Chadian born camel trader Muhammad Hamdan Dagalo Musa "Hemedti" now controls half of Sudan

"SUDANESE speculate that Hemedti sees himself either as president of a breakaway state, or still harbours ambitions to rule all of Sudan.

It's also possible that he sees a future as an all-powerful political puppet master, head of a conglomerate that controls businesses, a mercenary army and a political party. By these means, even if he isn't acceptable as Sudan's public face, he can still pull the strings.

And as Hemedti's troops massacre civilians in el-Fasher, he is confident that he enjoys impunity in a world that does not care much." Read full report.

From BBC News

By Alex de Waal
Africa analyst
Published Tuesday 4 November 2025, 00:42 GMT - full copy:

He made his money selling camels and gold. Now this warlord controls half of Sudan

Image source, ANADOLU VIA GETTY IMAGES

Mohamed Hamdan Dagolo, known as "Hemedti", has emerged as a dominant figure on Sudan's political stage, with his paramilitary Rapid Support Forces (RSF) now controlling half of the country.

The RSF scored a notable victory recently when it overran the city of el-Fasher, the last garrison held by the Sudanese army and its local allies in the western region of Darfur.

El-Fasher residents are suffering from famine following the RSF's 18-month siege of the city, a UN-accredited group of food security experts confirmed on Monday.

Feared and loathed by his adversaries, Hemedti is admired by his followers for his tenacity, ruthlessness, and his promise to tear down a discredited state.

Hemedti has humble origins. His family is from the Mahariya section of the camel-herding, Arabic-speaking Rizeigat community that spans Chad and Darfur.

He was born in 1974 or 1975 - like many from a rural background, his date and place of birth were not registered.

Led by his uncle Juma Dagolo, his clan moved into Darfur in the 1970s and 80s, fleeing war and seeking greener pastures and were allowed to settle.

After dropping out of school in his early teens, Hemedti earned money trading camels across the desert to Libya and Egypt.

At the time, Darfur was Sudan's wild west - poor, lawless and neglected by the government of then-President Omar al-Bashir.

Arab militiamen known as the Janjaweed - including a force commanded by Juma Dagolo - were attacking the villages of the indigenous Fur ethnic group.

This cycle of violence led to a full-scale rebellion in 2003, in which Fur fighters were joined by Masalit, Zaghawa and other groups, saying they had been ignored by the country's Arab elite.

In response, Bashir massively expanded the Janjaweed to spearhead his counter-insurgency efforts. They quickly won notoriety for burning, looting, raping and killing.

Image source, GETTY IMAGES. Image caption: 

The atrocities of the Janjaweed militia caused international outrage

Hemedti's unit was among them, with a report by African Union peacekeepers saying it attacked and destroyed the village of Adwa in November 2004, killing 126 people, including 36 children.

A US investigation determined that the Janjaweed were responsible for genocide.

The Darfur conflict was referred to the International Criminal Court (ICC), which brought charges against four men, including Bashir, who has denied carrying out genocide.

Hemedti was one of the many Janjaweed commanders deemed too junior to be in the prosecutor's sights at that time.

Just one, the Janjaweed "colonel of colonels", Ali Abdel Rahman Kushayb, was brought to court.

Last month he was found guilty on 27 counts of war crimes and crimes against humanity and he will be sentenced on 19 November.

In the years following the height of the violence in 2004, Hemedti played his cards skilfully, rising to become head of a powerful paramilitary force, a corporate empire, and a political machine.

It is a story of opportunism and entrepreneurship. He briefly mutinied, demanding back-pay for his soldiers, promotions and a political position for his brother. Bashir gave him most of what he wanted and Hemedti rejoined the fold.

Later, when other Janjaweed units mutinied, Hemedti led the government forces that defeated them, in the process taking control of Darfur's biggest artisanal gold mine at a place called Jebel Amir.

Rapidly, Hemedti's family company Al-Gunaid became Sudan's largest gold exporter.

In 2013, Hemedti asked - and got - formal status as head of a new paramilitary group, the RSF, reporting directly to Bashir.

The Janjaweed were folded into the RSF, getting new uniforms, vehicles and weapons - and also officers from the regular army who were brought in to help with the upgrade.

Image source, AFP VIA GETTY IMAGES. Image caption:

The RSF was an ally of the army, before they fell out

The RSF scored an important victory against the Darfur rebels, did less well in fighting an insurgency in the Nuba Mountains adjacent to South Sudan, and took a subcontract to police the border with Libya.

Ostensibly curbing illicit migration from Africa over the desert to the Mediterranean, Hemedti's commanders also excelled in extortion and, reportedly, people-trafficking.

