Bad against bad is the rule. That the wicked are in a trench and the good ones in the opposite, is the exception. What normally happens is that one side expresses the lesser evil. Although many times the reason in the combat is overwhelmingly more on one side than the other, as would be the case of the war between the invaded Ukraine and the invading Russia, as well as those of many insurgencies that fight against abject dictatorships.
The problem is when the abjection is distributed equally in the opposing trenches. That is the case of Sudan, where it is difficult to establish which is the bad and which is the worst. As an unequivocal sign of political decadence throughout the world, the phenomenon of this time is the prominence of mercenary armies and paramilitary organizations, which often, as in Sudan, also constitute forms of mercenarism.
There have always been those who fight for money. What is new is that now they are publicly exhibited and competing, in full view of the entire world, for portions of power as if they had the legitimacy to do so, when they only have weapons and bloody greed. This is the case of the FAR (Rapid Support Forces), a Sudanese militia that received mountains of money and obtained the right to exploit gold mines for having decimated Bantu tribes. And now it has turned the Sudanese capital, Khartoum, into the battlefield where it disputes power with the army that outsourced the crimes ordered by the dictator Omar al Bashir.
The first case of aberrant vedeism of war companies is the Wagner Group, whose CEO, the Russian businessman Yevgeny Progozhin, has more presence in the Russian and world media than the generals of the Eurasian giant’s army. He began by criticizing the strategies of Russian generals, then accused the Ministry of Defense of obstructing the advance of his fighters by leaving them devoid of ammunition, and now he is publicly proposing to President Vladimir Putin that he end the war because the Wagner Group and the Russian army can no longer make progress and must preserve what they have gained.
It is unusual that the gastronomic businessman who went from providing food to the Kremlin to supplying mercenaries to wars, managed to be the face and voice of the invasion of Ukraine, where he attributes the greatest achievements to his company, the Wagner Group. But it is not the only case of visibility of forces whose mere existence is aberrational. The world is seeing in Sudan an African version of the Wagner Group.
As the Russian paramilitary businessman occupies center stage in the war in Ukraine and pulsates with Russian generals to lead the conflict, the powerful Rapid Support Forces (FAR) militia launches into combat against the Sudanese Armed Forces. Khartoum is the main scene of this war between the military and paramilitaries, which since the fall of Al Bashir were associated with the regime that governs Sudan. The FAR paramilitary organization is trying to keep all the power that until now it shared with the military of the African country.
Mohamed Hamad Dagalo (popularly known as Hemedti) is the Sudanese “Prigozhin”. But while the Russian businessman maintains his dispute with the generalate in purely verbal terms, Hemedti launched an open war attacking the barracks, the airport and the government headquarters in Khartoum.
His paramilitary company originated from the bloodthirsty Bedouin militias with which the Al Bashir dictatorship fought the rebels in Darfur and Kordofan, regions of central and southwestern Sudan where the populations of Bantu ethnic groups and Christian and animist beliefs were decimated by the Arab militiamen calling themselves the Janjawees.
As payment for ethnic cleansing, Al Bashir granted Hemedti control of mining (gold) areas and the conversion of the militias that annihilated, burned villages and raped women and girls in Darfur, into a non-institutionalized arm of the army.
Massive protests in 2019 prompted General Abdelfattah Al Buhran, a brutal repressor who had given the Janjawees the weapons for their annihilation actions in Darfur, to join forces with Hemedti to betray the dictator who had empowered them. Both overthrew Al Bashir and formed a civil-military government. But the civil party did not take long to demand the progress of the transition towards an exclusively civilian government. Then there was an internal coup that expelled the civilians from the government. At the head of that power shared by the military and paramilitaries was General Al-Burhan, with Hemedti as number two.
or that triggered the current factional war, were some signs that the de facto president was preparing to betray the FAR and remove it from the regime. That made General Hemedti launch his paramilitaries against the Armed Forces to keep all the power. Mohamed Hemed Dagalo, alias Hemedti, the Bedouin peasant who raised and sold camels in Darfur until he formed his private army to amass fortunes massacring non-Arab tribes in that region, is now trying to become head of state in the vast African country. The warring powers have allies in Egypt, Libya, Somalia, Chad and other African countries. They also interfere with Russia, which has been negotiating for years to install a base on the Sudanese coast of the Red Sea; Iran, from its business with the Al Bashir dictatorship, and various countries of the Arabian Peninsula.
General Al Burhan’s army is not very powerful, which is why he had to finance paramilitaries to control Darfur and Kordofan, in addition to not having been able to crush Juba’s secessionism and prevent the secession of the south. Regardless, Al Burhan has overwhelming air superiority. FAR do not have aircraft but inherited their fast mobility on land from the Janjaweed. The Wagner Group became strong fighting in Syria, hired by Putin to support the Russian army that came to defend the regime of Bashar Al Assad. Then he took contracts to fight in Maghreb countries and finally entered the war in Ukraine.
Following in the footsteps of the Russian mercenary company, the private army led by Hemedti took contracts to fight in Libya and to support Saudi forces in the Yemen conflict. Born from Bedouin militiamen, FAR is agile fighting on desert plains. And if it prevails in this war of “bad guys against bad guys” and becomes the sole holder of power in Sudan, it would be like the Wagner Group taking over the Russian government.
