On April 15, 2023, fighting erupted between the Sudanese Armed Forces (SAF) led by Lieutenant General Abdul Fattah Al-Burhan and the Rapid Support Forces (RSF) commanded by General Mohamed Hamdan Dagalo, known widely as Hemedti or “Little Mohamad”.
By yesterday, the fighting had left at least 413 people dead, 3,551 wounded, and millions trapped in their homes and precipitating a profound humanitarian crisis. A nuanced understanding of the role of Sudan’s long legacy of extra-state violence in the country’s spiralling conflict is central to effectively intervening and mediating one of Africa’s worst crises.
Instead, Sudan is in the throes of a three-way conflict involving the SAF, RSF and civilian crusaders for a professional and integrated Sudanese military subordinated to civilian oversight in a democratic polity.
Conceptually, with the SAF-RSF clash, the Sudanese state has virtually lost its monopoly on violence and slid into its own interregnum—a period of uncertainty, confusion and disagreement among the dominant elite. The fighting reveals three unfinished transitions.
The first unfinished transition is the integration of SAF and RSF into one military. This merger has always been a key condition for Sudan’s successful transition. How the RSF should be integrated into the military, and who is to oversee that process, is at the heart of the disagreement between Al-Burhan and Hemedti, his deputy in the Transitional Sovereign Council.
The trouble with Sudan is simply and squarely the legacy of extra-state violence. The Sudanese elite sowed the wind of state-sponsored informal violence to counter popular resistance, today the country is reaping the whirlwind of a clash between legal and extra-legal state violence.
The rise of RSF as a paramilitary force reveals two conceptual problems that have bedevilled the Sudanese state.
First is the diffusion of violence involving militias, criminal gangs and state security agencies, gradually leading to the loss of the state’s monopoly of legitimate force especially in the periphery.
The second is informal or state-sponsored violence. Faced with the intra-elite struggle for state power that culminated in the Darfur crisis, the al-Bashir state resorted to the use of extra-state violence. The logical outcome of the in formalisation of violence is the rise of the informal wing of the military.
The RSF grew out of the Popular Defence Forces (the Janjaweed militia). El-Bashir deployed the militia to put down the rebellion in Darfur where an estimated 2.5 million people were displaced and 300,000 killed.
The RSF should have been disbanded or wound up after the regime’s Darfur triumph. Instead, Bashir rewarded the militia’s commanders financially, enabling the militia to grow to rival the military.
In 2013, the militia was transformed into RSF, granted the status of a “regular force” in 2015, and a law legitimising the unit as an independent security force was passed in 2017. Bashir deployed the militia to quell unrest in states such as South Kordofan and the Blue Nile.
The result was the emergence of a bifurcated Sudanese military held together by Bashir and the deep state. RSF was administered by the National Intelligence and Security Service (NISS) but commanded by the SAF during military operations.
All this changed after al-Bashir was deposed in 2019, ending his 30-year rule. Hemedti grew wary that RSF was going to lose its power through integration into the army. In the 2021-2023 hiatus, the Russian-trained general ran a rapid recruitment campaign that helped grow the RSF’s ranks.
The force grew meteorically from an estimated 17,500 by 2007 to as many as 50,000 troops by 2019 and to between 70,000 and 150,000 by 2023. RSF is almost evenly matched with SAF, which currently has between 110,000 and 120,000 soldiers. He built up a fleet of armoured vehicles and acquired drones.
Hemedit transformed RSF into a powerful mercenary group inside Sudan and regionally. Its 40,000-strong RSF troops fought in the war in Yemen alongside Saudi and Emirati forces in the 2016–2017 period. In July 2019, some 1,000 RSF soldiers were present in Libya.
By 2023, the RSF had become an autonomous force. This created two rival centres of military power, a problem accentuated by the absence of a strong centre to complete the chain of command and hold them together.
The second unfinished transition is to deal with the legacy of an interventionist military that monopolises the economy by transforming both the SAF and RSF into an integrated professional military under civilian leadership.
Sudan’s military cronyism and monopolistic control over the country’s economy are responsible for Sudan’s derailed transition.
Today, Sudan’s security elite, both SAF and RSF, controls 408 entities, including agricultural conglomerates, and medical import companies, as well as giant banks such as the Omdurman National Bank (ONB) and Khaleej Bank.
The civilian-military transitional government, charged with guiding Sudan’s transition towards democracy, stirred up the hornet’s nest when it decided to form an anti-corruption committee to confiscate assets from figures who made a fortune under Bashir. This struck at the core of the military’s patronage networks. Senior officers removed the administration in October 2021.
The third unfinished transition is a legacy of military involvement in the long-delayed transition to civilian rule.
In April 2019, after months of demonstrations, the SAF and RSF took part in the military coup that toppled al-Bashir. Along with other security forces, the RSF carried out the Khartoum massacre on June 3, 2019.
The military and the pro-democracy movement clinched a power-sharing deal. They established a joint military-civilian council headed by al-Burhan with Hemedit as his deputy and the prominent economist, Abdalla Hamdok, as prime minister and leader of the transitional cabinet.
In October 2021, the two rivals, Al-Burhan and Hemedit, jointly orchestrated a coup that upended Sudan’s transition to democracy. Escalating friction between them has derailed the signing of an internationally supported deal to revive Sudan’s democratic transition.
New mass pro-democracy rallies were already taking place across Sudan when the fighting erupted. These pro-democracy groups and the army are demanding the RSF’s integration into SAF. Al-Burhan and Hemedit are jostling for the position of commander-in-chief of the military.
The conflict appears a no-win situation for both the SAF and RSF. Silencing the guns in Sudan requires transforming, integrating and subordinating the two wings of the Sudanese military under an elected Commander-in-Chief. Only this can end the legacy of extra-state violence.
Prof Kagwanja is a former Government Adviser, the Chief Executive at Africa Policy Institute and Adjunct Scholar at the University of Nairobi and the National Defence University, Kenya.
