In the sands and mountains of Sudan’s Darfur region, almost 20 years before Russia’s Wagner Group would revive the word “mercenary” for a new generation, the leader of a ragtag militia was inventing a playbook that would later be attributed to Yevgeny Prighozhin.
Mr. Prighozhin, Russian President Vladimir Putin’s former confidante, who led an aborted insurrection against the Russian state in June, founded the Wagner Group PMC in 2014 to support Russian forces fighting in the Donbas region.
When the Kremlin launched a full-scale invasion of Ukraine in February 2022, Wagner mercenaries became central to initial Russian “terror” strategies aimed at quickly crushing their neighbor: rape and torture of women and children; filling mass graves with executed civilians; burning homes; bombing hospitals and apartment blocks—while simultaneously reinforcing their monetary value to the Russian state through “business enterprises” such as high-priced protection of African dictatorships and seizure and control of mines and oil fields.
Sudan’s Mercenary Warlord
According to the CIA, Mr. Dagalo was born in or about 1974 into the Mahariya tribe of the Arabic Rizeigat community in Sudan’s western Darfur region.The area, which borders Chad, has been plagued by ethnic wars between Sudanese of Arabic and African descent for centuries. Mr. Dagalo dropped out of school in the third grade and later became a camel trader.
“A story often told about Dagalo is that he became a fighter in Darfur when another tribe attacked his family’s convoy. They slaughtered about 60 of his relatives and stole all their camels—the family’s entire fortune. He then took up arms for revenge, and to rebuild his family’s wealth,” Adel Abdel Ghafar, director of the Foreign Policy and Security Program at the Middle East Council on Global Affairs, told The Epoch Times.
Mr. Dagalo joined the Janjaweed in about 2002, according to the CIA.
“Janjaweed” is an Arabic colloquialism meaning “a man with a gun on a horse,” according to Munzoul Assal, a professor at the University of Khartoum.
“The Janjaweed are indigenous Arabic militia that have existed for many, many years in Darfur and Chad. They extort money from local businesses, they control trade and commerce in the region, they raid villages when they need food and women; they basically act with impunity,” Mr. Assal told The Epoch Times.
In 2003, at about the time that the Dagalo family convoy was attacked, non-Arab tribes began revolting against the dictatorial rule of President Omar al-Bashir, arguing that his Arabic government had been oppressing “black” Sudanese for generations.
At first, Mr. Bashir “sent in his tanks” to crush the rebellion, said Guy Martin, a military analyst at DefenceWeb, an African defense and security news publication.
“But all the heavy weaponry of the Sudan national army was no good in Darfur because of all the sand. Then, in the rainy season, the sand would turn to deep mud, bogging the infantry and their weapons down and making them easy targets,” Mr. Martin told The Epoch Times.
So, Sudan’s leader turned to the Janjaweed to achieve his mission of “cleansing” Darfur of all non-Arabic ethnicities, mainly the Fur, Zaghawa, and Masalit communities, said Cameron Hudson, who was, at the time, the CIA’s top intelligence analyst on Sudan.
“So these Arab militias were mobilized by the Bashir government as proxies, and they became very good at complementing the army. The army could use artillery bombardments and aerial bombardments from far away, after which they could then send in the Janjaweed to do cleanup operations on the ground,” Mr. Hudson, now a Horn of Africa analyst at the Washington-based Center for Strategic and International Studies (CSIS), told The Epoch Times.
“They became sort of the tip of the spear for the Bashir government. They became responsible for the most gruesome aspects of the killing in Darfur because they were on the ground, because they were coming in on horseback and camelback, they were carrying out the rapes, the person-to-person killing, destroying of villages and water points, destruction of livestock, looting; all these very personal crimes.”
And, Mr. Hudson said, Mr. Dagalo was “central” to the action.
“He caught Bashir’s eye from the very beginning. Bashir was very impressed by this big, imposing, muscular man of action, a man who was clearly willing and able to use whatever means necessary to achieve the tasks given [to] him by his commanders,“ he said. ”So Dagalo soon became a Janjaweed commander himself, until he reached the very top of the structure.”
Mr. Bashir awarded Mr. Dagalo the rank of lieutenant-general.
“Dagalo was given free rein in Darfur. He seized several of Sudan’s top-producing gold mines in the region and built a massive fortune,” Mr. Assal said. “He’s now one of the richest men in Africa.”
