From the archive: Sudan’s outsider: how a paramilitary leader fell out with the army and plunged the country into war

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1:09Hi, I'm Nisreen Malik, the author of Sudan's outsider, how a paramilitary leader fell out with the army and plunged the country into war, published in 2023. This story is about how Muhammad Hamdan Daegaloo, a shadowy figure from Sudan's hinterlands, came to be one of the wealthiest and most powerful men in the country, and how his quest for ultimate power plunged Sudan into a devastating war. Even before the war it was clear that Daegaloo was on a path that would reshape the upper echelons of Sudanese politics and upend settlements that had been in place since Sudan's independence. I was interested in bringing his story out of the shadows, as he was still seen as somewhat of a background figure, which, as the events that led up to the peace show, he very much was not. Since the article was written, the war has expanded to claim

2:11every corner of the country and has resulted in ethnic cleansing and multiple human rights abuses, as well as famine. It is described often as a civil war, but it is important to look back to the origins of the conflict, as detailed in the peace, to understand that the war is a tussle for power between Daegaloo and Sudan's army. I would like people to remember that war was not a choice for even its very rank and file competence, and that Sudan is not victim to inevitable rifts, but a political establishment that is only interested in its own survival and dominion. Daegaloo and others have since been recognized as nefarious actors, sanctioned and accused of war crimes, but the war has also extended beyond its natural lifespan by the United Arab Emirates, which is backing Daegaloo and has turned the conflict into a wider proxy war

3:12and even further away from resolution. Welcome to the Guardian Long Read, showcasing the best long-form journalism covering culture, politics and new thinking. For the text version of this and all our long reads, go to thegardian.com forward slash long read. This article contains references to murder, torture and sexual assault. Sudan's outsider, how a paramilitary leader fell out with the army and plunged the country into war by an Austrian malic. When I landed in Khotum in late February, the city was tense. On the short journey to my family home in the suburbs of Sudan's capital, our car was stopped twice at checkpoints that in recent months have been erected after midnight. A carful of women, my mother,

4:13my sister and me, was clearly not the threat the officers were looking out for, so we were ushered onwards. Those manning the checkpoints were an inconsistent crew, some were in plain clothes, others in military fatiques, the rest in police uniform. You never quite knew who you were dealing with or exactly what they were afraid of. The only common feature they shared was a jittery menace. They were keeping a close eye on movements in a city where tensions had been rising between the two most powerful men in the country. Sudan's leader, General Abd al-Fatah al-Brahman, the head of the Sudanese army, and the country's deputy leader, General Muhammad Hamdan Daghalo, known as Hamedi, the head of a paramilitary organization called the Rapid Support Forces RSF, had been sharing power since late 2021 when they had jointly carried out a coup that had ejected

5:19civilians from a transitional government. But their alliance soon frayed and they began to regard each other with suspicion. By February, in sides to dawn, people were growing increasingly afraid that Borghan and Hamedi could come to blows and plunge the country into armed conflict. Still, life went on. Alongside the heavy security presence, there existed a broadly functioning city, kept afloat by families and communities pooling resources as inflation soared and public infrastructure crumbled. Khartoum's shops and restaurants shan late into the night, casting their colors onto the checkpoints. As we pulled into our street just before dawn, a single, bright, makeshift light hung over a table on the side of the road, gathered around some of the neighborhood teens were playing cards. Over the next few weeks, tensions rose, protests against the military

6:24and paramilitary junta, a regular occurrence since the 2021 coup continued. In early March, a protestor in Khartoum was filmed being fatally shocked in the chest at close quarters by an army officer. More than a hundred protestors had been killed since the coup, but this killing seemed even more gratuitous than usual, an indication of the rising tension and nervousness within and between different security forces. Locals found themselves adapting to the growing threat of violence. Warnings came through on WhatsApp and phone calls, telling people to avoid certain roads blocked by angry citizens and patrolling security forces. And we all found alternative routes as people made their way to weddings, funerals, work, friends. Meanwhile, the two generals escalated their war of words, both attempting to portray themselves

