The fighting in Sudan has entered its third day as the capital Khartoum woke up to explosions and gunfire. Close to 100 civilians have been killed and hundreds more injured.
The clashes first erupted on Saturday following days of tension between the military led by General Abdel Fattah al-Burhan and the paramilitary group Rapid Support Forces (RSF), led by Mohamed Hamdan Dagalo, also known as Hemedti.
Why are the two military leaders at loggerheads? What does Hemedti want?
Why have tensions erupted in Sudan?
After the October 2021 coup which saw the arrest of civilian members of a power-sharing transitional council including Prime Minister Abdalla Hamdok, Sudan has been run by a council of generals. Al-Burhan and Hemedti are the two main military men at the centre of the dispute.
al-Burhan heads the country’s armed forces and is in effect its de facto head of state. Hemedti is his deputy and the leader of the RSF.
The two have had a fallout over the proposed move over toward civilian rule. A bone of contention is the plan to include the RSF in the military and its possible new leader.
General Abdel Fattah al-Burhan is the head of Sudan’s army and in effect the head of state. File photo/AFP
According to analyst Kholood Khair, a December framework agreement for the deal ratcheted up tensions between al-Burhan and Hemedti, when it elevated Hemedti’s position into Burhan’s equal, rather than his deputy.
The ongoing violence started after rising tension between the army and the RSF as members of the paramilitary were deployed across the country. The army looked at this as a threat.
It is unclear who instigated the fighting on Saturday but the RSF has claimed that it has seized control of the presidential palace and two international airports, including the one in Khartoum. However, the army has denied the claims.
The two sides observed a temporary ceasefire to allow the evacuation of wounded on Sunday but the fighting has now resumed. Hemedti told CNN on Sunday that the army had broken a United Nations-brokered humanitarian ceasefire.
Who is Hemedti?
The RSF is influential in the northeast African nation because of General Dagalo, known as “Hemedti”, or “Little Mohamed”. He rose to prominence in the country after he helped topple President Omar al-Bashir in 2019 and then quelled pro-democracy protests.
Today, Hemedti is among the most powerful and richest men in Sudan but he was once a camel trader with no formal education. He was reportedly forced to take up arms in the western region of Darfur after his trade convoy was attacked, 60 of his family members killed, and his camels looted. There was rising tension in Darfur in 2003 after mostly non-Arab rebels rose against Khartoum, according to a report in Reuters.
He formed the Janjaweed, a conglomeration of Arab tribal militias mostly drawn from camel-trading tribes, which he later transformed into the RSF. He caught the attention of President al-Bashir, who had turned to the Janjaweed to fight non-Arab people who were revolting against his rule in Darfur.
Hemedti’s RSF and the army staged a coup in 2021 against a joint civilian-military leadership. But now the two sides are at loggerheads after Hemedti said he regrets participating in the coup. File photo/Reuters
Al-Bashir and other top officials were charged with genocide in Darfur, where 300,000 people were killed and 2.7 million were displaced. However, there were no charges against Hemedti.
The then-Sudanese president became increasingly dependent on Hemedti. A tall imposing figure, he is said to be cunning. Al-Bashir relied on the militia leader to fight enemies in Darfur and other parts of Sudan.
Hemedti became the lieutenant general and had complete control – he seized gold mines in Darfur, sold Sudan’s valuable resources and became wealthy. His family soon owned gold mines and had business interests in livestock and infrastructure.
“I’m not the first man to have gold mines. It’s true, we have gold mines and there’s nothing preventing us from working in gold,” Hemedti said in a BBC interview.
It was under al-Bashir that Hemedti gained all power but that did not stop him from overthrowing the president in 2019 and ending his nearly 30-year rule. Al-Bashir was facing mass protests with the call growing for democracy and putting an end to the economic woes in Sudan.
After the departure of the al-Bashir, a civilian-military partnership was set up and Hemedti was at the centre of it. Since then, he has wanted a say in the future of Sudan.
He spoke of the need for democracy, met Western ambassadors and held talks with rebel groups, reports Reuters. But he did everything to crush dissent and the RSF played a big role.
Graphic: Pranay Bhardwaj
How powerful is the RSF?
The RSF, created in 2013, emerged from the Janjaweed fighters and its forces were used as border guards. In 2015, the heavily armed militia was deployed alongside regular Sudanese forces in the civil war in Yemen as part of the Saudi-led coalition, which helped boost Hemedti’s profile abroad.
It was granted the status of a “regular force”, and in 2017, a law legitimising the RSF as an independent security force was passed, reports Al Jazeera.
According to experts, the force has also been involved in the conflict in neighbouring Libya.
Sudan’s paramilitary Rapid Support Forces (RSF) grew out of the Janjaweed militia, which allegedly committed war crimes in Darfur. File photo/AFP
After the ouster of al-Bashir, the RSF cracked down on a protest camp outside the Ministry of Defence in 2019, killing more than 100 people. Hemedti denied ordering the assault. Two years later, the military and the RSF staged a coup.
However, since then the rivalry between al-Burhan and Hemedti has intensified.
Today, the RSF has about 100,000 members. Over the past two years, Hemedti ran a rapid recruitment campaign that helped grow the RSF’s ranks, according to a report in Washington Post.
The RSF troops come largely from western Sudan, near Darfur, and areas long neglected by the government, including regions in the east near the Red Sea and along the border with South Sudan, experts say. They also include child soldiers.
Now this strong growing force outside the army is leading to instability in the region.
What happens next?
Hemedti and the RSF are seeking legitimacy in the region. He wants a constitutional role in the country, Cameron Hudson, an expert on African peace and security at the Center for Strategic and International Studies, told The Post. He has tried to depict himself as an everyman standing up for Sudan’s “marginalised areas,” he said.
But as Hemedti became wealthy and others plundered villages, the belief in the RSF dwindled.As the conflict continues, experts say the Sudanese army is more powerful. It has an advantage over the RSF, which has fought in rural areas. This gives the formal military an upper hand in cities such as Khartoum.
This picture taken on 16 April 2023 shows Sudanese army soldiers, loyal to army chief Abdel Fattah al-Burhan, posing for a picture at the RSF base in the Red Sea city of Port Sudan. AFP
According to experts, the relationship between al-Burhan and Hemedti was a “marriage of convenience”. Independent researcher and policy analyst Hamid Khalafallah told AFP, “It was never a genuine alliance or partnership, they just had to tie their interests together to face the civilians as a united military front.”
The rift widened after Hemedti called the coup a mistake.
With both generals out for blood, Khair finds it “unlikely they’ll come to the negotiating table without one or both of them suffering heavy losses”. The longer they battle it out in city streets, she said, the higher the civilian toll climbs and the harder it will be for either general to rule over the wreckage.
“Both sides are strong enough that any war between them will be extremely costly, deadly and long,” Alan Boswell, Horn of Africa director at the International Crisis Group, told AFP. Even with a partial victory for either side in Khartoum, “war will continue elsewhere in the country”, dividing up Sudan into strongholds.
With inputs from agencies
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