Mr. Ghafar said that while the conflict raged in Darfur, Mr. Bashir helped Mr. Dagalo to establish mining businesses, gold smuggling networks, and to invest in livestock and infrastructure.
The Janjaweed commander’s troops began calling him “Hemedti,” or “little Mohamed,” a clear demonstration of the reverence in which they held him.
Human rights groups said Mr. Bashir’s forces killed 200,000 to 400,000 people in Darfur, mainly between 2003 and 2010, and mass graves are being found to this day.
“Darfur is a conflict that never really ended,” Mr. Hudson said. “It kind of fizzled out simply because there were only a few people left to kill because millions fled to displacement camps in neighboring countries.
“But even after people returned home, and even now, the ethnic killings continue, just on a lower level, so we’ll probably never know the exact death toll.”
In July 2010, the International Criminal Court issued a warrant of arrest for Mr. Bashir, accusing him of committing genocide “by killing,” “by causing serious bodily or mental harm,” and “by deliberately inflicting on each target group conditions of life calculated to bring about the group’s physical destruction.”
Mr. Bashir has yet to be prosecuted.
“We wouldn’t have the near-civil, near-regional war we have today in Sudan if it wasn’t for Bashir’s nurturing of his proxy force, the Janjaweed, which has become the Rapid Support Forces (RSF), led, of course, by Dagalo,” Mr. Hudson told The Epoch Times.
Post-Coup
Mr. Dagalo and Gen. Burhan, despite their blood-soaked backstories, had been central figures in a transitional council that the Sudanese were counting on to lead them to democratic rule.According to a post-coup agreement, the RSF would be absorbed into the national army under one commander—Gen. Burhan—following democracy.
“Dagalo, being the character he is, was never going to accept that. Particularly because he and Burhan don’t like each other,” Mr. Hudson said.
“Both men have calculated that the leadership contest is now a zero-sum game, and we have a winner-takes-all scenario unfolding, with Dagalo appearing to be making gains recently,” Mr. Martin said.
That isn’t surprising, he said, as Mr. Dagalo and his RSF had become a “supremely versatile fighting unit” in recent years.
“I would argue that the RSF were the Wagner Group before the Wagner Group existed,” Mr. Martin told The Epoch Times. “They’re actually now one of the world’s top commercial mercenary outfits, and not many people know this. They kind of slipped under the radar because the great powers of the world mostly didn’t care about the atrocities the RSF was committing in Africa and elsewhere.”
When the most intense period of violence in Darfur ended, in about 2010, Mr. Bashir was left with a dilemma: what to do with the Janjaweed, Mr. Hudson said.
“There was still this very large mobilized force of Arab tribesmen. That, in a time of relative calm, was already a worry to the Bashir government, because it posed a potential threat to it. Promises had been made to the Janjaweed in terms of salaries, land that they would control, and they were looking to the government to make good on those promises,” he said.
Mr. Dagalo’s fierce personal ambition arrived as a temporary solution for Mr. Bashir, Mr. Hudson said.
“Hemedti wanted to make money by using the Janjaweed as a mercenary force, and Bashir didn’t stand in his way. [Mr. Bashir] saw it as a perfect way to occupy them and take them out of his area of concern, to send them overseas and let them fight in somebody else’s war, so they don’t stir up trouble at home,” he said.
“It also served the Bashir government politically to have them do that. It created allies for the Bashir government, because here they were contributing to other people’s wars in ways that earned them powerful friends in North Africa and the Persian Gulf.”
In 2019, a report published in the Georgetown University Security Review estimated that 14,000 Sudanese mercenaries had fought in Yemen alone, with the majority from Darfur.
The report stated: “The repatriation of thousands of young, battle-hardened men with no prospects for employment would likely shatter the region’s fragile peace. In a nation with few opportunities and an inflation rate of 70 [percent], these young men may be tempted to use their combat experience for economic gain by resorting to organized crime.”
Mr. Hudson said that when the Janjaweed mercenaries began returning from their foreign campaigns, Mr. Bashir decided to “normalize” and “formalize” that force, to ensure he kept control of it.
“The government placed the Janjaweed under the intelligence service, and made them constitutional officers of the state—not necessarily on par with the army, but certainly to give them formal recognition, no longer just an Arab militia,” he said.