7:26as the Tribune of the People. Hameti seized upon the shooting court on video and called for the proper trial of the officer who shot the protestor. Hameti's brother, the head of the RSF, said that his forces would not permit the killing or detention of protesters from now on. Borhan, in appointed reference to a power-hungry Hameti, claimed that the army was now ready to withdraw from politics altogether and break the cycle of supporting dictatorial governments. Neither meant it. I left Sudan in mid-March and a little over six weeks after I had passed the boys' playing cards, the main road we took home from the airport would be struck by a missile launched from an army plane and the airport would be in ruins. It happened quickly. Both sides claimed they were provoked and had no choice, but the big moves were made by the RSF.

8:31On the morning of Saturday the 15th of April, I started receiving messages from friends and family in Khartoum, saying that they were hearing the sounds of gunfire. Within hours, the RSF had taken over the airport. civilian aircraft were bombed on the asphalt. Two passengers died in their seats. RSF troops were posting videos from other airports and locations across the country, holding their machine guns aloft. Shortly after the attacks began, a citizens coward in shock, Hameti gave an interview to El Jazeera. He was angry, ranting. Borhan, he said, was a criminal who wants to destroy the country. He would be arrested and brought to justice or die like any dog. Hameti only appeared on the National Political Scene four years ago. In that short time, he has drawn the army and all of Sudan into an unprecedented confrontation in which the country's army,

9:37under Borhan, now finds itself at war with a large paramilitary force that it cannot dominate. Under a leader that it cannot control, how did Hameti seemingly overnight come to capture Sudan's politics? Hameti first became a nationally known figure after the Sudanese revolution of 2019, which ousted President Omar Al-Bashir, a military dictator who ruled for almost 30 years. Until the revolution, Hameti was a shadowy background militiaman who worked for Bashir, using his private army to stamp out rebellions in the rest of the west of the country on behalf of the central government. In February and March 2019, as protests against Bashir intensified, Hameti's forces were summoned from the peripheries of the country to support the

10:42army in Khartoum. But then, in April 2019, Hameti made an unexpected move, which would be the start of his remarkable political rise. Since early April, protesters had been camped outside Sudan's military headquarters demanding the removal of Bashir. Then, on 11 April, Hameti decided in a joint move with the military to push aside the man who had been his patron and sponsor. After Bashir was removed, Hameti transitioned from his informal role as head of the militia based outside Khartoum to becoming incorporated into a post-revolution transitional government, working in partnership with Borhan, the commander-in-chief of the Sudanese army. For two 10 years after the revolution, Hameti shared power with the army and civilian parties

11:43under a civilian prime minister, an arrangement that was supposed to pave the way for democratic elections. After the coup of October 2021, in which civilian elements were ejected from government, Hameti's role and power expanded once again. All transitional government bodies were dissolved, and Hameti became the de facto vice president of the country, with no civilian checks or buffer between him and the army. He thus consolidated huge executive power with access to the country's budget and the mandate to represent Sudan globally forging alliances and trade deals. Hameti is an outsider. If he were just a mid-level Sudanese politician, he would stand out. As a national leader, his style and personal background is even more striking. Unlike any other leader

12:44or politician, the Sudanese have known, he speaks almost entirely in vernacular, and his arabic is marked by an accent distinctive to the western tribes who live far away from the usual sources of Sudan's leaders, cartoons, military countenments, and elite salons. Hameti is foxy, easy in his skin, with a glint in his eye, and a smiling mischief to his demeanor that belies his reputation for slaughter. Even his nickname, a diminutive of Muhammad, meaning a little Muhammad, is a nod to his baby-faced features. His unconventional background means he has few allies amongst Sudan's political elites and military. But as a politician who also happens to own immensely valuable gold mines and run the largest private army in Africa, with about 70,000 soldiers at his disposal. This has not, at least until now,

