Hemedti

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 Abdel Fattah al-Burhan, the head of the Sudanese army, and the country's deputy leader, General Mohamed Hamdan Dagalo, known as Hemeti, 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 civilians from a transitional government.

but their alliance soon frayed and they began to regard each other with suspicion.

By February, inside Sudan, people were growing increasingly afraid that Burhan and Hemeti could come to blows and plunge the country into armed conflict.

Unlike any other leader or 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, Khartoum's military cantonments and elite salons.

Hemeti is folksy, easy in his skin, with a glint in his eye and a smiling mischief to his demeanour, that belie 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 among Sudan's political elites and military.

And that seems perfectly reasonable to me, I'm sure, to all of you as well.

In Asia and Myanmar, junta leader Minh Aung Hlaing made his first official visit to Vietnam as a nominally civilian head of state on Friday.

And on Saturday, he and Vietnamese President Tho Lam announced that they had agreed to strengthen their defense and security relationship.

The deal itself is less notable for what it entails than for what it says about Myanmar's reintegration into Southeast Asian politics now that its junta has gone through the motions of holding an election.

In China, the Washington Post reports on Chinese President Xi Jinping's recent busy travel calendar, which indicates that he's hoping to capitalize on the present geopolitical moment.

Let me read you a bit of this piece.

Chinese leader Xi Jinping has hit the road this September for an unusual series of diplomatic trips spanning four countries, three state visits, two multilateral summits, and one widely anticipated meeting with President Donald Trump.

A key part of his agenda, a pitch for China as a stable partner, especially for developing countries, during a period of what Beijing has portrayed as US-driven geopolitical uncertainty.

The contacts were reportedly part of a broader security and intelligence relationship that predated Sudan's war.

A Sudanese court sentenced RSF Commander Mohamed Hamdan Dagalo and 15 others to death in absentia in July for war crimes and genocide, the first conviction of the parliamentary's leadership since the war began.

The conflict has killed tens of thousands and displaced more than 14 million people.

Those are the facts.

And so if you look at Kenya newspapers, particularly The Standard and others, And there's very good reporting on that, as well as on Kenyan television.

Now, a large part of that is driven by, according to these reports, the relationship between President Trudeau with General Hemeti of the RSF.

And there have been very public meetings between the two of them.

And so I think there is sort of a growing picture of how the RSF has managed to have this sort of influence operation.

They were even working with the European Union to crack down on illegal migration, and in 2017, that group of militias was formalized in Sudanese parliament as the Rapid Support Forces.

So there was a power struggle between the head of the army, General Abdel Fattah Burhan, and the head of the RSF, Mohamed Hamdan Dagalo, also known as Hemedti.

The army wanted to absorb the RSF formally into the armed forces, and the RSF had been making money as a militia for hire.

They fought for the United Arab Emirates in, in Yemen.

I mean, mediators were dealing with the army saying, "We need the RSF to be absorbed into the armed forces in two years," and Hemedti turning around and saying, "10 years." So it was a complete deadlock, and then that erupted into explosions, gunfire in the capital on a Saturday morning when Hemedti's forces wanted to take control of the capital, and they held it for two years before the army could reclaim it.

And it has descended or escalated month by month since then into this absolutely massive catastrophic war.

Give us a sense of the scale of this because if we're looking at that number of, what is it, 15 million people displaced, that is the entire population of London, Kent, Surrey, and Sussex getting up and deciding that, that it's just too dangerous to live where you are and running for their lives literally.

Sudan's war is an inconvenient war.

They're frighteningly similar.

Uh, General Dagalo or Hemedti was also instrumental in that 2019 revolution and coup.

He became that deputy of that military council, and the guys both got too big for their britches.

So both of them are claiming that they have the mandate of those people at the bottom of this proverbial hill, and both of them are claiming that the other guy's claims are patently, and beat me here, Freight Train, [beep].

It's a very rubber, glue, rubber versus glue, not me, nah, you situation, but millions of innocent people are dying because of this.

And also, there is one thing we have to mention officially.

Hemedti is rich as [beep].

He is one of the most wealthy people in the entirety of Sudan, and it's because of a corporation called Al Junaid, uh, A-L dash J-U-N-A-I-D.

I think the most immediate thing is for the parties to the conflict in the north to be rained on.

The particular one which I'll draw attention to is the the rebel group of this guy, Hemeti, who effectively has been alleged to have committed genocide against particular communities, particularly in Darfur.

And these guys are backed by United Arab Emirates.

There have been major reports about these things, and so they're almost certainly definitive, which United Arab Emirates are armed by.

They still wa- needed to maintain Arab supremacy and, you know, to quell any sort of rebellion, but they needed to do it in a way without this person, Musa Hilal.

Um, and you know, the way they did it was basically, like you said, in 2013, they promoted a relative of his, which his name is Hemedti, who we hear in the news today, instead of Musa Hilal, and changed, you know, the Janjaweed and, you know, refined the image of the Janjaweed into basically the RSF, the Rapid Support Forces.

They called the RF- the RSF the R- Rapid Support, Support Forces because it was meant to be like, you know, the support forces that were to protect the, the dictatorship, to protect the, the, the president, uh, Omar Bashir.

And, you know, yeah, they, they were, they were basically, um, they were called on for whenever there was like protest in Khartoum, these people would come, they would be deployed to basically destroy and kill, if necessary, uh, protesters in, in, in the capital, um, and elsewhere.

And I think one of the, one of the interesting things that we see like ripples of today is just like Musa Hilal and the Janjaweed had ambitious, had ambitions to overtake the- Basically the national, the national army, uh, uh, Omar al-Bashir.

Today, the RSF also, you know, with under Hemedti, similarly had the motivations or the ambitions to take over Sudan and over the national-- destroy the national army and basically, you know, be the, the new rulers, even though they were subsidiary of, you know, the, the, the...

It came out of like, you know, sub- was subsidized by the, the national army, the Sudanese Armed Forces, the SAF.

It's important to say this because if you look at it, you know, abstractly, we see what happens with financialization policies as we see all over the world.