When Khartoum awoke in April 2023 to the sound of tanks rolling through its streets and jets screaming overhead, it was the return of a nightmare Sudan had never truly escaped. The gunfire wasn’t just a clash of uniforms; it was the unraveling of a state, a showdown between the army of General Abdel Fattah al-Burhan and the paramilitary empire of Mohamed Hamdan Dagalo – known simply as Hemedti.
To many, Hemedti embodies the paradox of African leadership in crisis. Once a camel trader in Darfur, he built his fortune not through ballots or policy, but through blood and gold. His militia, the Rapid Support Forces (RSF), grew out of the Janjaweed, the feared “devils on horseback” who in the early 2000s carried out massacres in Darfur that the United States called genocide.
Darfur’s story began with drought, land, and identity — clashes between Arab nomads and African farmers. But by the 1980s, these tensions were weaponized by Libya’s Muammar Gaddafi, who armed Arab tribes in pursuit of a grand project of Arab supremacy across the Sahel. Local skirmishes became racialized wars. The Sudanese state, weak and opportunistic, co-opted these militias rather than stopping them.
By 2003, when Darfur’s non-Arab communities rose up for equality, Khartoum unleashed the Janjaweed. Villages were torched, women raped, men executed, and entire communities erased. The United Nations estimates some 300,000 people were killed. Survivors still carry the scars of genocide.
Hemedti rose in this crucible. By the mid-2000s, he was no longer a mere foot soldier but a commander who understood both the battlefield and the marketplace. With loyalty to Omar al-Bashir’s regime, he transformed his militia into a formal force, the RSF. Bashir gave him weapons and rank; in return, Hemedti gave the dictator a tool sharper than the army itself.
What made Hemedti different was his grasp of economics. In 2017, his RSF seized Darfur’s Jebel Amir gold mines, ousting his former mentor Musa Hilal. That single act turned a warlord into one of Sudan’s richest men. Through his family company, Al Junaid, Hemedti turned Sudan’s gold wealth into a private treasury, smuggling billions’ worth to Dubai and beyond.
For ordinary families in Darfur, this gold never meant schools, hospitals, or food security. It meant deeper poverty, as their land was militarized and their sons recruited into militias. Gold became a curse, financing wars abroad in Yemen and Libya, where Hemedti rented his fighters to Gulf monarchies. His deals extended even to Russia’s Wagner Group, trading Sudan’s resources for weapons and political backing.
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