--- title: Sudan’s Paramilitaries are the Best-Funded Insurgents on Earth. They’re also Losing the War. description: "Sudan’s Rapid Support Forces are arguably the most well-funded and armed insurgency in decades. With billions of dollars in funding and near-daily weapon deliveries from the UAE, winning the civil war should in theory have been easy. But the opposite is true. The RSF is losing." url: https://fronts.co/article/sudans-paramilitaries-are-the-best-funded-insurgents-on-earth-theyre-also-losing.md canonical: https://fronts.co/article/sudans-paramilitaries-are-the-best-funded-insurgents-on-earth-theyre-also-losing/ datePublished: 2026-08-31T14:30:24.000Z dateModified: 2026-08-31T14:30:25.000Z author: - name: Thomas van Linge url: https://fronts.co/authors/thomas-van-linge/ publisher: Fronts image: "https://media.fronts.co/cdn-cgi/image/width=1200,height=630,fit=cover,gravity=auto,quality=80,format=auto/images/articles/sudans-paramilitaries-are-the-best-funded-insurgents-on-earth-theyre-also-losing-3c6b678f.jpg" type: NewsArticle language: en tokens: 3894 --- Few conflicts have witnessed a turn of the tide as frequently as the war in Sudan. Ever since fighting started in April 2023, both the Sudanese Armed Forces (SAF) and the rebellious Rapid Support Forces (RSF) have on more than one occasion felt that victory was within their grasp, only to have it slip away again. In 2024, the RSF had taken over Wad Madani, Sennar and advanced all the way to the Ethiopian border, cutting SAF territory in several pockets. The Sudanese government seemed ready to collapse. But hardly a year later the SAF had regained all lost ground in the center of the country and even pushed the RSF out of the capital of Khartoum. This time the paramilitaries were the ones who seemed on the brink, only for the RSF to overwhelm the defense of the city of El-Fasher and take the vast majority of Darfur by late 2025. But now the RSF is once again on the back foot, and this time it's different. Several key RSF commanders have switched sides over the past months, instability and communal conflicts are rising in RSF territory and on the battlefield the SAF has scored some key victories. RSF leader Muhammed Hamdan Dagalo, better known by his nom de guerre ‘Hemedti’, gave an indication of how poor things were looking for the RSF when he granted field commanders authority to disregard the military chain-of-command and strike enemy positions at will without any approval from above. A move which most military analysts would describe as desperate at best, and unhinged at worst. The RSF’s current poor standing has surprised friend and foe alike, as by many metrics they hold a material advantage and might be expected to come out on top. This is primarily due to the role of a single outside actor: the United Arab Emirates. Very early on in the war, the UAE threw its weight behind the RSF. Within a year Abu Dhabi had set up an industrial-sized supply chain of weapons and equipment to the paramilitaries. Entire neighboring countries were hired by the UAE to serve as transit points between the Emirates and Darfur. Regular cargo flights would take off from Abu Dhabi, land in eastern Libya or Chad, and from there whole convoys would simply cross the border. As the war went on the UAE even brought Ethiopia into the fray and started making weapon deliveries into Sudan directly, with cargo planes landing at the airport of Nyala, the RSF’s administrative capital. By 2026 the UAE had hired at least three out of Sudan’s seven neighbors to support the RSF.  The SAF, meanwhile, had hardly any real allies to rely on. Egypt, Turkey, and Iran delivered some weaponry, but in the initial years of the conflict this was only a drop compared to what the UAE committed to Hemedti. The SAF, which ironically for decades of internal conflict had been the one to outsource ground operations to the RSF, suddenly found itself having to fight a much more experienced, mobile and better armed enemy. The RSF was quick to seize this advantage and launch all-out assaults on SAF garrisons, which were quickly overwhelmed. Poorly armed and inexperienced SAF troops often melted away after little resistance.  RSF leadership at times seemed convinced that victory was a foregone conclusion, believing that overwhelming support from one of the richest nations in the world would be enough to seize power. But what the RSF forgot, and SAF leadership remembered, is that victory in Sudan does not come through firepower alone. Forging alliances and political scheming can be just as powerful a weapon, if not even more so.  **Allies in Darfur and Beyond** The first key alliance al-Burhan made was with his former enemies in Darfur; the defunct rebel forces of the Sudan Liberation Army and Justice & Equality Movement. These groups, which both primarily hailed from the non-Arab Zaghawi community in northern Darfur, were quickly combined and reformed into a new formation: The Joint Forces. Like the RSF, these former fighters had years of combat experience from previous wars and were able to beat the RSF at its own game. The RSF’s main battlefield advantage over the SAF was its mobility. Fast-moving attack groups in pick-up trucks, mounted with machine guns, were frequently able to outflank static SAF forces whose main military doctrine was to hold position and wait for the other to strike. The Joint Forces utilized the same tactics as the RSF and therefore were able to give the paramilitaries a taste of their