It won’t be easy to defeat him
of Muhammad Hamdan Dagalo, better known as Hemedti, from the deserts of remotest Darfur to a gilded mansion on the banks of the Nile in Khartoum, Sudan’s embattled capital, is hard to fathom. Once a lowly camel rustler and small-time businessman, he started out with neither formal education nor military training. Yet by the late 2000s he was the most powerful militia commander in all of Darfur, the country’s vast western region, holding a key to Sudan’s future.
Within a decade the Janjaweed, officially recognised by the central government as the Rapid Support Forces , had morphed into a paramilitary body with tens of thousands of well-equipped troops. Mr Dagalo, now a brigadier-general, had struck lucrative deals with the United Arab Emirates and Saudi Arabia and had sent men to aid their war in Yemen.
strengthen its foothold in the capital, letting it rearm and deploy fresh troops. But Mr Dagalo has little chance of defeating the army outright.may be the more effectively commanded. Mr Dagalo and a close-knit circle of his family and clansmen will have to decide whether their troops should capitulate, raze the capital, or flee to their stronghold in Darfur, where they could inflict even more damage.
Jérôme Tubiana, a French researcher who has known Mr Dagalo since the late 2000s, calls him “a pragmatist”. Once upon a time his chief allies were the Arab supremacists of Darfur. These days he claims to be fighting for democracy. But as recently as 2021 he joined forces with his rival, General Burhan, the de facto president, to oust the civilian-led government in a coup.
Mr Dagalo’s weakness is that he lacks a wider popular base. Despite his recent efforts to portray himself as the authentic tribune of Sudan’s downtrodden masses, theremains at core a family concern centred on Mr Dagalo’s own Rezeigat tribe. Its exceptionally brutal conduct since the civil war began in April has alienated people still more. “He lost the hearts and minds of the people,” says a former official in Sudan’s interim government.
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