13:51proved an insurmountable obstacle. Hameti owns, along with other family members, a gold mining company that operates and lands he seized in Darfur in 2017. In 2018, Bashir gave Hameti permission to mine and sell gold, and operations extended to other gold-rich areas outside Darfur in the south of the country. The gold was exported according to a 2019 Reuters investigation, circumventing capital controls, and even sold to the Sudanese central bank for a preferential rate. The yield was allegedly used to enrich Hameti and his family and fund the expansion of the RSF, a spokesperson for Hameti, denied these allegations to Reuters. Sudan is Africa's third largest producer of gold, and one of the poorest countries in the world. Yet the dagelow fortune is not one that Hameti,

14:55or the rest of his family, is discreet about. Hameti sees no conflict between his political role and his business interests. I'm not the first man to have gold mines. He told the BBC in 2019. In a video posted last year, Hameti's cousin boasted that the dagelows have become one of Africa's richest families. Hameti is also in the business of mercenaries. The RSF is an opaque mercenary force, which grew out of the Genjuid militia known for its atrocities in the Darfur war, and went on to become a formidable partner with the military in running Sudan. Over the past decade, he has hired out his soldiers, some of them children, to Arab and African governments in need of troops for their own wars. Beyond a tool for domestic power and making money, the RSF gives Hameti

15:57geopolitical power, by sending his forces to Yemen to support Saudi Arabia and the UAE's war against Houthi rebels. By 2017, according to reports, there were as many as 40,000 RSF troops in Yemen. Hameti secured powerful allies. After the revolution that ousted Bishir, Saudi Arabia and the UAE sent $3 billion to stabilize the prospects of the military RSF junta. That alliance extended into Libya, where in 2019, 1,000 RSF troops were sent to support UAE allied forces of Khalifa Haftar in his offensive on Tripoli. The RSF has for years rendered Hameti seemingly untouchable. If you try to remove him by force, Amjid Ferdid, a Sudanese political activist told me when we

16:58spoke in February, that only means one thing, civil war. Two months later, in an aggressive show of force, Hameti demonstrated that his troops would indeed be unleashed if he felt threatened. No one knows when or where exactly Hameti was born. Like many who hail from Sudan's peripheries, his date of birth was not officially recorded, though he is thought to be in his late 40s. He claims to have been born in Sudan, but his family, members of an Arab tribe of Kamal Herders and traders, are said to have arrived in Western Sudan's Darfur region in the 1980s, having fled conflict and drought in Chad. Hameti came of age in South Darfur, where his family eventually

18:00settled. He dropped out of school in the third grade, and later began to do business along Sudan's porous borders with Libya and Egypt. He claims to have been a Kamal trader in his early years, though there are reasons to doubt this. You will not find a single person in all of Darfur, who will tell you he was a Kamal trader, said Nehmaat Al-Mahdi, who lived in North Darfur at the time Hameti claims he was trading Kamal's, and now lives in the US after fleeing war in the region. He was a high woman. My father was a senior civil administrator in the region. All the Kamal traders would come to our town and ensure their stock before setting off to sell it to Egypt and Libya. They were known names and families. Any Kamal's, Hameti ended up owning, she claimed, was stolen from raids on Kamal processions on their way to the border.

19:02After starting out in the Kamal and Sheep Trade, he eventually expanded into selling furniture and knickknacks. At one point, he owned a large furniture store in Niela, and Hameti's story might have ended there. School dropout, nomadic traveller, Kamal trader, and small time businessman. It was the start of the rebellion in Darfur that transformed his fortunes. The region, large and landlocked, straddles several climates and topographies. In the south, there is rainfall and lush savannah. The centre is a plateau ringed by mountains, and the north is a sprawling desert. Established as an Islamic sultanate in 1596, Darfur's history and identity long predates the creation of Sudan as a state, and it has never been fully integrated into wider Sudan proper. It is a region that is only noticed by the central government when it rebels, and then

