President Donald Trump announced that the US would intervene to end the civil war in Sudan. This promise came at the request of the Saudi crown prince Mohammed bin Salman. The conflict in Sudan — which has been marked by serious human rights abuses by both sides — recently reached a turning point. The Rapid Support Forces (RSF) took control of the town of El Fasher, effectively splitting the country in half between the paramilitary group and the Sudanese military.
At the heart of this brutal conflict is the relationship between two men: the leader of the Sudanese military, General Abdel Fattah al-Burhan, and the head of the Rapid Support Forces (RSF), Muhammad Hamdan Dagano Musa, also known as Hemedti.
To better understand the conflict, Today, Explained host Noel King spoke with Alex DeWaal, the executive director of the World Peace Foundation at Tufts. Dewaal has been studying Sudan for over 40 years. He says the two leaders are a product of the cycle of violence that has embroiled the country for decades. The conversation has been edited for length and clarity.
There’s much more in the full podcast, so listen to Today, Explained wherever you get podcasts, including Apple Podcasts, Pandora, and Spotify.
What has been happening in El Fasher?
What has happened in the last couple of years was that the people of Al Fasha, the different groups that were there, initially wanted to stay neutral in this war, but they couldn’t sustain that. So, they sided with the so-called government, and they became the last place in Darfur that was resisting the Rapid Support Forces, this very vicious paramilitary. Then, just a few weeks ago, the RSF overran that garrison.
The people of El Fasher had been living in a state of suspended terror for 18 months, because when the RSF overran previous cities — notably a city called El Geneina, close to the border with Chad — it had committed the most horrendous massacres against the people there. What the people of El Fasher had been experiencing was shelling drone attacks, targeted on the hospitals, on the clinics, on everything that made civilian life bearable. Then, when the troops or the paramilitary men came in, they went house to house pulling people out, murdering men in the streets, raping women and girls in front of their families.
Perhaps just as horrific as the crimes themselves is the way the men who are perpetrating them film themselves. They put themselves on video, and you see their relish, the enjoyment with which they torture and torment their victims before killing them. These are videos that are simply too horrible to watch.
So, there are two sides in this war, and there is a general leading each side. Let’s start with Sudan’s regular army, the SAF. Who is the general leading that force?
General Abdul Burhan is a regular career military officer. And like many of those regular officers, he has a pretty mixed record. Some 20 years ago, he was one of those who served in the vicious war in Darfur. He was then head of a contingent of Sudanese soldiers that served in Yemen, paid for by Saudi Arabia and the United Arab Emirates. He has his fingers in a number of crony capitalist enterprises that make money.
But, within his coalition, which is a very fractious coalition, he has some people who are utterly ruthless, among them an Islamist brigade. He relies on them, because they have money. They also have some of the best troops, and they are bitter and vengeful. When General Burhan has said he’s ready to come to peace talks, it’s the Islamists in his coalition who say, “no way.”
What does General Burhan want?
He calls himself the government of Sudan, even though he didn’t actually control the capital. The United Nations recognized him, rather foolishly in my view, and he wants to basically restore the status quo, which is certainly better than what we have now.
But it was that status quo against which civilians rebelled against seven years ago.
How has General Burhan conducted himself and his forces during this war?
So, there’s no doubt that his forces have committed war crimes. They’ve tried to cut off international assistance to rebel held areas. They’ve blocked the UN. Some of it is a lack of discipline, some of it is the vengefulness of local commanders.
The other side of this war is the Rapid Support Force, the RSF. This is a paramilitary group. Who is the general leading them?
His name is [Muhammad] Hamdan Dagalo [Musa]. He’s widely known as Hemedti. I first came across him 20 years ago when I read a report from African Union monitors. There were some peacekeepers in Darfur at the time in which a notorious militia called the Janjaweed, which had been rampaging on a genocidal campaign throughout Darfur, they destroyed a village called Adwa in the centre of Darfur — killed 128 people, 38 of them children. When these African Union monitors showed up, this fellow Hemedti was there, and he didn’t conceal the fact that they were responsible. In fact, he said, we’ve been planning this for a long time.
So, he was one of the most ruthless and capable commanders. He’s also a very charming man. Many of these killers are; they don’t have horns growing out of their heads. He became, over the succeeding years, a very capable commander serving the government, also a businessman. So, he took control of gold mines and became extremely wealthy.
He is a different kind of animal; he’s much more sort of a mercenary commercial operator. He doesn’t want to rebuild the state as it was. He basically would like to see power in the hands of him and his family, running the country as though it’s really a family business with his own private army, his own companies in charge.
How has Hemedti conducted himself and his forces during this war?
Hemedti claims to be standing for democracy, and he claims to be the champion of the poor, and the marginalized, and all those who oppose the Islamists. That doesn’t cut much ice. We see how his forces have behaved throughout the war; it is utterly atrocious. Right at the beginning of the war, they ransacked and pillaged the national capitol Khartoum, terrorized so many of its inhabitants, looted, raped their way through whole residential neighborhoods.
Then, in Darfur, they conducted what is candidly a genocidal campaign in this city of El Fasher. That was a longstanding goal of some of the groups that are allied with Hemedti and his forces.
You’ve been living in and writing about Sudan on and off for 40 years. These men have been shaped by years and years of war. Is the future of Sudan just more and more generations of men who’ve been shaped by war?
One of my very first hosts when I went to Darfur 40 years ago was an old sheikh from a nomadic Arab tribe, who told me, “We are so poor, we are so impoverished. We’ve lost our camels. The desert is encroaching. Our way of life is coming to an end.” And he said what this famine means isn’t so much that our people are starving, but that our way of life is ending.
Now, his son, same age as me, 20 years later, became head of the Janjaweed, this notorious force. Then, that man, Musa Hilal, the head of the Janjaweed, was himself displaced by his second in command Hemedti, who said, this man is not ruthless enough. So, what we see is over those 40 years, you can trace how the pressures on the traumas of hunger and of conflict have translated into this merciless political culture that we have today.
