Terrorists Kidnap Zamfara District Head
Terrorists kidnapped a senior member of an influential emirate council, a District Head in Zamfara state, northwest Nigeria. The kidnapping breaks a period of peace in his district, residents say.
Terrorists kidnapped a senior member of an influential emirate council, a District Head in Zamfara state, northwest Nigeria. The kidnapping breaks a period of peace in his district, residents say.
In addition to its natural resources and agricultural output, Sudan’s geographic location also makes it critical to Gulf security.
Since the 1970s, Arab Gulf countries have pledged billions of dollars in aid and investment to Sudan in sectors including agriculture, energy and infrastructure, yet many of these projects fail due to the country’s political uprisings and warring factions.
Dozens have been killed in armed clashes in the Sudanese capital Khartoum following months of tension between the military and the powerful paramilitary group Rapid Support Forces (RSF). Behind the tensions is a disagreement over the integration of the paramilitary group into the armed forces – a key condition of a transition agreement that’s never been signed but has been adhered to by both sides since 2021.
General Mohamed Hamdan Dagolo, better known as Hemedti, is the leader of the RSF. He is a key mover in the fast-escalating civil war, as he has been in other key moments in Sudan’s recent history.
Hemedti’s Rapid Support Forces is led by Darfurian Arabs known as Janjaweed. The term refers to the armed groups of Arabs from Darfur and Kordofan in western Sudan. Drawn from the far west of the country’s periphery, they have – in a mere decade – become the dominant power in Khartoum. And Hemedti has become the face of Sudan’s violent, political marketplace.
I have been a scholar of Sudan for decades. During 2005-06, I was seconded to the African Union mediation team for Darfur and from 2009-11 served as senior adviser to the African Union High-Level Implementation Panel for Sudan, in the lead-up to the independence of South Sudan. My most recent book, co-authored with Justin Lynch, examines Sudan’s unfinished democracy.
Hemedti’s career is an object lesson in political entrepreneurship by a specialist in violence. His conduct and (as of now) impunity are the surest indicator that politics of the mercenary kind that have long defined the Sudanese periphery, have been brought home to the capital city.
Coming in from the periphery
Hemedti is from Sudan’s furthest peripheries, an outsider to the Khartoum political establishment. His grandfather, Dagolo, was leader of a subclan that roamed across the pastures of Chad and Darfur. Young men from these camel-herding, landless and marginalised group became a core element of the Arab militia that led Khartoum’s counterinsurgency in Darfur from 2003.
A school dropout turned trader, Hemedti has no formal education. The title ‘General’ was awarded on account of his proficiency as a commander in the Janjaweed brigade in Southern Darfur at the height of the 2003-05 war. A few years later, he joined a mutiny against the government, negotiated an alliance with the Darfurian rebels, and threatened to storm the the government-held city of Nyala.
Soon Hemedti cut a deal with the government. Khartoum would settle his troops’ unpaid salaries and compensation for the wounded and killed. He got promotion to general and a handsome cash payment.
After returning to the Khartoum payroll, Hemedti proved his loyalty. President Omar al-Bashir who ruled Sudan from 1993 to April 2019 when he was deposed became fond of him, sometimes appearing to treat him like the son he had never had.
But, in the days after Bashir was overthrown, some of the young democracy protesters camped in the streets around the Ministry of Defence embraced him as the army’s new look.
A country in his pocket
Back in the fold, Hemedti ably used his commercial acumen and military prowess to build his militia into a force more powerful than the waning Sudanese state.
Al-Bashir constituted the Rapid Support Forces as a separate unit in 2013, initially to fight the rebels of the Sudan People’s Liberation Army-North in the Nuba Mountains. The new force came off second best. But, with a fleet of new pickup trucks with heavy machine guns, it soon became a force to be reckoned with, fighting a key battle against Darfurian rebels in April 2015.
Following the March 2015 Saudi-Emirati military intervention in Yemen, Sudan cut a deal with Riyadh to deploy Sudanese troops in Yemen. One of the commanders of the operation was General Abdel Fattah al-Burhan who has chaired the Transitional Military Council since 2019. But most of the fighters were Hemedti’s RSF. This brought hard cash direct into Hemedti’s pocket.
And in November 2017, Hemedti’s forces took control of the artisanal gold mines in Jebel Amer in Darfur — Sudan’s single largest source of export revenues. This followed the defeat and capture of his arch-rival Musa Hilal, who rebelled against Al-Bashir.
Suddenly, Hemedti had his hands on the country’s two most lucrative sources of hard currency.