In 2015, Saudi Arabia and the United Arab Emirates (UAE) called on the Sudanese army to send troops to fight against the Houthis in Yemen.

The contingent was commanded by a general who had fought in Darfur, Abdel Fattah al-Burhan, now the head of the army at war with the RSF.

Hemedti saw a chance and negotiated a separate, private deal with both Saudi Arabia and the UAE to provide RSF mercenaries.

The Abu Dhabi connection proved most consequential. It was the beginning of a close relationship with the Emirati president, Mohamed bin Zayed

Young Sudanese men - and increasingly from neighbouring countries too - trekked to the RSF recruiting centres for cash payments of up to $6,000 (£4,500) on signing up.

Hemedti struck a partnership with Russia's Wagner Group, receiving training in return for commercial dealings, including in gold.

He visited Moscow to formalise the deal, and was there on the day that Russia invaded Ukraine. After the war in Sudan broke out, he denied the RSF was getting help from Wagner.

Although the RSF's main combat units were increasingly professionalised, it also encompassed a coalition of irregular old-style ethnic militia.

As the regime faced mounting popular protests, Bashir ordered Hemedti's units to the capital, Khartoum.

Punning on his name, the president dubbed him himayti, "my protector", seeing the RSF as a counterweight to potential coup makers in the regular army and national security.

It was a miscalculation. In April 2019, a vibrant camp of civic protesters surrounded the military headquarters demanding democracy.

Bashir ordered the army to open fire on them. The top generals - Hemedti among them - met and decided to depose Bashir instead. The democracy movement celebrated.

Image source, AFP VIA GETTY IMAGES. Image caption: The RSF leader turned on then-President Omar al-Bashir, helping to depose him

For a time, Hemedti was lionised as the fresh face of Sudan's future. Youthful, personable, actively meeting diverse social groups, and positioning himself as the challenger to the country's historic establishment, he tried to change his political colours. That lasted just a few weeks.

As he and the joint head of the ruling military council, Burhan, stalled on handing power to civilians, the protesters stepped up their rallies, and Hemedti unleashed the RSF, which killed hundreds of people, raped women, and threw men into the River Nile with bricks tied to their ankles, according to a report by campaign group Human Rights Watch (HRW), external.

Hemedti has denied the RSF committed atrocities.

Pressed by the quartet of countries formed to promote peace and democracy in Sudan - the US, UK, Saudi Arabia and the UAE - the generals and the civilians agreed to a compromise drafted by African mediators.

For two years, there was an unstable coexistence of a military-dominated sovereign council and a civilian cabinet.

As a cabinet-appointed committee investigating the companies owned by the army, security and RSF closed in on its final report - which was set to expose how Hemedti was fast expanding his corporate empire - Burhan and Hemedti dismissed the civilians and took power.

But the coup-masters fell out. Burhan demanded that the RSF come under army command.

Hemedti resisted. Days before a deadline in April 2023 to resolve this issue, RSF units moved to surround the army headquarters and seize key bases and the national palace in Khartoum.

The putsch failed. Instead, Khartoum became a war zone as the rival forces fought street by street.

Violence exploded in Darfur, with RSF units mounting a vicious campaign against the Masalit people.

The UN estimates as many as 15,000 civilians died, and the US described it as genocide. The RSF denied the allegation.

RSF commanders circulated videos of their fighters torturing and killing, advertising the atrocities and their sense of impunity.

The RSF and its allied militia rampaged across Sudan, pillaging cities, markets, universities, and hospitals.

An avalanche of looted goods are for sale in what are popularly known as "Dagolo markets" reaching beyond Sudan into Chad and other neighbouring countries. The RSF has denied its fighters are involved in looting.

Trapped in the national palace under attack from artillery and airstrikes, Hemedti was badly injured in the early weeks of the conflict and disappeared from public view.

When he reappeared months later he showed no remorse for atrocities and was no less determined to win the war on the battlefield.

Image source, REUTERS. Image caption: 

The war in Sudan has forced millions of people to flee their homes

The RSF has acquired modern weapons including sophisticated drones, that it has used to strike Burhan's de facto capital, Port Sudan, and which played a crucial role in the assault on el-Fasher.

Investigative reporting by, among others, the New York Times, has documented that these are transported through an airstrip and supply base built by the UAE just inside Chad. The UAE denies that it is arming the RSF.

With this weaponry, the RSF is locked in a strategic stalemate with its former partner, the Sudanese army.

Hemedti is trying to build a political coalition, including some civilian groups and armed movements, most notably his former adversaries in the Nuba Mountains.

