capture Sudan’s politics?
Hemedti first became a nationally known figure after the Sudanese revolution of 2019, which ousted president Omar al-Bashir, a military dictator who ruled for almost 30 years. Until the revolution, Hemedti was a shadowy background militiaman who worked for Bashir, using his private army to stamp out rebellions in the restive west of the country on behalf of the central government. In February and March 2019, as protests against Bashir intensified, Hemedti’s forces were summoned from the peripheries of the country to support the army in Khartoum. But then, in April 2019, Hemedti made an unexpected move, which would be the start of his remarkable political rise.
Since early April, protesters had been camped outside Sudan’s military headquarters, demanding the removal of Bashir. Then, on 11 April, Hemedti decided, in a joint move with the military, to push aside the man who had been his patron and sponsor. After Bashir was removed, Hemedti transitioned from his informal role as head of a militia based outside Khartoum, to becoming incorporated into a post-revolution transitional government, working in partnership with Burhan, the commander in chief of the Sudanese army.
For two tense years after the revolution, Hemedti shared power with the army and civilian parties under a civilian prime minister, an arrangement that was supposed to pave the way for democratic elections. After the coup of October 2021, in which civilian elements were ejected from government, Hemedti’s role and power expanded once again. All transitional government bodies were dissolved, and Hemedti became the de facto vice-president of the country, with no civilian checks or buffer between him and the army. He thus consolidated huge executive power, with access to the country’s budget, and the mandate to represent Sudan globally, forging alliances and trade deals.
Hemedti is an outsider. If he were just a mid-level Sudanese politician, he would stand out; as a national leader, his style and personal background is even more striking. Unlike any other leader or politician the Sudanese have known, he speaks almost entirely in vernacular, and his Arabic is marked by an accent distinctive to the western tribes who live far away from the usual sources of Sudan’s leaders – Khartoum’s military cantonments and elite salons. Hemedti is folksy, easy in his skin, with a glint in his eye and a smiling mischief to his demeanour that belie his reputation for slaughter. Even his nickname, a diminutive of Mohamed, meaning “a little Mohamed”, is a nod to his baby-faced features.
His unconventional background means he has few allies among Sudan’s political elites and military. But as a politician who also happens to own immensely valuable goldmines and run the largest private army in Africa – with about 70,000 soldiers at his disposal – this has not, at least until now, proved an insurmountable obstacle.
Hemedti owns, along with other family members, a gold mining company that operates in lands he seized in Darfur 2017. In 2018, Bashir gave Hemedti permission to mine and sell gold, and operations extended to other gold rich areas in outside Darfur in the south of the country. The gold was exported, according to a 2019 Reuters investigation, circumventing capital controls, and even sold to the Sudanese central bank for a preferential rate. The yield was allegedly used to enrich Hemedti and his family, and fund the expansion of the RSF. (A spokesperson for Hemedti denied these allegations to Reuters.)
Sudan is Africa’s third-largest producer of gold, and one of the poorest countries in the world. Yet the Dagalo fortune is not one that Hemedti, or the rest of his family, is discreet about. Hemedti sees no conflict between his political role and his business interests. “I’m not the first man to have goldmines,” he told the BBC in 2019. In a video posted last year, Hemedti’s cousin boasted that the Dagalos have become “one of Africa’s richest families”.
Hemedti is also in the business of mercenaries. The RSF is an opaque mercenary force, which grew out of the Janjaweed militia, known for its atrocities in the Darfur war, and went on to become a formidable partner with the military in running Sudan. Over the past decade he has hired out his soldiers, some of them children, to Arab and African governments in need of troops for their own wars.
Beyond a tool for domestic power and making money, the RSF gives Hemedti geopolitical power. By sending his forces to Yemen to support Saudi Arabia and the UAE’s war against Houthi rebels – by 2017, according to reports, there were as many as 40,000 RSF troops in Yemen – Hemedti secured powerful allies. After the revolution that ousted Bashir, Saudi Arabia and the UAE sent $3bn to stabilise the prospects of the military-RSF junta. That alliance extended into Libya, where in 2019, 1,000 RSF troops were sent to support UAE-allied forces of Khalifa Haftar in his offensive on Tripoli.