20:06is oppressed into submission. The indigenous sedentary African peoples of Darfur and the nomadic Arabs have different cultures, identities, religious rituals, and racial backgrounds, but have broadly coexisted for centuries. In the early northeast, however, competition for resources precipitated by climate breakdown and desertification triggered conflict between local groups. The influx of weaponry in the late 90s and early northeast, in part from the civil war in Chad, along Darfur's border, made the conflict bloodier. In 2003, as a result of prolonged drought, but also decades of misrule by central governments that favoured Arab tribes over others, Darfur's disgruntled members of the non-Arab population turned to armed rebellion against the government. Bashir's regime, only just emerging from a long civil war in the south of the

21:09country, decided that it was not going to engage directly with the rebel movement. Instead, it turned to a notorious force of Arab warriors, the Genjoese, who were known for violently extracting land and resources from African tribes in the largely lawless region. The Genjoese were drawn from the same background as Hamedi, camel-herding nomads who traversed the border between Sudan and Chad. In the Sudanese government, they found a powerful sponsor, one that could supply them with arms and power. In 2003, Hamedi, then in his late 20s, joined the Genjoese. 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 roots of his people and to protect Arabs who he claimed

22:12were being persecuted by African tribes. Already connected to Arab militias through family members and to other Arab interests in the region through the camel business, Hamedi rose through the ranks of the Genjoese to become an emir, leading crews that attacked non-Arab populations. The period up to 2005 was a very difficult time, Nehmet Al-Mahdi told me. Resident in the town of Qabqabiyyat at the time, she saw first-hand atrocities that the Genjoese committed. They would enter a village of an African tribe, she said, kill all the men on sight and rape the women. Then they would tell the women, you should celebrate, you slave, you are going to give birth to an Arab. As a Genjoese commander, Hamedi cultivated an image that played into mythologies of the desert warrior, drawing a turban across his face, wearing desert fatigues,

23:14and modeling himself as a charismatic figure recruiting across tribes and fighting for their rights. The truth may be more preseic. There is little evidence that Hamedi was ever passionate about the ideal of self-determination. He seems to have always been a cany strategist, and once he joined the armed conflict leveraged his political activities to further his commercial aspirations. Over the next few years, Hamedi 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, Hamedi 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. He later admitted that his threats had

24:18all been a tactical ploy. We didn't really become rebels, he told the journalist and researcher Jerome Tubiana in 2009. We just wanted to attract the government's attention. Tell them we're here in order to get our rights, military ranks, political positions, and development in our area. This approach was what distinguished him from the rest of the gingerweed Tubiana told me. Hamedi was ambitious and had an aptitude for cutting deals. Other senior leaders were less cunning and more rebellious. Hamedi, in Tubiana's view, was not a freedom fighter, but a pragmatist who used the intersecting strands of Sudan's conflicts to advance his interests. Hamedi got what he wanted from the government. The title of Brigadier General, official ranks for his officers, and a large cash infusion, seed capital for his enterprise.

25:21His troops were put under the command of the government's powerful intelligence unit, the National Intelligence and Security Service. Only six years after joining the gingerweed, Hamedi was no longer a son-scored freelance mercenary, but a government official with an air-conditioned office. Over the next few years, Hamedi's power and resources began to multiply, but his biggest asset, by far, became his paramilitary army, the RSF. Hamedi's power is a powerful force. Hey, I'm running out to drop off a stack of letters and packages. Need anything shipped while I'm gone?

26:22Save the gas. stamps.com lets you print postage and schedule pickups right from your desk. Sink your contacts into the address book. Get detailed accounting insights and get notified the moment your certified mail is delivered. All from my desk? All from your desk. Join the four million businesses using stamps.com right now with Code Podcast and get your free welcome gift. stamps.com, Code Podcast. Texas and Feds Apply. Forming a business seems easy until influencers, forums, and AI give different advice. Legal Zoom has helped five million business owners get it right. Because after 25 years, we know what getting it wrong can cost. We stand behind every formation we file and we'll be there after you've launched. When you need a legal hand, visit Legal Zoom. Legal Zoom provides access to independent attorneys and self-service tools. Legal Zoom is not a law firm, it does not provide legal advice. Your will or trust shouldn't be in the wrong hands. Cobble together from an AI answer or a generic template.