He has formed a parallel "Government of Peace and Unity", taking the chairmanship for himself.

With the capture of el-Fasher, the RSF now controls almost all the inhabited territory west of the Nile.

Following escalating reports of mass killings and widespread condemnation, Hemedti declared an investigation into what he called violations committed by his soldiers during the taking of the city.

Sudanese speculate that Hemedti sees himself either as president of a breakaway state, or still harbours ambitions to rule all of Sudan.

It's also possible that he sees a future as an all-powerful political puppet master, head of a conglomerate that controls businesses, a mercenary army and a political party. By these means, even if he isn't acceptable as Sudan's public face, he can still pull the strings.

And as Hemedti's troops massacre civilians in el-Fasher, he is confident that he enjoys impunity in a world that does not care much.

Alex de Waal is the executive director of the World Peace Foundation at the Fletcher School of Law and Diplomacy at Tufts University in the US.

More about the conflict in Sudan

A simple guide to the war in Sudan

'I was accused of spying and beaten' - a boy's escape from captured Sudan city

New videos show executions after RSF militia takes key Sudan city

'We saw people murdered in front of us' - Sudan siege survivors speak to the BBC

Reports of mass killings in Sudan have echoes of its dark past

Sudan's fertile region where food is rotting amid famine and war

View original: https://www.bbc.co.uk/news/articles/c3vn17r29v9o

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Sudan: RSF to turn Zurrug, N Darfur into a dream city

THE ruthless leader of Sudan's Arab militia has grand plans for the remote western province. But the transformation of Zurrug risks more unrest. Read more in this report from the archives of Sudan Watch, copied here in full.

Blood, sand and gold: victor’s city rises from ashes of Sudan’s civil war

Report from the The Observer - www.theguardian.com

Observer dispatch Darfur

By KLAAS VAN DIJKEN

Dated Saturday 29 February 2020, 17.05 GMT

Photo: Children at the school in Zurrug sing anti-racism songs that praise the Rapid Support Forces. Photograph: Klaas van Dijken/Lighthouse Reports

Zurrug is one of the few towns on Earth that has yet to appear on Google maps. After nightfall, its sparse shacks are illuminated by campfires that throw shadows over pick-up trucks mounted with anti-aircraft guns – the only hint of the violent past of this outpost in Darfur, Sudan’s troubled western province.

The town is being built on the spoils of a brutal war that once tore at the conscience of the world. The victors in that conflict have grand plans for this settlement based on a winner-takes-all vision for their home region – a vision that clouds the future of the whole of Sudan.

The Observer was given unprecedented access to this remote area of Darfur by the Rapid Support Forces, a paramilitary group whose influence stretches from Sudan’s borderlands with Chad and Libya to the capital, Khartoum, where protesters last year toppled 30-year dictator Omar al-Bashir.

The RSF wants to show off a future city as evidence of the peace it has brought to this contested land. To the vanquished – scattered in their millions across desperate refugee camps within and beyond Sudan’s borders – Zurrug is an insult being built on stolen land.

Darfur and Bashir were back in the headlines last month when Sudan’s transitional government agreed to hand over the ousted president to the international criminal court to face charges of crimes against humanity. These crimes took place in Darfur from 2003, when Bashir unleashed Arab militia, with the backing of the Sudanese army, to crush an insurgency by black African tribes. What began as ethnic clashes over land and water escalated into a crisis that prompted western public demonstrations, celebrity activism and a genocide investigation.

Those armed herders were known at the time as the Janjaweed, or “devils on horseback”. Today they are called the RSF. Their leader, Mohamed Hamdan Dagalo – long referred to as Hemedti – is Bashir’s heir apparent. A renowned and ruthless commander, he was called by Bashir “my protector”, a role that helped him become the wealthiest man in Sudan.

Zurrug is a world away from Khartoum, where riverine Arab elites created a metropolis thanks to their dominance of politics and economy. This makeshift town is a 10-hour drive across the vast plateau from Darfur’s northern city of El Fasher.

In its current form, Zurrug’s market has stalls hawking anything from Chinese phones to sacks of beans. The prefab clinic and school are speckled with the letters “UN”, a reminder that they have been jerry-built from the wreckage of the shrinking peacekeeping mission to Darfur, Unamid.

Photo: Rapid Support Forces on the way from Kutum towards Zurrug. Photograph: Klaas van Dijken/Lighthouse Reports

According to plans seen by the Observer, Zurrug will become a city. The documents call for residential areas, a hospital and town squares. Officials from Saudi Arabia and the United Arab Emirates visited in 2018 promising to help finance the work, including an international airport.