Hemedti is adopting a model of state mercenarism familiar to those who follow the politics of the Sahara. The late President Idriss Déby of Chad rented out his special forces for counter-insurgencies on the French or U.S. payroll in much the same manner. One can expect to see RSF troops deployed to Libya some day.
On the other hand, with the routine deployment of paramilitaries to do the actual fighting in Sudan’s wars at home and abroad, the Sudanese army has become akin to a vanity project. It is the proud owner of extravagant real estate in Khartoum, with impressive tanks, artillery and aircraft. But it has few battle-hardened infantry units. Other forces have stepped into this security arena, including the operational units of the National Intelligence and Security Services, and paramilitaries such as special police units — and the RSF.
Reaping the whirlwind
But there’s also a twist to the story. Every ruler in Sudan, with one notable exception, has hailed from the the heartlands of Khartoum and the neighboring towns on the Nile. The exception is the Khalifa Abdullahi “al-Ta’aishi” who was a Darfurian Arab. His armies provided the majority of the force that conquered Khartoum in 1885. The riverian elites remember the Khalifa’s rule (1885-98) as a tyranny. They are terrified it may return.
Hemedti is the face of that nightmare, the first non-establishment ruler in Sudan for 120 years. Despite the grievances against Hemedti’s paramilitaries, he is still recognised as a Darfurian and an outsider to the Sudanese establishment.
When the Sudanese regime sowed the wind of the Janjaweed in Darfur in 2003, they least expected to reap the whirlwind in their own capital city. In fact the seeds had been sown much earlier. Previous governments adopted the war strategy in southern Sudan and southern Kordofan of setting local people against one another. This was preferred to sending units of the regular army -— manned by the sons of the riverain establishment — into peril.
Hemedti is that whirlwind. But his ascendancy is also, indirectly, the revenge of the historically marginalised. The tragedy of the Sudanese marginalised is that the man who is posing as their champion is the ruthless leader of a band of vagabonds, who has been supremely skillful in playing the transnational military marketplace.
The RSF is commanded by General Mohamed Hamdan Dagalo, who currently holds the position of deputy head of Sudan’s ruling Sovereign Council.
Sudan’s military and the Rapid Support Forces (RSF) paramilitary group are engaged in fierce fighting in the capital, Khartoum, and elsewhere in the country, raising fears of a civil war.
The report, titled: “Gas Expansion and the Energy Transition in Nigeria and the Niger Delta,” said the country’s weak enforcement of standards and regulations has enabled oil and gas companies to “continue to operate without due care.”
The United Nations’s top diplomat in Sudan, Volker Perthes, has told the Security Council that the latest temporary ceasefire is holding only in some parts of the country, and that the army and RSF are each accusing the other of truce violations.
The Sudan conflict has once again bared facts about the Horn of Africa States and the greater region surrounding it. The region has neighbors like the GCC countries which have significant interest not only in the region but also Yemen just across from the region. It has also Sudan as a neighbor and Egypt further north. On the south is the East Africa Community (South Sudan and Uganda and Kenya). All of these countries and regions have their own issues which impact on the region, one way or the other. Let us take these regions and countries one at a time.
The endless sorrow of the Sudanese people is like a scar that refuses to heal, a constant reminder of the pain and suffering that has plagued the African continent for far too long. They fight for freedom, for a chance to live without fear, but their struggle seems to fall on deaf ears, drowned out by the apathy of the world. It’s as if humanity has put on a pair of tinted glasses, seeing only the surface of the crisis in African countries, ignoring the depths of despair that lie beneath. The recent massacre and emergency in Sudan are just another chapter in this tragic story of ignorance and neglect.
After weeks of escalating tensions, open military clashes broke out on April 15 between the Sudanese Armed Forces (SAF) and the Rapid Support Forces (RSF), where the latter is a powerful paramilitary group. Despite the fact that both groups were previously close allies who jointly seized control of Sudan in 2021, subsequent tensions over control and decision-making on national key issues have driven them apart. This includes, but is not limited to, opposing views on the integration of the RSF into the Sudanese military and transitional planning for eventual civilian rule in Sudan. The currently developing events in Sudan resemble a typical power struggle seen in fragile states, where more than one powerful armed group exists and each is vying for control. However, the political conflict and escalating military confrontation is actually much more complex than a simplistic power struggle.
La violence séparatiste est l’un des dossiers prioritaires qui attendent le président élu Bola Tinubu, l’ancien gouverneur de Lagos, qui entrera en fonction le mois prochain.
Quatre policiers nigérians et deux civils ont été tués vendredi par des militants séparatistes présumés lors d’une fusillade, alors qu’ils patrouillaient dans le sud-est du pays, a annoncé samedi la police.