The RSF has, for years, rendered Hemedti seemingly untouchable. “If you try to remove him by force,” Amjed Farid, a Sudanese political activist told me when we spoke in February, “that only means one thing: civil war.” Two months later, in an aggressive show of force, Hemedti demonstrated that his troops would indeed be unleashed if he felt threatened.
No one knows when or where, exactly, Hemedti was born. Like many who hail from Sudan’s peripheries, his date of birth was not officially recorded, though he is thought to be in his late 40s. He claims to have born in Sudan, but his family, members of an Arab tribe of camel herders and traders, are said to have arrived in western Sudan’s Darfur region in the 1980s, having fled conflict and drought in Chad.
Hemedti came of age in South Darfur, where his family eventually settled. He dropped out of school in the third grade, and later began to do business along Sudan’s porous borders with Libya and Egypt. He claims to have been a camel trader in his early years, though there are reasons to doubt this. “You will not find a single person in all of Darfur who will tell you he was a camel trader,” said Neimat al Mahdi, who lived in North Darfur at the time Hemedti claims he was trading camels, and now lives in the US after fleeing war in the region. “He was a highwayman. My father was a senior civil administrator in the region. All the camel traders would come to our town and insure their stock before setting off to sell it to Egypt and Libya. They were known names and families.” Any camels Hemedti ended up owning, she claimed, “were stolen from raids on camel processions on their way to the border”.
After starting out in the camel and sheep trade, he eventually expanded into selling furniture and knick-knacks. At one point he owned a large furniture store in Nyala. And Hemedti’s story might have ended there – school dropout, nomadic traveller, camel trader and smalltime businessman. It was the start of the rebellion in Darfur that transformed his fortunes.
The region, large and landlocked, straddles several climates and topographies. In the south there is rainfall and lush savanna, the centre is a plateau ringed by mountains, and the north is a sprawling desert. Established as an Islamic sultanate in 1596, Darfur’s history and identity long predates the creation of Sudan as a state, and it has never been fully integrated into wider Sudan proper. It is a region that is only noticed by the central government when it rebels, and then is oppressed into submission. The indigenous sedentary African peoples of Darfur and the nomadic Arabs have different cultures, identities, religious rituals and racial backgrounds, but have broadly coexisted for centuries. In the early 00s, however, competition for resources, precipitated by climate breakdown and desertification, triggered conflict between local groups. The influx of weaponry in the late 90s and early 00s, in part from the civil war in Chad along Darfur’s border, made the conflict bloodier. In 2003, as a result of prolonged drought, but also decades of misrule by central governments that favoured Arab tribes over others, Darfur’s disgruntled members of the non-Arab population turned to armed rebellion against the government.
Bashir’s regime, only just emerging from a long civil war in the south of the country, decided that it was not going to engage directly with the rebel movement. Instead, it turned to a notorious force of Arab warriors, the Janjaweed, who were known for violently extracting land and resources from African tribes in the largely lawless region. The Janjaweed were drawn from the same background as Hemedti, camel-herding nomads who traversed the border between Sudan and Chad. In the Sudanese government, they found a powerful sponsor, one that could supply them with arms and power.
In 2003, Hemedti, then in his late 20s, joined the Janjaweed. In a later interview with Sudanese TV, he claimed that members of his family had been killed by rebels in Darfur, which had spurred him to contact the government and offer himself as a recruit against rebels. His desire, he said, was to protect the camel-trading routes of his people and to protect Arabs who he claimed were being persecuted by African tribes.
Already connected to Arab militias through family members, and to other Arab interests in the region through the camel business, Hemedti rose through the ranks of the Janjaweed to become an “emir”, leading crews that attacked non-Arab populations.
“The period up to 2005 was a very difficult time,” Neimat al Mahdi told me. Resident in the town of Kabkabiya at the time, she saw first-hand the atrocities that the Janjaweed committed. They would enter a village of an African tribe, she said, kill all the men on sight and rape the women. Then they would tell the women: “You should celebrate, you slave. You are going to give birth to an Arab.”
