Subject type: Paramilitary formation, de facto governing authority in part of Sudan
Jurisdiction: Sudan, no recognised legal status since 2023
Also known as: RSF, Quwat al-Da’m al-Sari, Janjaweed successor
File opened: 15 August 2026
Last updated: 15 August 2026
Origin
The RSF was formally created in 2013 out of Darfur militias that the Sudanese government had armed and deployed against insurgents during the Darfur war, the forces generally known as the Janjaweed. Bashir’s calculation was that a parallel force loyal to him personally would insure against a coup by the regular army.
It worked in the short term and failed comprehensively later. The RSF was given legal status, a budget, gold revenue and a command that answered to the presidency rather than to the general staff. By the time Bashir fell in 2019 the force was strong enough to act independently, and it did, participating in the Khartoum massacre of protesters that June.
Open war with the Sudanese Armed Forces began on 15 April 2023, over the terms and timetable for integrating the RSF into the regular army.
Command
Commanded since its formation by Mohamed Hamdan Dagalo, known as Hemedti, with his brother Abdul Rahim Dagalo as deputy. The command is familial and tribal at its core, drawing on the Rizeigat of Darfur, and this is both its cohesion and its ceiling. The force has never built a national political base because its structure does not permit one.
A civil administration was declared in RSF-held territory in December 2024, followed by the proclamation of a parallel government in April 2025. The claim to statehood has attracted no recognition.
Capability
Strength claims run from around 280,000 at the war’s outbreak to figures near 450,000 asserted by Hemedti in 2026. Such numbers include allied militias and should be read as political statements rather than order-of-battle data.
The force took El Fasher in October 2025 after an eighteen-month siege, completing control of Darfur and triggering mass killing and ethnic cleansing in the city’s aftermath. Since then the fighting has moved east into Kordofan, with El Obeid under sustained pressure.
The significant capability change has been aerial. Sudan’s war has become one of the first substantially drone-fought conflicts in Africa, and the drones on both sides are foreign-supplied. RSF long-range strikes in August 2026 hit El Obeid, Atbara, Omdurman and Khartoum simultaneously, targeting power and fuel infrastructure. That is a different force from the technical-mounted militia of 2023.
Funding and ownership
Darfur gold, controlled through family-linked companies and exported largely through the Gulf. Supplementary revenue from taxation of territory held, from protection arrangements, and from the mercenary deployments the force undertook in Yemen and Libya before the war.
Restrictions and exposure
The RSF and named commanders carry designations from the United States, the European Union and the United Kingdom, and the UN Security Council maintains a Sudan sanctions regime with a panel of experts. A UN fact-finding mission reported in September 2026 on transnational networks recruiting, training and deploying foreign personnel to the RSF and facilitating weapons and technology transfers.
The persistent question, addressed indirectly in such reporting, is state sponsorship, and the persistent difficulty is that the states involved deny it.
Watch items
- El Obeid and the Kordofan axis.
- Whether the UN panel of experts mandate is renewed and with what scope.
- Gold export routing and any interdiction of it.
- Drone supply chains and whether components are traced to identifiable suppliers.
- Fate of the parallel government structure declared in 2025.
Related files
- Africa Corps: Russian presence in the Sudanese theatre
- EDGE Group: Gulf defence industry and regional supply questions