What is the RSF? The Rapid Support Forces are a Sudanese paramilitary army — estimated by analysts at around 100,000 fighters before the current war — led by Mohamed Hamdan Dagalo, known as Hemedti, and built by the Sudanese state itself out of Darfur's Janjaweed militias. Formalised in 2013, used by President Omar al-Bashir as a border guard, a mercenary exporter and a coup shield, the RSF helped overthrow Bashir in 2019, ruled beside the regular army for four years, and has fought that army for control of Sudan since April 15, 2023. It now holds the capitals of all five Darfur states and runs a parallel government — the clearest case in the current war of a state-created militia outgrowing its creator. This explainer is the RSF spoke of our Sudan civil war explainer.
Where did the RSF come from?
From the Janjaweed, formalised. The Janjaweed were the Arab-majority militias Khartoum armed and funded to crush the rebellion that broke out in Darfur in 2003; UN and international investigations documented mass killings, systematic sexual violence, village burnings and ethnic cleansing in that campaign, and the Council on Foreign Relations (CFR) records that the Darfur conflict's first two years claimed over 200,000 lives. In 2013, after rebel attacks in North and South Kordofan, Bashir reorganised the militias as the Rapid Support Forces — a semi-regular unit under the National Intelligence and Security Service, mandated to "combat rebellion" and protect borders, with Hemedti, a Janjaweed commander, as its undisputed leader. A 2017 law then declared the RSF a "national military force" under the Sudanese Armed Forces — but, analysts note, it kept its own command structure, recruitment networks and revenue streams. That dual structure, a state army and a state-licensed rival army side by side, is the institutional fact the whole war grows out of.
How did a militia become half the state?
By being useful to everyone who held power, until it held power itself. Bashir employed the RSF as a border guard force, sent its fighters as mercenaries with the Saudi coalition in Yemen, and used it as his protection against coups — while Hemedti became one of Sudan's wealthiest men by seizing control of gold mines. The force's other face showed in Khartoum on June 3, 2019: weeks after the RSF had joined the army in ousting Bashir, its troops opened fire on a peaceful protest sit-in, killing more than 100 people, ACLED documented; more than half of the RSF's recorded activity in that protest period was violence against civilians, and at least 70 rapes associated with the force were reported in the crackdown. Hemedti refused responsibility, blaming "imposter troops." Politically, though, the RSF only rose: Hemedti became deputy chair of the Sovereign Council under army chief Abdel Fattah al-Burhan, and the two generals jointly seized full power in the October 2021 coup. The December 2022 framework deal then made Hemedti formally Burhan's equal — and required the RSF's integration into the regular army under civilian leadership, without a deadline and without settling who would command the merged force.
Why did the RSF and the army go to war?
Because integration meant one of the two armies would cease to exist, and neither commander would accept being the one absorbed. The war broke out in Khartoum on April 15, 2023, over exactly the disputes the 2022 deal had left open — when and how the RSF would be integrated, and who would command the unified force; each side accused the other of firing first. The RSF seized large sections of Khartoum and Omdurman in an urban-warfare campaign, while the army eventually regained the capital in 2025. The war's atrocity record began immediately and has centred on Darfur: in El Geneina, West Darfur, the RSF killed thousands of people and displaced hundreds of thousands between April and November 2023, a 2024 Human Rights Watch report found; CFR records a UN figure of 10,000 to 15,000 people killed in 2023 by ethnic violence by the RSF and its allies in West Darfur, and more than 800 killed in the November 2023 Ardamata attack alone. Human Rights Watch has documented widespread unlawful killings, sexual violence and destruction of civilian property by the RSF and its allies, and repeated use of heavy explosive weapons in densely populated areas. In January 2025 the International Criminal Court's prosecutor said there were reasonable grounds to believe a wide range of Rome Statute crimes had been and were being committed in Darfur.
What does the RSF hold, and how does it pay for the war?
It holds the west, and it pays in gold. The RSF controls broad areas of western and central Sudan — in Darfur, all five state capitals: El Fasher, Nyala, El Geneina, Zalingei and Ed Daein. El Fasher, the last army-held city in Darfur, fell on October 26–27, 2025 after an eighteen-month siege; the UN Fact-Finding Mission described systematic and ongoing attacks on civilians in its fall, local and international organisations reported massacres, and more than 62,000 people were displaced — while nearly 400,000 people in the region faced starvation, CFR records. In February 2025 the RSF and its allies had already signed a charter in Nairobi to form a parallel government, presenting the force as a state-in-waiting. The money is independent of any state budget: the RSF has built a vast economic network largely independent of the Sudanese state, and its most profitable source is gold extracted from mines in Darfur and South Kordofan, which finances recruitment, weapons purchases and foreign partnerships, according to the reporting summarised in Reuters' factbox. Across Sudan as a whole, the war had killed 20,000 people and displaced more than 15 million as refugees and internally displaced persons by the factbox's UN and local figures — the context in which every RSF drone strike, defection and Kordofan offensive in our Africa coverage now lands.
This explainer is drawn from the Reuters factbox on the RSF, the Council on Foreign Relations' Sudan conflict tracker (updated November 6, 2026) and ACLED's RSF report, all opened and read in full during this run. Strength figures are pre-war analyst estimates as those sources report them; atrocity findings are attributed to the bodies that documented them.