own medicine. RSF positions and forces were constantly harassed, ambushed and chased in the wide expanses of northern Darfur, denying the RSF total control over the Zaghawa heartland which sits uncomfortably close to key cities such as El Fasher, El Geneina, and Kutum. The second part of the SAF’s divide-and-conquer strategy was to look for allies within Darfur’s Arab-tribal belt, the main source of the RSF’s power. One figure stood out more than anyone else: Musa Hilal. Musa Hilal hails from the Arab Mahamid tribe in northern Darfur. He rose to prominence during the Darfur war of 2003 to 2010, leading his fellow tribesmen against the Darfurian rebels in a pro-government irregular force which came to be known as the *Janjaweed. *The Janjaweed stand accused of horrible crimes against the non-Arab communities, including allegations of genocide. More relevant for today’s article, though, they were also the basis for what would become the RSF, after Sudan’s government decided to make them into an official military force. But when the Janjaweed joined the government, Musa Hilal went his own way. In 2014 he founded his own political movement, the Revolutionary Awakenings Council, and threatened open rebellion against Khartoum. He was arrested in 2017 and remained in jail until his release in spring of 2021 - a time when Sudan was in flux following a successful revolution, and hadn’t yet suffered the joint coup carried out by Hemedti and SAF leader al-Burhan. When the civil war erupted two years later, many expected Musa Hilal to join ranks with Hemedti, but Hilal and his RAC stayed on the sidelines, refusing to pick a side. That is until February of this year, when the RSF launched a surprise assault on his tribal heartland in the north of Darfur. While Musa Hilal survived the attack and managed to escape the area, his son Haider was captured and killed by the RSF, alongside another 27 people belonging to the Mahamid tribe. The assault didn’t come entirely out of the blue - Hilal, who was starting to voice political support for the SAF, had stated in early February to a crowd of supporters that the RSF was at its weakest since the beginning of the conflict, and admitted that some of his men were fighting in the ranks of the SAF on other frontlines. In response, the RSF attempted to set up a new pro-RSF leadership of the Mahamid tribe, only for the move to backfire as some of their fighters defected and returned to the RAC. It was apparently this that triggered the February assault, one that ended in disaster when Musa Hilal not only escaped with his life, but marched immediately into SAF territory in Sudan’s Northern State, where he threw his lot in with the army.  This has given the SAF an unparalleled advantage this year. Where al-Burhan and all the other SAF generals are eastern Sudanese military elite, Hilal is a Darfurian Arab tribal leader, one capable of appealing to the same support base as Hemedti. This is something he’s since done successfully, working as a middleman between the SAF and the Darfurian tribes, trying to convince other leaders to switch sides. The first one to defect was senior RSF commander Al-Nour Ahmed Adam, also known as Guba. Guba had been active in the RSF since 2021, holding the title of major general, and acting as a central figure during the siege of El Fasher, where he stands accused of committing horrendous war crimes. But Guba had also become disenchanted with the paramilitaries after being passed over for a promotion to commander of all RSF forces in northern Darfur, and had retreated to his home region of Damrat Guba near Kutum. There, Musa Hilal established contact with him. Not long after, Guba defected, taking with him hundreds of fighters, in what other RSF commanders described as a ‘painful’ blow. What came next displayed just how deliberate the SAF’s attempts to cultivate high-level defectors really were. When Guba arrived in Khartoum he was received with open arms by al-Burhan - in this case literally, as the SAF commander gave him a warm embrace before the cameras. Guba was put in an SAF uniform, received a military promotion and was even gifted a brand new car. The men loyal to him were integrated into the SAF’s ranks almost immediately, taking up security tasks south of Khartoum within two weeks. While the message this sent to the survivors of El-Fasher was shameful, they were not the intended audience. Rather, the ones al-Burhan wanted to witness this were other RSF commanders who might be holding grudges or harboring doubts; cross the lines, and you will be not only forgiven for your crimes, but also richly rewarded. This set off a steady trickle of defections that has continued to this day. In May, RSF commander El Safana announced his defection from the RSF in a video statement uploaded to social media. Just like Guba, El Safana emerged at a press conference in Khartoum, sporting an SAF uniform, and announcing his intention to return to the front and fight with the army against the rebels. Then in August, following military defeats around the city of El-Obeid, another RSF-commander defected. Brigadier General Musa Khamsin traveled to SAF territory, together with 300 of his men. Waiting on the other side to publicly welcome him was Guba. Hemedti’s former confidants were now rallying to the opposite side.  **A Hollow Army** The effect on this hollowing out of the RSF has been clear to see this summer. A couple of months ago, the RSF had seemed set to launch a major offensive on the city of El Obeid, already surrounded on three sides by the paramilitaries. There were warnings of another El Fasher, where around sixty thousand people may have died after the paramilitaries overran the city’s defenses. But when the Joint Forces launched a small-scale offensive in June in northern Darfur, the RSF had no extra troops to spare and was forced to pull critical manpower resources from El Obeid and deploy them in Darfur to hold the line. The RSF attack on El Obeid never took off and the SAF even turned the tables by launching a successful counteroffensive north of the city, opening the road to the capital Khartoum for the first time in years, and thus eliminating any threat of an RSF siege in the near-future. RSF-leader Hemedti seems to be belatedly recognizing the impact of these defections. Recently, he has begun meeting with Darfurian tribal leaders, initiating a new tribal mobilization drive, known in the region as “al-rasan” (*to unleash forces*). This has had some success as several tribes have committed thousands of men to the RSF. But this has not been a risk-free way of bolstering the RSF’s depleted ranks. Intercommunal tensions are a fact of life among the tribes of Darfur, and these tensions have not disappeared as their men get folded in under the wider RSF umbrella. One of the tribes to respond to the call for new recruits, the Beni Halba, is in open conflict with the Salamat tribe, a fellow Arab community which lives in Darfur and is part of the RSF’s larger coalition. During previous rounds of fighting, RSF fighters hailing from the Beni Halba are known to have abandoned their duties on the frontline in order to return home, where they turned their newly acquired weapons on the Salamat. Hemedti is now in a difficult position. After three years of full-scale war the RSF’s ranks have been depleted. Dissatisfaction is growing among the Arab tribes which support the RSF, due to tribal rivalries, heavy losses of young men on the frontlines, as well as a growing sense of lawlessness in their home territory. By arming more of these tribesmen Hemedti risks giving weapons to those that might turn on him sooner or later.  The UAE, meanwhile, continues to support the RSF in whatever way it can. It has recently expanded its operations in Ethiopia, allowing for thousands of RSF fighters to fly into the country and attack Sudan from the east, opening another front to which the SAF needs to divert resources which could deny it a victory elsewhere. But the UAE’s deep pockets can only do so much. In the end, the already existing power structures within Sudan will likely prove decisive. For years Hemedti tapped into these same structures by claiming to fight for the Darfurian Arab tribal belt. Now with Musa Hilal rivalling him for that mantle, the war in Sudan has taken a dramatic turn. More than any previous military defeat, the potential loss of its support base to rival contenders could spell the eventual doom of Hemedti’s rebels. <!-- generated-faq --> ## FAQ ### When did the fighting between SAF and RSF start? In April 2023, RSF leader Hemedti and SAF leader al-Burhan carried out a joint coup before their two forces began fighting each other. Earlier that spring, Sudan had been in flux following a successful revolution. ### How did the UAE supply weapons to the RSF? Within a year of the war's start, Abu Dhabi set up an industrial-sized supply chain, using cargo flights to eastern Libya or Chad followed by convoys crossing the border. By 2026, the UAE had hired at least three of Sudan's seven neighbors to support the RSF, and was landing cargo planes directly at Nyala airport. ### Who are the Joint Forces allied with the SAF? The Sudanese Liberation Army and Justice & Equality Movement, defunct rebel forces from the non-Arab Zaghawa community in northern Darfur, were combined and reformed into the Joint Forces. They matched the RSF's mobility tactics, harassing and ambushing RSF positions across northern Darfur. ### What triggered Musa Hilal to join the SAF? In February 2025, the RSF launched a surprise assault on his tribal heartland, capturing and killing his son Haider and 27 other Mahamid tribesmen. Hilal escaped and immediately joined the SAF in Sudan's Northern State. ### What desperate measure did Hemedti recently authorize? Hemedti granted field commanders authority to disregard the military chain-of-command and strike enemy positions without approval. Military analysts described the move as desperate at best and unhinged at worst. ### How did SAF break the siege threat on El Obeid? In June 2025, the Joint Forces launched a small-scale offensive in northern Darfur that forced the RSF to pull critical manpower from El Obeid. The RSF attack never materialized, and the SAF launched a successful counteroffensive that opened the road to Khartoum. ### How did al-Burhan reward Guba's defection? When Guba defected, al-Burhan literally embraced him before cameras, gave him an SAF uniform, a military promotion, and a new car. Guba's men were integrated within two weeks. This spectacle was designed to encourage other RSF commanders to switch sides. ### What is Hemedti's new tribal mobilization drive called? Hemedti's new mobilization drive, known as 'al-rasan' or 'to unleash forces,' has brought in thousands from several tribes. But it carries risks: intercommunal tensions persist, and armed tribes like the Beni Halba have previously abandoned frontlines to fight rival tribes. <!-- /generated-faq -->