What next for Sudan’s most notorious rebel leader, known as Hemedti?

The journeyRSFRSF of Muhammad Hamdan Dagalo, better known as Hemedti, from the deserts of remotest Darfur to a gilded mansion on the banks of the Nile in Khartoum, embattled capital, is hard to fathom. Once a lowly camel rustler and small-time businessman, he started out with neither formal education nor military training. Yet by the late 2000s he was the most in all of Darfur, the country’s vast western region, holding a key to Sudan’s future. His infamous force of fellow camel-herding Arabs, known as the Janjaweed, was accused of committing genocide against the region’s African tribes on behalf of the country’s long-serving dictator, General Omar al-Bashir. As a veteran Sudan-watching diplomat puts it, Hemedti was like “a Mafia don who started on a street corner and then took over the city”.Within a decade the Janjaweed, officially recognised by the central government as the Rapid Support Forces (), had morphed into a paramilitary body with tens of thousands of well-equipped troops. Mr Dagalo, now a brigadier-general, had struck lucrative deals with the United Arab Emirates and Saudi Arabia and had sent men to aid their war in Yemen. Thanks to the ’s control of Sudan’s gold mines, he had established a sprawling transnational business empire.