27:23Legal Zoom was built to help with your situation, with self-guided tools or the assistance of an attorney without the price tag of a traditional law firm. 2.2 million families made their will or trust with Legal Zoom. Yours can be next. When you need a legal hand, visit Legal Zoom. Legal Zoom provides access to independent attorneys and self-service tools. Legal Zoom is not a law firm and does not provide legal advice. Welcome back to The Guardian Long Read. In 2013, after a resurgence of rebellions against Udown Central Government in Darfur and elsewhere, Bashir decided to formally create the RSF under the control of Hematy. By that point, Hematy already commanded a large force of gingerweed, mercenaries and tribal loyalists. Bashir's move was a way to regularize these troops,

28:25making it easier for him to outsource the government's military activities to a separate army with a separate budget. For Bashir, the RSF served two roles, first as a Praetorian god, protecting him from threats from his own inner circle, and second as a tool for crushing dissent in Sudan's peripheries. There, the RSF relied on the same brutal tactics deployed by the gingerweed during the Darfur War. This time, though, they had more weapons and air cover from the Sudanese army. A human rights watch report found that in 2015, during two operations against civilians affiliated with rebel tribes, the RSF committed a wide range of horrific abuses, including torture, extra-judicial killings and mass rapes. In June 2019, the RSF deployed similarly brutal tactics against protesters in Khartoum.

29:27After the removal of Bashir in April, thousands of people that had taken part in a sit-in outside the government's military headquarters in central Khartoum refused to budge. These protesters were not content with what they were being offered. A government made up of Bashir's remnants in the army, the RSF and the intelligence forces. They demanded the immediate installment of a wholly civilian government, the return of the army to the barracks and the dissolution of the RSF. By this stage, the military and the RSF had lost patience and were not going to tolerate another large, drawn-out protest movement that were threatened their power too. Bashir was dispensable, but they were not. In the early hours of the morning of the 3rd of June, the power went out and the sitting camp was attacked while the protesters were sleeping. Security forces led by the RSF began moving in,

30:30driving swiftly to the location in pickup trucks. Eye witness reports and hundreds of smartphone videos captured the massacre. They began shooting and setting tents on fire. One of the protesters, Muhammad Medinini, told me. The gunfire didn't stop. Days after the attack, dozens of bodies secured with heavy weights were pulled out of the Nile River. You used to chance the whole country is therefore, the militia said, after the attack, mocking the idealistic revolutionaries calls for solidarity with Darfur in their head the early days of the uprising in Khartoum. Now, we brought Darfur to you. Hameddi has denied ordering the killings. The total number of casualties is still unknown. It was a traumatic event in Sudan's recent political history. But in scale, it was small in comparison to what the RSF and similar militias

31:31with the support of government had visited on Sudan's civilians away from scrutiny and Darfur, South Kroddefan, and Blue Nile. The weeks after the June 2019 massacre were a period of hectic negotiation between the RSF, the Army, and civilian leaders represented by the forces for freedom and change, FFC, as they tried to hash out a transitional arrangement that would appease protesters, stabilize the country, and set a new course for Sudan. In July, a power-sharing agreement was reached, and in August, a civilian Prime Minister, Abdullah Hamdok, was selected with the intention of working with Hameddi and Burhan to steer the country towards democratic elections in three years. The government was shaky. After a few initial gains, such as securing the removal of Sudan from the US's state sponsors of terror list in late 2020, and the promise of debt relief