As a Janjaweed commander, Hemedti cultivated an image that played into mythologies of the desert warrior, drawing a turban across his face, wearing desert fatigues and modelling himself as a charismatic figure recruiting across tribes and fighting for their rights. The truth may be more prosaic. There is little evidence that Hemedti was ever passionate about the ideal of self-determination. He seems to have always been a canny strategist, and once he joined the armed conflict, leveraged his political activities to further his commercial aspirations.
Over the next few years, Hemedti used his power in the region to extract more and more support from Khartoum. In 2007, he effectively blackmailed the government into extending him more resources by threatening to join the rebel movement. The government capitulated, and once an agreement was sealed, Hemedti was on his way to becoming not just an emir in an informal gang, but the head of a paramilitary force with weapons, uniforms, and budgets. He later admitted that his threats had all been a tactical ploy. “We didn’t really become rebels,” he told the journalist and researcher Jérôme Tubiana in 2009. “We just wanted to attract the government’s attention, tell them we’re here, in order to get our rights: military ranks, political positions, and development in our area.”
This approach was what distinguished him from the rest of the Janjaweed, Tubiana told me. Hemedti was ambitious and had an aptitude for cutting deals. Other senior leaders were less cunning, and more rebellious. Hemedti, in Tubiana’s view, was not a freedom fighter, but a pragmatist who used the intersecting strands of Sudan’s conflicts to advance his interests.
Hemedti got what he wanted from the government: the title of brigadier general, official ranks for his officers, and a large cash infusion – seed capital for his enterprise. His troops were put under the command of the government’s powerful intelligence unit, the National Intelligence and Security Service. Only six years after joining the Janjaweed, Hemedti was no longer a sun-scorched freelance mercenary, but a government official with an air-conditioned office. Over the next few years, Hemedti’s power and resources began to multiply. But his biggest asset by far, became his paramilitary army, the RSF.
In 2013, after a resurgence of rebellions against Sudan’s central government in Darfur and elsewhere, Bashir decided to formally create the RSF, under the control of Hemedti. By that point, Hemedti already commanded a large force of Janjaweed, mercenaries and tribal loyalists. Bashir’s move was a way to regularise these troops, making it easier for him to outsource the government’s military activities to a separate army, with a separate budget. For Bashir, the RSF served two roles: first, as a praetorian guard, protecting him from threats from his own inner circle, and second, as a tool for crushing dissent in Sudan’s peripheries. There, the RSF relied on the same brutal tactics deployed by the Janjaweed during the Darfur war. This time, though, they had more weapons and air cover from the Sudanese army. A Human Rights Watch report found that in 2015, during two operations against civilians affiliated with rebel tribes, “the RSF committed a wide range of horrific abuses”, including “torture, extrajudicial killings and mass rapes”.
In June 2019, the RSF deployed similarly brutal tactics against protesters in Khartoum. After the removal of Bashir in April, thousands of people that had taken part in a sit-in outside the government’s military headquarters in central Khartoum refused to budge. These protesters were not content with what they were being offered: a government made of up Bashir’s remnants in the army, the RSF, and the intelligence forces. They demanded the immediate instalment of a wholly civilian government, the return of the army to the barracks, and the dissolution of the RSF. By this stage, the military and the RSF had lost patience, and were not going to tolerate another large, drawn-out protest movement that would threaten their power, too. Bashir was dispensable, but they were not.
In the early hours of the morning of 3 June, the power went out and the sit-in camp was attacked while the protesters were sleeping. Security forces led by the RSF began moving in, driving swiftly to the location in pickup trucks. Eyewitness reports and hundreds of smartphone videos captured the massacre. “They began shooting and setting tents on fire”, one of the protesters, Mohamed Madani, told me. “The gunfire didn’t stop.” Days after the attack, dozens of bodies secured with heavy weights were pulled out of the Nile River. “You used to chant the whole country is Darfur,” the militia said, after the attack, mocking the idealistic revolutionaries’ calls for solidarity with Darfur in the heady early days of the uprising in Khartoum. “Now we brought Darfur to you.” (Hemedti has denied ordering the killings.)
