Khartoum, the Lokoja of Sudan, is strategically positioned at the confluence of the Blue and White Niles. From her origins as an Egyptian military outpost in the early 19th century, her fate has been tied to the ambitions of thrusting conquerors. Sequentially, she became the seat of power for Alawiyya Egyptian, Mahdist, and Anglo-Egyptian (emphasis on Anglo) administrations. Each wrested control from the last! Throughout the 20th and early 21st centuries, Khartoum, as the nerve centre of Sudanese politics, was a battleground for the coups and counter-coups that embodied the emergent nation's struggle for stability.
As an unyielding sun blazed overhead on 14th April 2023, Khartoum became a city of ghosts as snipers nested in high-rises and artillery duels echoed across the Nile. The metropolis that was once the heart of Sudan was dismembered systematically, street by bloody street. The violence was occasioned by the falling out of two instruments of State violence. They were the Sudanese Armed Forces (SAF) and, more menacingly, the Rapid Support Forces (RSF).
The RSF, a paramilitary juggernaut with a fearsome reputation, was not merely fighting for control; it was consuming the State from within. To understand the maelstrom that has engulfed Sudan requires tracing the astonishing ascent of this militia and its master.
Turning and turning in the widening gyre
The falcon cannot hear the falconer.
Things fall apart; the centre cannot hold;
Mere anarchy is loosed upon the world,
The blood-dimmed tide is loosed, and everywhere
The ceremony of innocence is drowned;
The best lack all conviction, while the worst
Are full of passionate intensity.
—The Second Coming by William Butler Yeats
The RSF can be traced to the mounted militias known as the Janjaweed and the scorched earth of Darfur in the early 2000s. Then President Omar al-Bashir, sitting cozily in Khartoum, had unleashed them against Darfuri separatists as a crude and brutal instrument of counter-insurgency suppression. That informal arrangement was soon institutionalised, and in 2013, President al-Bashir’s government gave its guard dogs legal teeth. The RSF was born mature. For President al-Bashir, this was politically astute: loyal, battle-hardened praetorian guards do not grow on trees. They could counterbalance the regular army and project power where the SAF could or would not go. The RSF, though gouged on State resources, would be kept on a long leash.
The man who was at the end of that leash is Mohamed Hamdan Dagalo. He was a trader from the camel-herding Rizeigat of Darfur. His cunning and chilling ambition propelled his meteoric rise, consolidating control over the fractious Janjaweed factions to become the indispensable commander of the RSF. His authority stems from a web of patronage networks, rather than any State commission.
The RSF is his personal army. Its simple and compelling ideology is survival, power, unparalleled wealth and a spot of rape on the side. Judged purely by the raw logic of accumulation, then General Dagalo has been one of the most successful warlords in recent history. Signing up early enough to be trusted but too late to be deployed to the frontlines was likely one of the best career decisions a young Arab Sudanese could have made.
His operational model has proved devastatingly effective. General Dagalo built a war economy, financed by his control of Darfur's gold mines and robust smuggling networks that exported gold bars and imported state-of-the-art weaponry. This independent revenue stream gave the RSF an autonomy that the regular army envied. It also bought friends abroad. Allegations abound of connections to Chad, Russia and the United Arab Emirates.
The RSF honed their craft as soldiers of fortune, fighting in the chaotic conflicts of Yemen and Libya, gaining valuable combat experience and proving their worth to the global shadow economy of hard currency, harder drugs and iron-chomping mercenaries — the main characters and NPCs of the MSF: Militaries sans Frontières (arigato, Kojima-san).
Many men wish death upon me
Blood in my eye, dog, and I can't see
I'm tryin' to be what I'm destined to be
And niggas tryin' to take my life away
I put a hole in a nigga for fuckin' with me
My back on the wall, now you gon' see
Better watch how you talk when you talk about me
'Cause I'll come and take your life away
—Many Men by Curtis James Jackson III
The RSF’s apotheosis arrived in 2019. General Dagalo acted opportunistically when mass protests erupted against President Omar al-Bashir’s three-decade reign. He sided with the protestors and the regular army to topple his patron. In a masterful act of political theatre, the Janjaweed commander reinvented himself as an armed vanguard of the people’s revolution. That secured him the deputy chairmanship of the subsequent Sovereignty Council, which was the transitional body meant to guide Sudan to the sunlit uplands of democracy.
That transitional period was marked by a simmering rivalry between the RSF and the SAF, led by General Abdel Fattah al-Burhan. It is said that there cannot be two tigers on a mountain. The Sudanese civilians weren’t a third tiger. That left them as powerless spectators to the brewing confrontation between unrepresentative stationary bandits.
With the civilians shunted off the political stage, the inevitable confrontation between the armed men erupted in April 2023. The immediate trigger was a dispute over RSF integration into the regular army. General Dagalo chose war instead of dissolving his power base. The fighting that began in Khartoum quickly spread, plunging the country into the abyss of violence. The RSF’s tactics of urban warfare, honed abroad, proved horribly effective at dismantling what little was left of State control.
The consequences have been catastrophic. In Darfur, the violence has taken on an explicitly ethnic dimension, with targeted killings of Sudan’s non-Arab ethnicities. The Masalit of West Darfur have been especially victimised. The grim accusations of ethnic cleansing and war crimes, once levelled at the Janjaweed, are now directed at their official successor, the RSF. Across the country, nearly seven million people have been displaced into camps alongside victims who’d fled earlier conflicts in South Sudan, Chad, Eritrea, Ethiopia and even Syria! The jewel that was Khartoum is now a ruin; State power has fragmented. All that remains in the land of the blacks (bilad al-Sudan, no?) are fiefdoms dominated by warring States.
That is the grim stalemate as of mid-2025. The Sudanese army has driven the paramilitaries from the nation's core. However, deadly fighting continues to rage in central-western Kordofan and Darfur's traditional capital, al-Fashir. To consolidate its gains and legitimise external support, the RSF has formed a rival government in its territories with Mohamed Hassan al-Taishi, a former member of the defunct transitional council, serving as Prime Minister. This new State, in territories occupied by the RSF and the Sudan People’s Liberation Movement-North (SPLM-N), has also appointed regional governors for states in Darfur, Khartoum, the Nuba Mountains and the Eastern region.
The story of the RSF is a cautionary tale of how a State and its leader, driven by paranoid hubris, can create the instruments of their own destruction. It is a story of how a militia, nourished by State patronage, foreign interests and criminal enterprise, can grow powerful enough to devour its host. The ghosts of Khartoum await an answer on if their country can endure and their people punish their murderers. Time will tell.