The story has it that Mohamed Hamdan Dagalo – known universally as Hemedti or “little Mohammed” – first became a fighter in the Sudanese Arab Janjaweed militia in Darfur after an armed attack killed dozens of members of his family.
A secondary school dropout turned camel trader, the general and deputy head of state whose Rapid Support Forces [RSF] are now battling the Sudanese army forces loyal to army chief Abdel-Fattah al-Burhan, is also widely feared.
The grandson of the head of a sub clan of the Mahariya Rizeigat Arab tribe that herded livestock, including camels in Darfur and Chad, is a tall and imposing figure, his nickname a nod to his youthful looks.
Rising through the ranks of the Janjaweed during the 2003-05 war in southern Darfur, in which an estimated 300,000 people died, he commanded a brigade and caught the eye of the then dictator Omar al-Bashir, for whom he would act as an enforcer.
Always an opportunist, he briefly led a rebellion against Bashir and Khartoum in 2007-08, withdrawing his forces into the bush and fighting the army before cutting a deal with the government that promoted him to general.
Then in 2013, Hemedti would form the RSF around a core of the Janjaweed – initially tasked with fighting the Sudan People’s Liberation Army-North in the Nuba mountains – although widening its recruitment. That would lay the grounds for his later power in the country.
His rise under Bashir came with other rewards. Allowed to operate with autonomy and a large degree of impunity, he seized goldmines from a rival tribal leader in Darfur – the source of his considerable wealth.
“I’m not the first man to have goldmines,” Hemedti told the BBC. “It’s true, we have goldmines and there’s nothing preventing us from working in gold.”
The definition of a warlord, Hemedti recruited fighters from Darfur to fight as mercenaries in Yemen after the Saudi-Emirati intervention in Yemen in 2015 that brought him another valuable source of revenue – a move described memorably by Alex de Waal as Hemedti’s “adopting a model of state mercenarism”.
In the midst of Sudan’s 2019 revolution against Bashir, Hemedti appears to have wavered between arguing for the use of his forces to break up the mass sit-ins and demonstrations in Khartoum and other cities.
But by 11 April of that year, sensing the writing was on the wall for Bashir and sniffing another opportunity, he joined army head Burhan – the same figure he is now fighting – in deposing Bashir and ostensibly joining the wider movement for democratic transition.
If it seemed that Hemedti had changed his stripes, the events of June would disabuse observers as his troops massacred 100 protesters and committed acts of rape – apparently convinced that the general’s backers in the Gulf would not kick up a fuss. Hemedti has denied ordering the killings.
With Burhan and Hemedti both in powerful positions on the Transitional Military Council and the sovereign council that succeeded it, negotiations toward democratising Sudan barely limped forward until 2021 when – perhaps inevitably – Burhan and the army allied with Hemedti and his RSF launched a coup.
Ostensibly, Hemedti said the army had seized power to “correct the course of the people’s revolution” and achieve stability, but many observers have long suspected that his aim after Bashir’s ouster was to put himself in a position of unchallenged power in Sudan.
This weekend, after two years of growing frictions between army and RSF, it appeared Hemedti and Burhan had each prepared to make their moves against their rival, as the army accused Hemedti of mobilising his forces.
“Both [Hemedti] and Burhan have calculated that the leadership contest is now a zero-sum game and thus have moved on each other, and unfortunately, the Sudanese people must stand on the sidelines as both military leaders fight it out till the bitter end,” Adel Abdel Ghafar, the director of the Foreign Policy and Security Program at the Middle East Council on Global Affairs told Al Jazeera in an interview earlier this week.
For Sudanese long familiar with his brutal machinations, none of it is a surprise.
“I have long believed that [Hemedti] is an existential threat not only to Sudan’s democratic transition but to its very viability as a state,” said Ahmed T el-Gaili, a Sudanese lawyer.