32:32from the World Bank, the RSF and the military started to grow tired of what Burhan called infighting between them and the civilians, and between civilian parties themselves. In mid-2021, someone who was working closely with the Prime Minister at the time told me that the civilian component was weak and splintered, and that the soldiers still retained ultimate control. In the same period, another civilian government staffer told me that Hamdok, a gentle technocrat who made his name working in international organizations, was not aggressive enough to stand up to the two generals, and so was beginning to lose his credibility. By October 2021, the generals had had enough, took power and detained the Prime Minister and others in his cabinet. The coup was not a success. Protests erupted, who were violently suppressed,

33:33then erupted again, weak in, weak out. The international community, which had begun to bring Sudan in from the cold, stopped aid in funding. The African Union suspended Sudan's membership and the generals found themselves running a fiercely rest of country and a deteriorating economy, while also failing to trust each other fully. Hamdok began to suspect that Islamists from Bashir's regime were infiltrating the army. He established close ties with contacts in Russia, meeting with Russian Foreign Minister Sergei Lavrov, the day of the Ukraine invasion, but it was clearly not enough to decisively strengthen his position against the army, either through extensive arms purchases or funding. By the middle of 2022, both generals had begun to make overtures to civilian leaders once again, in the hope that a new deal with civilians would buy them some time and options.

34:35Rohan needed to figure out how to remove the threat of the RSF and bring it under the umbrella of the army. Hamdok needed to find a way to embed himself more securely within the senior offices of the state, through running for election, for example, without fear of military ambush, but also without relinquishing his soldiers. The FFC came back to the table, and in December 2022, civilian parties had signed a framework agreement to be finalized in April. The deal promised the civilians against all the evidence of the past two years that the generals would relinquish power. Hamdok, however, would soon grow to believe this was a trap. In February, I had arrived in Khotoum hoping to meet with Hamdok. I had made contact with his team by a former members of the civilian government, but was warned that Hamdok would probably not give me an audience

35:37because he had been hurt by previous encounters with the press. After the 2010s, the government had already been in a position that had been in contact with the press. After the 2019 revolution that thrust him into the spotlight, Hamdok had launched a media campaign to burnish his image, but he was not satisfied with the results. He hired a Canadian public relations firm for an upfront fee of $6 million, and opened his large headquarters in South Khotoum to visiting media, offering them meals, with accounts of how he and his forces intervened to save the country from anarchy. The charm offensive didn't work. All people wanted to print was that he was a killer and had no education, a middleman who had introduced him to a Western journalist in the past told me. If Hamdok is sensitive about his outside estate,

36:39the mockery he is subjected to within Sudan and particularly Khotoum, most likely does not help. A wave of social media memes follows his public speeches, making fun of his accent and expression. Pictures of him and his old Darfur days looking bejraggled circulate on WhatsApp groups, captioned with derisory comments. Hamdok was a hinterland village clown to the Arab elites of Central Sudan, the so-called Gryverine tribes, descendants of Arabs who migrated from the Arabian peninsula in the 12th century and intermarried with indigenous populations along the banks of the Nile River, which runs through the center of Sudan. These groups who have dominated government and state bureaucracy since independence in 1956 are not accustomed to people such as Hamedi at the seat of power. Enforcing Bashir to step aside,

37:39Hamedi overturned an agreement that underwrote Sudanese politics for generations. The elites of the center have the political power and their partners in the peripheries enforce their agendas but remain in the background. At the end of February, I received a surprising message from my contacts. Hamedi would talk to me after all, but only in a particular setting, on his farm on the outskirts of Khotoum and not at RSF headquarters in the city. The tension was rising between Him and Borhan as the April deadline for finalizing the framework agreement loomed and there were nowhere close to agreement on one major sticking point. When and how to incorporate the RSF into the army? Against this backdrop, I was told that Hamedi was keen to get his account of events across. But in early March, he suddenly departed on a series of unceduled foreign trips to the UAE and Eritrea.