For now, two water towers mark the entrance to the town, placed there to slake the thirst of the camels, which vastly outnumber either people or vehicles. The largest house belongs to Juma Dagalo, the area’s chief and Hemedti’s uncle. “We were nomads, but now we want to develop ourselves, so we have to settle and send our children to school,” he said.

In his telling, Zurrug belongs to his ethnic group, the Mahariya, having been gifted to them by their former colonial masters, the British. The chief, who brought Hemedti up, says the land was empty.

This story of empty land is bitterly disputed by community leaders in the camps in north Darfur. They claim Zurrug is on land they inhabited for centuries before being forced to leave by the RSF, who used the same tactics – murder, rape and robbery – as the Janjaweed. One of these communities is the Zaghawa, a black African ethnic group who bore much of the brunt of the war crimes alleged in Bashir’s ICC indictment.

Mohamed Ibrahim, a Zaghawa chief or umda, said: “What Juma Dagalo is saying is not true. Zurrug was not empty land. We have our farms there but we cannot harvest. The RSF denies us access.”

Injustice and asymmetric war on civilians dominated much of the three decades that Bashir spent in power. His hold on office relied on a complex of alliances that spanned the Islamists, the army and support among the Arab middle class. Last year the regime collapsed as demonstrators in the cities demanded a civilian government. But insiders claim that Bashir stepped down only when Hemedti refused to use the RSF to crush the demonstrations. The protector switched allegiances from Bashir to the protestors in a move that saw him expand his support base far beyond Darfur.

“I stood beside the Sudanese people,” Hemedti told the Observer from his gilded residence in Khartoum. “A massacre would have happened herein Khartoum, a genocide would have happened on 11 April without our existence.”

The RSF is sanctioned by the state but its allegiance is to Hemedti, not Sudan’s army. His leadership of what is effectively a private army has reportedly helped him make a fortune from gold, construction and alleged smuggling. Hemedti denies that the men he commands perpetrated atrocities, either in their former guise as the Janjaweed or more recently as the RSF.

Today, Hemedti, whose Mahariya clan is part of the populous Rizeigat tribe, is vice-chairman of the sovereign council, the transitional body that is meant to guide Sudan to a new civilian government. But his credentials as protector of the people were stained in June last year when soldiers – many in RSF uniforms – attacked a civilian sit-in in the capital. More than 150 people were killed and many woman were raped. Hemedti denies ordering the violence and blames elements of the former regime seeking to discredit him. His denial is dismissed by most of the protest groups.

Photo: Mohamed Hamdan Dagalo, known as Hemedti, the RSF leader. Photograph: STR/AP

Meanwhile, a struggle is being waged inside the Sovereign Council, and on the streets, to make good on the promise of a transition to civilian rule. The army retains a powerful, possibly decisive voice on the council. Straddling it all is Hemedti, not beholden to Sudan’s army, confident in his wealth and political support. He has the backing of influential Gulf States, cemented by sending the RSF to fight in Yemen alongside Saudi proxies in yet another gruesome conflict.

For now, Hemedti prefers to whitewash the RSF’s recent and deeper past, saying his forces have brought safety and stability to Darfur. On the issue of land, he appears magnanimous: “Whoever took land or built anything on land which is not his, he has to leave it. Everybody has to take his own old land.”

But those who have done the taking in north Darfur are overwhelmingly Hemedti’s own Mahariya people. His uncle, Juma Dagalo, has toured the region enticing members of his own ethnic group to come and settle in Zurrug and six other proto-towns around it. Each one has the same school and clinic, recycled from the UN bases. The teachers and doctors are on Hemedti’s payroll. Water towers, a practical and symbolic way of staking claim to land, have started to appear – all financed by the RSF.

A report last year from the UN panel of experts for Darfur concluded that development around Zurrug was meant to lure people from the cities. It also warned that it had the potential to “become a new source of conflict”.

The land issue is far from buried, and Darfur is part of the same negotiations between Sudan’s transitional government and various rebel groups that saw Bashir offered up to the ICC. Whatever those talks conclude, the facts on the ground are already being changed, with mono-ethnic settlements expanding every day.

After dark in Zurrug the children of the Mahariya gather around a single lightbulb to recite passages from the Qur’an. During the day they sing songs that mash up anti-racism slogans with praise for the RSF. These anthems would ring hollow with the disenfranchised Zaghawa, who have formed committees in their camps and written letters to Sudan’s new leadership. They have had no response and their leader, Mohamed Ibrahim, warns: “If we can’t solve this peacefully, we will take up arms again.”

Source: https://sudanwatch.blogspot.com/2020/03/sudan-blood-sand-and-gold-victors-city.html

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