From camel trader to warlord to Sudan’s most dangerous general. The lightning rise of Mohammed Hamdan Dagalo, alias Hemedti, has made him one of the key figures in the recent history of the African country.
Head of the fearsome Rapid Support Forces (FAR) paramilitary group, he is one of the undisputed protagonists of the violence that broke out last Saturday and has brought the country to the brink of civil war.
The other, faced to the death with him, a man from the establishment but also accustomed to the smell of gunpowder: the head of the army, Abdelfattah Burhan, born in 1960 in northern Sudan and wearing a uniform full of military decorations.
Their visceral confrontation and mutual hatred, now transferred to an open combat that has claimed more than two hundred lives and almost two thousand wounded, will mark the future of the African country.
Both are united by ambition and separated by their roots. Born in Darfur into a family of camel traders in Chadian and Sudanese lands, Hemedti soon left behind his humble origins – he dropped out of secondary school as a child – and thrived thanks to his warlike cunning and his ability to build a group paramilitary group of mercenaries more powerful than the Sudanese army.
Spurred on by a thirst for revenge: after armed robbers attacked his camel caravan and killed more than 60 family members, Hemedti joined the Arab militias that fought an insurgency by non-Arab groups in Darfur that escalated in 2003 into the fearsome Janjaweed militia, encouraged by the dictator Al Bashir.
That name still strikes terror in Sudan today: more than 300,000 people were killed by Janjaweed soldiers, in acts so horrific that they led the International Criminal Court to indict Al Bashir for crimes against humanity.
Later transformed into the FAR, the militia led by Hemedti, a man of imposing size, became a kind of special forces independent from the army that provided protection to the Sudanese satrap, fearful that his army would conspire against him.
That loyalty of arms gave Hemedti a military rank, who is now a general, and made him a millionaire thanks to his control of the gold mines in the north of the country and the income of his mercenaries, whom he sent to fight in Yemen or Chad.
“Hemedti’s career is an object lesson in political entrepreneurship from a specialist in violence. His conduct and impunity (for now) that have defined the Sudanese periphery has now been brought to the heart of the country’s capital, â€Sudan analyst and specialist Alex de Waal wrote this week in The Conversation.
For Sudanese lawyer Ahmed El Gaili, his inordinate ambition goes beyond his pocket and he longs for the baton. And that makes him a total danger. “I have long believed that he (Hemedti) is an existential threat not only to Sudan’s democratic transition but also to his viability as a state.”
In front of him he will have a man from the power apparatus who also wants to command. Trained at the Khartoum military academy, Burhan is the emblem of a man attached to the military leadership.
After rising through the ranks in the army and fighting successfully in Darfur, in 2019 he came forward as a defender of the revolution when popular protests toppled Al Bashir. The shedding of his skin earned him to become the president of the Military Council of the transition. Like his second, another manual opportunist was placed: Hemedti.
Their strange alliance had one more twist. Both generals allied themselves in 2021 to carry out a coup and thus end a democratic transition that caused them itching and fear.
The two generals shared a concern: a strong civilian government would risk losing their economic privileges and being held accountable for their abuses. The move to derail the process did not go well for them. Without international support, his attempt to stop the transition ran into a galloping economic crisis and the resistance of a society determined by democratic change.
Since then, it was a matter of time before the rivalry between Hemedti and Burhan exploded. In disagreement over what the country’s political future should be, who should lead the armed forces and how the incorporation of the 100,000 FAR soldiers into the army should be, their differences speak the language of the bombings since Saturday.
On paper, Burhan has the upper hand, since he has an impressive armament of tanks, artillery and, above all, the air force. But his army does not have something that Hemedti has in excess: troops fought in the fight to the death on the battlefield. The future of Sudan oscillates in this violent imbalance.
For the Sudanese Mohammed Awad, director of the Al Yarida newspaper, all is not lost for Sudanese society yet. The journalist and analyst believes that between Hemedti and Burhan there will only be one left, but whoever wins will not get the victory.
“The people have lost their fear and have already managed to overthrow the dictator Al Bashir, who used much greater levels of repression and violence. Hemedti and Burhan fight for influence, but the victor will then face the Sudanese people and lose. This is a dark tunnel that Sudan must go through to achieve freedom.”
