Mohamed Hamdan Dagalo
Mohamed Hamdan Dagalo, known as Hemedti, is the commander of the Rapid Support Forces, the paramilitary army built out of the Janjaweed militias of Darfur, who was al-Burhan's deputy in the junta that removed Bashir in 2019 and in the coup of 2021, and whose refusal to have his force merged into the regular army on the army's timetable became, on 15 April 2023, the war for Sudan. His troops took most of Khartoum in the first weeks, all of Darfur by the end of 2024 with the fall of El Fasher, and stand accused of genocide against the Masalit at El Geneina and of massacres wherever they have gone. He is a Rizeigat Arab from Darfur, born about 1974, a camel trader with three years of schooling who joined the Janjaweed when the government armed the Arab tribes against the Darfur rebellion in 2003 and rose as a commander in the years the villages burned. Bashir made the militias a formal force in 2013, the RSF, under Hemedti and outside the army's chain of command, used it as his own guard against the generals, and let it take the gold mines of Jebel Amer in 2017 and the contract to send fighters to the Saudi and Emirati war in Yemen, which made Hemedti rich and gave him the Gulf patrons who have armed him since. In April 2019 he turned on Bashir with the army and became deputy chairman of the sovereignty council. On 3 June his men cleared the sit-in outside army headquarters with more than a hundred dead. He signed the transition and the 2021 coup with Burhan and then, sensing which way the wind blew, presented himself to the civilians and the diplomats as the reformer who regretted the coup. The framework agreement of December 2022 set the merger of the RSF into the army as the condition of civilian rule, the army said two years and the RSF ten, and the RSF moved units into Khartoum and around the airbase at Merowe in April 2023. Who fired first is disputed. His forces took the presidential palace, the airport and most of the capital, lost them to the army's counter-offensive in 2025, and hold Darfur and Kordofan, where in February 2025 he declared a parallel government at Nyala; the United States sanctioned him in January 2025 for genocide, and the Emirates deny arming him.
- Lived: 1974 CE – ?
- Nationality: Sudanese
- Roles: paramilitary commander, politician
