Hemedti, Bashir and rise of merciless militia

Abdul Rahim Hamdan Dagalo (right), Sudan's Rapid Support Forces deputy commander and brother to Mohamed Hamdan Dagalo and Sudan People's Liberation Army (SPLA-North) chairperson Abdelaziz al-Hilu, in Nairobi on February 18, 2025. [ AFP]. 

Dwarfing President William Ruto when he made his first public visit to Kenya in January 2023, Mohamed Hamdan Dagalo, popularly known as Hemedti, oozed credence that sought credibility. For a man whose squinty smile paced by glinty eyes, underestimating him could be a jaundiced judgment.

Underneath the mask lies intemperate man who has risen from a lowly background to be a key player in one of Africa’s most convoluted regional conflicts.

He leads a military outfit that began as a non-state armed group before becoming a tolerated appendage of the Sudanese army,  which was absorbed within the country’s military ranks, before bolting out to be a gritty rebel force.

Despite having links to the Sudanese military, the Rapid Support Forces (RSF) often chose to operate as a quasi-unit of the army.

RSF is the former Janjaweeed militia, which played a key, yet deadly, role in the 2003-2020 war in Darfur.

It was blamed for the murder of around 300,000 people, and displacement of millions of others both in Darfur and South Kordofan states of Sudan.

According to a Human Rights Report published in September 2015 titled Men with No Mercy, RSF carried out a targeted and systematic murderous campaign on villages in Darfur. Part of the report reads, “Many civilians were killed by the RSF when they refused to leave their homes or give up their livestock, or when they tried to stop RSF fighters from raping them or members of their family.”

UN reports have also linked the group to various human rights abuses. Former Sudanese president Hassan Omar al Bashir, who is in detention, has an arrest warrant from ICC over the massacres.

But as manacles of ICC dangle over the heads of the perpetrators of the war crimes and other human rights violations, the history of RSF is too entrenched in the spiralling civil war in Sudan, but which is now sucking in regional players, including Kenya.

RSF’s history is steeped in the aftermath of the Toyota War of 1987, which pitted Chad against her then powerful neighbour, Libya, in which Muammar Gadaffi suffered a devastating defeat.

Some elements in Chad that had supported Libyan forces in the war, under the leadership of Acheikh Ibn-Oumar, retreated into Darfur, where they were received and granted accommodation by a local senior Baggara Arab chief called Musa Hilal. The Baggara are a group of dark-skinned Arabs found mainly in the Sahel.

The Janjaweed, whose local meaning translates to ‘Devils on Horseback’ or ‘Horsed Demons’, would engage in conflicts with local Zaghawa and Fur tribes over grazing land and control of minerals.

Some would later be part of the larger agenda of converting local mainly Christian and animist Sudanese communities to Islam under the Arabicisation agenda that was supported by Khartoum.

Years of conflicts and what has been termed by historians as Arab Apartheid led to an uprising by the local tribes, under the Justice and Equality Movement, Sudan Revolutionary Force and the Sudan Liberation Army rebel groups, from 2002. They inflicted heavy losses on the Sudanese army, which had been deployed in 2003 to quell the riots.

Bashir, turned to Janjaweed to boost his chances. He armed and built their capacity by sending senior officials of the Sudanese military to take command of the fighters. One of the fighters who had made a fortune in camel and gold trading was Mohamed Hamdan Dagalo aka Hemedti.

In 2013, amid calls for accountability over the Darfur pogroms, President Bashir renamed the group the Rapid Defence Forces, and charged Hemedti with handling the dissipating war in Northern Darfur and South Kordofan. He also made it part of the Sudanese army.