The total number of casualties is still unknown. It was a traumatic event in Sudan’s recent political history, but in scale, it was small in comparison to what the RSF and similar militias, with the support of government, had visited on Sudan’s civilians away from scrutiny in Darfur, South Kordofan and Blue Nile.
The weeks after the June 2019 massacre were a period of hectic negotiation between the RSF, the army and civilian leaders represented by the Forces for Freedom and Change (FFC), as they tried to hash out a transitional arrangement that would appease protesters, stabilise the country and set a new course for Sudan. In July, a power-sharing agreement was reached, and in August, a civilian prime minister, Abdalla Hamdok, was selected, with the intention of working with Hemedti and Burhan to steer the country towards democratic elections in three years.
The government was shaky. After a few initial gains, such as securing the removal of Sudan from the US’s state sponsors of terror list in late 2020, and the promise of debt relief from the World Bank, the RSF and the military started to grow tired of what Burhan called “in-fighting” between them and the civilians, and between civilian parties themselves. In mid-2021, someone who was working closely with the prime minister at the time told me that the civilian component was “weak” and splintered, and that the soldiers still retained ultimate control. In the same period, another civilian government staffer told me that Hamdok, a gentle technocrat who made his name working in international organisations, was not aggressive enough to stand up to the two generals, and so was beginning to lose his credibility. By October 2021, the generals had had enough, took power and detained the prime minister and others in his cabinet.
The coup was not a success. Protests erupted, were violently suppressed, then erupted again, week in, week out. The international community, which had begun to bring Sudan in from the cold, stopped aid and funding. The African Union suspended Sudan’s membership, and the generals found themselves running a fiercely restive country and a deteriorating economy, while also failing to trust each other fully. Hemedti began to suspect that Islamists from Bashir’s regime were infiltrating the army. He established close ties with contacts in Russia, meeting with Russian foreign minister Sergei Lavrov the day of the Ukraine invasion, but it was clearly not enough to decisively strengthen his position against the army, either through extensive arms purchases or funding.
By the middle of 2022, both generals had begun to make overtures to civilian leaders once again, in the hope that a new deal with civilians would buy them some time and options. Burhan needed to figure out how to remove the threat of the RSF and bring it under the umbrella of the army. Hemedti needed to find a way to embed himself more securely within the senior offices of the state, through running for election for example, without fear of military ambush, but also without relinquishing his soldiers. The FFC came back to the table, and in December 2022, civilian parties signed a framework agreement, to be finalised in April. The deal promised the civilians, against all the evidence of the past two years, that the generals would relinquish power. Hemedti, however, would soon grow to believe this was a trap.
In February, I had arrived in Khartoum hoping to meet with Hemedti. I had made contact with his team via former members of the civilian government, but was warned that Hemedti would probably not give me an audience because he had been hurt by previous encounters with the press. After the 2019 revolution that thrust him into the spotlight, Hemedti had launched a media campaign to burnish his image, but he was not satisfied with the results. He hired a Canadian public relations firm for an upfront fee of $6m, and opened his large headquarters in south Khartoum to visiting media, offering them meals and regaling them with accounts of how he and his forces intervened to save the country from anarchy. The charm offensive didn’t work. “All people wanted to print was that he was a killer and had no education,” a middleman who had introduced him to a western journalist in the past told me.
If Hemedti is sensitive about his outsider status, the mockery he is subjected to within Sudan, and particularly Khartoum, most likely does not help. A wave of social media memes follows his public speeches, making fun of his accent and expression. Pictures of him in his old Darfur days looking bedraggled circulate on WhatsApp groups, captioned with derisory comments. Hemedti was a hinterland village clown to the Arab elites of central Sudan, the so called “riverine tribes”, descendants of Arabs who migrated from the Arabian peninsula in the 12th century and intermarried with Indigenous populations along the banks of the Nile River, which runs through the centre of Sudan. These groups, who have dominated government and state bureaucracy since independence in 1956, are not accustomed to people such as Hemedti at the seat of power. In forcing Bashir to step aside, Hemedti overturned an agreement that underwrote Sudanese politics for generations. The elites of the centre have the political power, and their partners in the peripheries enforce their agendas, but remain in the background.
