'Already the fighting has killed hundreds and tipped Africa’s third-largest country into a humanitarian disaster and a battle that analysts say could carry on for months, even years.' // David Pratt (foreigncorr1)
The area in which the village stood was then a faultline in the country’s civil war and one where the notorious Sudanese Arab Janjaweed militia launched occasional raids in which they would loot, rape, and kill.
Today too the man that heads them, General Mohamed Hamdan Dagalo, better known as Hemedti, is still the same one that led them all those years ago, but he too has since refashioned his role.Both Hemedti and his Janjaweed – now known as the Rapid Support Forces – stand on one side of a bitter military divide in Sudan that has brought the country to the brink of civil war.
Neither man, it appears, was willing to be subordinate to the other under the new hierarchy and the current hostilities are the culmination of what both parties now view as an existential fight for dominance. Meanwhile, plans are being ramped up to evacuate foreign nationals of a number of countries including the UK but so far have been prevented because of the fighting.
“The two sides who are fighting are not giving the impression that they want mediation for a peace between them right away,” said UN envoy Volker Perthes speaking to reporters by video link from Khartoum. Speaking to Al Jazeera, Srinivasan said the RSF may eventually retreat to its stronghold in the western province of Darfur, as well as infiltrate and capture small pockets of land elsewhere.
Many local leaders in the tribe are said to have greater loyalty to a rival of Hemedti known as Musa Hilal, a local sheikh and former Janjaweed leader. With bad blood between the two men going back some years and Hilal having his own militia as well as loyalists in the RSF, the scene could be set for a showdown within the RSF itself.
Mashamoun believes these top army officials will not accept any outcome other than the full demobilisation of the RSF and Hemedti’s exile from Sudan. Should the conflict become a full-blown civil war, it has the capacity to suck in the entire region and some global powers, a danger highlighted last week by Endre Stiansen, Norway’s ambassador to Sudan, whose Khartoum residence was hit by a missile at the start of the fighting.
The two armies conduct regular war games, most recently this month before the current fighting erupted and Cairo remains a strong supporter of Burhan. Anna Jacobs, Gulf analyst at Crisis Group, said the prime concern of Saudi Arabia, which shares a long stretch of Red Sea coastline with Sudan and has been increasingly focused on domestic development, was preventing Sudan falling into a state of collapse, similar to Libya.
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