“They were even given a fancy name, one that was supposed to emphasize their allegiance to the state and its national army: The Rapid Support Forces,” Mr. Martin said.
By doing that, Mr. Hudson said, Mr. Bashir “planted the seeds” for the RSF to grow into what it had become.
“One thing to understand, though, is that without the leadership of someone like Hemedti—a brutal but entrepreneurial leader who saw not only the potential to use the RSF to advance his own ambitions, but also to grow it into a kind of institutional juggernaut within the state—we would not see the RSF today emerging the way it has,” he said.
“It was his transformational leadership, of seeing the opportunities of using the RSF as a mercenary army in North Africa and the Middle East; using the RSF to control gold mining areas; using the RSF to build his own business empire; that allowed the RSF to transcend the boundaries of simply being a rebel group, and to become such a powerful political and military force.”
Mr. Hudson said that much like Russia’s Wagner Group before Mr. Prighozhin’s ill-fated march on Moscow, the RSF is now a “hydra-headed commercial entity” that uses violence as its “stock-in-trade.”
“By doing that, Hemedti has become terribly wealthy and has been able to use that wealth to recruit numbers rivaling the size of the national army, but also to purchase the heavy weaponry that make him, as we see on the ground today, a very legitimate tactical rival to most African armies,” he said.
“It’s really a remarkable, fascinating transformation over little more than a decade of this ragtag Arab militia into a pretender to the throne of Sudan right now.”
Mr. Hudson said it was the Janjaweed’s mercenary experience in Yemen—given that the clients were Saudi Arabia and the United Arab Emirates—that was formative in the modern history of the RSF.
“We would not have the same RSF today were it not for that experience, which again, for both political reasons and economic reasons, have enabled the real and figurative growth of the RSF. The figurative growth has great importance within the Sudanese political context because it has brought Hemedti legitimacy in the regional context and bought him a big seat at the table,” he said.
Mr. Martin said the UAE was the main hub of the RSF’s financial dealings.
“It even co-owns a bank in [the] UAE. Gold smuggling alone is a billion-dollar industry, and much of that illicit money is in Dubai,” he said.
“So Dagalo has access to all this money, which enables him to recruit more and more fighters. That in turn allows him to gain access to even more resources.
“So how does the Sudan army stop this machine that is getting bigger and more efficient by the day?”
Mr. Hudson said Mr. Bashir’s sanctioning of Mr. Dagalo’s mercenary actions had “backfired” on Sudan in some very important ways.
“Hemedti, in overseeing this kind of expansion into areas like Libya and Yemen, he’s been able to establish his own foreign policy maps; he’s developed his own relationships with leaders across the region,” he said.
“So he’s no longer just a kind of Sudanese political figure in a domestic context; he now has a foreign policy of his own; he has relationships across the region and across the world which he’s able to draw on in order to augment his arsenal, his funding, his resupply; you name it, and to provide him some measure of political cover within the international community. He’s used that very adeptly.
“But also the money was transformational. The hundreds of millions of dollars that he brought in, separate from the political alliances that he cultivated, is really what allowed him to come back and to have the seed capital to transform the RSF into not only a large mercenary group, but also into a multifaceted corporate entity that was able to buy legitimate businesses across Sudan, to allow him to begin developing the local gold sector, moving it from artisanal mining into something much more formal and substantial, something which now generates more than a billion dollars annual revenue, and Sudan’s now the third-largest producer of gold in Africa.”
Mr. Dagalo has become one of Africa’s major political figures, while simultaneously staying true to his roots as a warlord, Mr. Hudson said.
“Being on the ground floor of one of the biggest new revenue streams in the country—gold—has made him so wealthy that he’s now able to return to his fighting roots with a war chest that’s allowed him to recruit and resupply in such a way that he is now a rival to the authority of the country,” he said.
Mr. Martin said that Hemedti—the once-impoverished camel trader—has become one of the most dangerous men in Africa.
“He has money. He has killer instinct. He’s ruthless and unafraid of anyone. He has a massive, fiercely loyal army. He has powerful allies,” he said.
“But mostly, he has money, and we all know that with money, in this world, one can do anything. What will he choose to do with his power? I think we’re only seeing the beginning of his ambition.”