At the end of February, I received a surprising message from my contacts: Hemedti would talk to me after all, but only in a particular setting – on his farm on the outskirts of Khartoum, and not at RSF headquarters in the city. The tension was rising between him and Burhan as the April deadline for finalising the framework agreement loomed, and they were nowhere close to agreement on one major sticking point – when and how to incorporate the RSF into the army. Against this backdrop, I was told that Hemedti was keen to get his account of events across. But in early March he suddenly departed on a series of unscheduled foreign trips to the UAE and Eritrea, in hindsight perhaps an effort to drum up regional support for his campaign against the army.
Over the next few days, as we awaited Hemedti’s return, I spent time with his inner circle, who were nestled in plush offices and villas in affluent parts of the city, in buildings that all seemed hastily and expensively furnished, and only recently inhabited. The people I met were lavishly supported by bodyguards, drivers and young female personal assistants. Despite these shows of wealth, Hemedti’s close allies seemed to think of themselves as plucky outsiders who cut their teeth in the crucible of Sudan’s wars, far away from the decadent capital and its corrupt network of traditional political elites. One of them told me of having escaped the scene of a massacre in Darfur, only to come to Khartoum and be dazed by the dissonance of seeing people dining, partying and going about their lives, oblivious to what was happening only hours away in their own country.
They all spoke of Hemedti as a misunderstood figure, a generous man living frugally, preoccupied with the interests of the Sudanese people and battling the devious propaganda of Burhan and his shadowy cabal of Islamist allies. They maintained that a “deep state”, made up of the powerful remnants of Bashir’s regime and the army, was working to eliminate him. Despite all the power that Hemedti had amassed, he was a stressed man under siege, they said. He had realised that troops, money and arms weren’t enough to establish him firmly in power.
By early April, as the deadline for finalising the agreement with the civilians and the military approached, it became clear that commitment to the deal was ebbing away. The army backtracked on previous statements, declaring that it would not cede power to a civilian authority unless it was elected. Crucial points, such as the timing of the RSF’s integration into the army, and Hemedti’s own position within it, became contentious. Hemedti accused the army of dragging its feet and “clinging on to power”. In turn, an army spokesperson stated: “We cannot make an agreement when there are two armies in the country.”
It is not clear exactly when the last shred of trust disappeared, or who fired first, but three days before hostilities began, the RSF had begun to deploy more troops to Khartoum and to quietly reinforce its positions in the strategic northern city of Merowe. On Saturday 15 April, the first day of hostilities, the RSF troops captured Merowe airport and airbase, and appeared to take over Khartoum airport and the presidential palace. The army’s military headquarters were also attacked, and by Sunday morning the building was on fire. The army turned to its major advantage over the RSF, aerial firepower, and deployed jets that rained missiles on RSF positions across the centre of the city, against buildings and clusters of militiamen nestled close to civilian areas. The fighting flared up simultaneously in other parts of Sudan, not just in the north, but once again in Darfur, in the cities of Nyala and Al Fashir. Hemedti had junked the deal as a way for him to consolidate his power, and reverted to what he knows best: fighting.
That fighting seems partly animated by Hemedti’s bitterness at how he has been treated by his former partners in the army, and by Burhan personally, the man whose death he relished in that first interview after the conflict began. From the third day of the conflict, RSF troops began entering houses in Khartoum, pillaging, looting and assaulting civilians. Such actions suggest a force that is hostile not just to the army, but the inhabitants of a city, and a wider ethnic heartland that had never welcomed them, a bloody expression of Hemedti’s vengeance.
Not even a week after the hostilities began, civilian casualties have risen to nearly 300, the deaths concentrated in Khartoum, the site of the most intense fighting. Some died by bullets that ricocheted into their homes, others trying to make their way across the city to safety. The rest of the city’s population are running out of food and water, and sleeping, if they can, far away from windows as the constant barrage of gun fire rattles outside their homes. Meanwhile, the army indiscriminately showers both Hemedti’s militia and the Sudanese people with bombs, as it fights an existential battle on behalf of a ruling class desperately trying to eliminate a man who is both its creation, and its punishment.
