Sudan
Commonly known as Hemedti, the Rapid Support Forces general rose through the ranks of the Janjaweed during the 2003-05 war
The story goes that Mohamed Hamdan Dagalo – commonly known as Hemedti, or “little Mohammed” – first became a fighter for the Sudanese Arab Janjaweed militia in Darfur after an armed attack killed dozens of members of his family.
A high school dropout became a camel trader, general and deputy head of state of the Rapid Support Forces [RSF] now fighting the Sudanese forces loyal to army chief Abdel-Fattah al-Burhan is also widely feared.
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The grandson of the leader of a sub-clan of the Mahariya Rishowat Arab tribe, who herded cattle including camels in Darfur and Chad, is a tall and imposing figure, his nickname a nod to his youthful appearance.
During the 2003-05 war in South Darfur, in which an estimated 300,000 died, he rose through the Janjaweed ranks, commanded a brigade and attracted the attention of then-dictator Omar al-Bashir, for whom he would serve as enforcer .
Always an opportunist, he briefly led a rebellion against Bashir and Khartoum in 2007-08, withdrawing his forces into the bush and fighting the army before striking a deal with the government that promoted him to general.
Then, in 2013, Hemedti formed the RSF around a core of the Janjaweed—originally tasked with fighting the Sudan People’s Liberation Army North in the Nuba Mountains—but expanded their recruitment. This would lay the groundwork for his eventual power in the country.
His rise under Bashir came with other rewards. He was allowed to operate autonomously and largely with impunity, and confiscated gold mines from a rival tribal leader in Darfur – the source of his considerable wealth.
“I’m not the first man to own gold mines,” Hemedti told the BBC. “It’s true, we have gold mines and nothing prevents us from working in gold.”
Hemedti, the definition of a warlord, recruited fighters from Darfur to fight as mercenaries in Yemen after the Saudi-Emirati intervention in Yemen in 2015 gave him another valuable source of income – a move memorably described by Alex de Waal as Hemedtis ” Adoption of a model “of state mercenaryism” was described.
Amid the Sudanese anti-Bashir revolution in 2019, Hemedti seems to have wavered between arguing for using his armed forces to break up mass sit-ins and demonstrations in Khartoum and other cities.
But on April 11 of that year, sensing the writing was on the wall for Bashir and sniffing another opportunity, he joined Army Chief Burhan — the same figure he’s fighting now — to depose Bashir and ostensibly to join the broader movement for a democratic transition.
If it seemed as if Hemedti had changed his stripes, events in June would put observers to rest when his troops massacred 100 protesters and committed rapes – apparently believing the general’s supporters in the Gulf would make no fuss. Hemedti has denied ordering the killings.
With Burhan and Hemedti both holding powerful positions in the Transitional Military Council and the subsequent Sovereign Council, negotiations to democratize Sudan made little headway until, perhaps inevitably, in 2021 Burhan and the army allied to Hemedti and his RSF launched a coup d’état.
Allegedly, Hemedti said the army seized power to “correct the course of the people’s revolution” and achieve stability, but many observers have long suspected that his aim after Bashir’s ouster was to position himself in a position of undisputed power in the country to bring Sudan.
This weekend, after two years of rising tensions between the army and RSF, it appeared Hemedti and Burhan were preparing to move against their rival as the army accused Hemedti of mobilizing his forces.
“Both [Hemedti] and Burhan have calculated that the leadership competition is now a zero-sum game and so have turned against each other and unfortunately the Sudanese people have to stand on the sidelines while both military leaders fight to the bitter end,” said Adel Abdel Ghafar, director of the program for Foreign Policy and Security at Middle East Global Affairs Council Al Jazeera in an interview earlier this week.
None of this comes as a surprise to Sudanese, long familiar with his brutal machinations.
“I believed in that for a long time [Hemedti] is an existential threat not only to Sudan’s democratic transition but also to its viability as a state,” said Ahmed T el-Gaili, a Sudanese lawyer.
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