The long read: The civilians of Sudan have been trying to throw off military rule for decades, but now find themselves caught in the middle of a deadly power struggle between former allies turned bitter opponents
The RSF has, for years, rendered Hemedti seemingly untouchable. “If you try to remove him by force,” Amjed Farid, a Sudanese political activist told me when we spoke in February, “that only means one thing: civil war.” Two months later, in an aggressive show of force, Hemedti demonstrated that his troops would indeed be unleashed if he felt threatened.o one knows when or where, exactly, Hemedti was born.
In 2003, Hemedti, then in his late 20s, joined the Janjaweed. In a later interview with Sudanese TV, he claimed that members of his family had been killed by rebels in Darfur, which had spurred him to contact the government and offer himself as a recruit against rebels. His desire, he said, was to protect the camel-trading routes of his people and to protect Arabs who he claimed were being persecuted by African tribes.
Over the next few years, Hemedti used his power in the region to extract more and more support from Khartoum. In 2007, he effectively blackmailed the government into extending him more resources by threatening to join the rebel movement. The government capitulated, and once an agreement was sealed, Hemedti was on his way to becoming not just an emir in an informal gang, but the head of a paramilitary force with weapons, uniforms, and budgets.
In the early hours of the morning of 3 June, the power went out and the sit-in camp was attacked while the protesters were sleeping. Security forces led by the RSF began moving in, driving swiftly to the location in pickup trucks. Eyewitness reports and hundreds of smartphone videos. “They began shooting and setting tents on fire”, one of the protesters, Mohamed Madani, told me. “The gunfire didn’t stop.
The coup was not a success. Protests erupted, were violently suppressed, then erupted again, week in, week out. The international community, which had begun to bring Sudan in from the cold, stopped aid and funding. The African Union suspended Sudan’s membership, and the generals found themselves running a fiercely restive country and a deteriorating economy, while also failing to trust each other fully. Hemedti began to suspect that Islamists from Bashir’s regime were infiltrating the army.
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