38:42In hindsight, perhaps, an effort to drum up regional support for his campaign against the army. Over the next few days, as we awaited Hamedi's return, I spent time with his inner circle who were nestled in plush offices and villas in affluent parts of the city, in buildings that all seemed hastily and expensively furnished, and only recently inhabited. The people I met were lavishly supported by bodyguards, drivers, and young female personal assistants. Despite these shows of wealth, Hamedi's close allies seemed to think of themselves as plucky outsiders who cut their teeth in the crucible of Sudan's wars, far away from the decadent capital and its corrupt network of traditional political elites. One of them told me of having escaped the scene of a massacre in Darfur only to come to Khatum and be dazed by the dissonance of seeing people dining, partying,

39:42and going about their lives oblivious to what was happening only hours away in their own country. They all spoke of Hamedi as a misunderstood figure, a generous man, living frugally preoccupied with the interests of the Sudanese people and battling the devious propaganda of Burhan and his shadowy cabal, the slimmest allies. They maintained that a deep state made up of the powerful remnants of Bashar's regime and the army was working to eliminate him. Despite all the power that Hamedi had amassed, he was a stressed man under siege, they said. He had realized the troops, money, and arms weren't enough to establish him firmly in power. By early April, as the deadline for finalizing the agreement with the civilians in the military approached, it became clear that commitment to the deal was ebbing away.

40:43The army backtracked on previous statements, declaring that it would not seed power to a civilian authority unless it was elected. Crucial points, such as the timing of the RSS integration into the army and Hamedi's own position within it, became contentious. Hamedi accused the army of dragging its feet and clinging onto power. In turn, an army spokesperson stated, we cannot make an agreement when there are two armies in the country. It is not clear exactly when the last shred of trust has appeared, or who fired first, but three days before hostilities began, the RSS had begun to deploy more troops to Khartoum and to quietly reinforce its positions in the strategic northern city of Meadowie. On Saturday, the 15th of April, the first day of hostilities, the RSS troops captured Meadowie airport and airbase, and appeared to take over Khartoum airport

41:43and the presidential palace. The army's military headquarters were also attacked, and by Sunday morning, the building was on fire. The army turned to its major advantage over the RSS, aerial firepower, and deployed jets that reigned missiles on RSS positions across the center of the city against buildings and clusters of militiamen nestled close to civilian areas. The fighting fled up simultaneously in other parts of Sudan, not just in the north, but once again in Darfur, in the cities of Ni'ala and Al-Fersher. Hameddi had junked the deal as a way for him to consolidate his power and reverted to what he knows best, fighting. That fighting seems partly animated by Hameddi's bitterness at how he has been treated by his former partners in the army, and by Borhan personally, the man whose death he relished in that first interview after the conflict began.

42:45From the third day of the conflict, RSS troops began entering houses in Khartoum, pillaging, looting, and assaulting civilians. Such actions suggest a force that is hostile, not just to the army, but the inhabitants of a city and a wider ethnic heartland that had never welcomed them, a bloody expression of Hameddi's vengeance. Not even a week after hostilities began, civilian casualties have risen to nearly 300. The deaths concentrated in Khartoum, the site of the most intense fighting. Some died by bullets that ricocheted into their homes, others trying to make their way across the city to safety. The rest of the city's population are running out of food and water, and sleeping, if they can, far away from windows as the constant barrage of gunfire rattles outside their homes. Meanwhile, the army indiscriminately showers both Hameddi's militia

43:48and the Sudanese people with bombs, as it fights an existential battle on behalf of a ruling class desperately trying to eliminate a man who is both its creation and its punishment. Thanks again for listening to The Guardian Longread. That was Sudan's outsider, how a paramilitary leader fell out with the army and plunged the country into war by Nasserine Malik. Red by Nasserine Malik and produced by Rachel Porter and Nicola Alexandru. The executive producer was Ellie Bury. For more Guardian Longreads in text and a selection in audio, visit theguardian.com forward slash Longread. And to purchase a beautifully illustrated collection of our finest stories in print, visit guardianbookshop.com.

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