Rapid Support Forces
The Rapid Support Forces are a Sudanese paramilitary force formerly operated by the Sudanese government. They originated as auxiliary force militias known as the Janjaweed used by the Sudanese government during the War in Darfur, which the government later restructured as a paramilitary organization in August 2013 under the command of Muhammad Dagalo, better known as Hemedti.
Since 2023, the RSF has been fighting a civil war against the Sudanese Armed Forces for control of Sudan, after seizing power along with the SAF in the 2021 Sudanese coup d'état. In 2025, it established a parallel government called the Government of Peace and Unity.
Its forces have been documented committing war crimes on a vast scale against members of non-Arab ethnicities in Darfur and against Northern Sudanese Arabs in Khartoum state and Gezira State because of their perceived support of the Sudanese Armed Forces.
Their fighters are largely recruited as mercenaries, with funding coming from the capture of gold mines and patronage by corporate and state actors; the group has also hired out its fighters as mercenaries to fight in conflicts and assist governments outside Sudan such as in the Yemeni civil war. In more recent years, the RSF has allegedly recruited mercenaries from more distant regions to fight in its war in Sudan, occasionally via US sanctioned firms in the United Kingdom. The RSF has adopted an anti-Islamist stance in its public relations, and has claimed its new state will be a secular democracy with a bill of rights, but these postures have been met with widespread skepticism by observers given the RSF's behavior on the ground.
The United Arab Emirates has been widely accused of secretly supplying it with financial support. The RSF has obtained many fighters and arms from neighboring Chad, the government of which has ceased any formal relations with Sudan in an effort to quell these accusations. RSF supply lines run in part through Libya, and RSF forces have been deployed to Libya to work for the Libyan National Army.
The RSF has been accused of crimes against humanity, including genocide of the non-Arab population, by the International Criminal Court, Human Rights Watch, Genocide Watch, and the federal government of the United States. In the course of the civil war, their forces have killed hundreds of thousands of non-Arab civilians, used sexual violence systematically, imposed deliberate starvation, and pillaged and burned homes, hospitals, and places of worship, leading millions to flee and creating an ongoing humanitarian crisis.
They have been documented gang raping women and forcing them into marriages, recruiting child soldiers, and forcing civilians to enlist under pain of death. During the 2019 military coup, they killed, raped, unlawfully detained, and pillaged the homes of hundreds of protesters and activists, especially during the Khartoum massacre. In October 2025, the RSF captured El Fasher, the last major stronghold of the Sudanese Armed Forces in Darfur, following an 18-month siege. The takeover triggered a massive humanitarian catastrophe characterized by widespread ethnic cleansing and mass killings. Reports indicate that tens of thousands of civilians were murdered during and after the city's fall.
Background
RSF has its roots in the Janjaweed militias used by the Sudanese Government in its attempts to fight the anti-government insurgency during the war in Darfur. RSF was officially formed in 2013, following a restructuring and reactivation of Janjaweed militias in order to combat rebel groups in Darfur region, South Kordofan, and the Blue Nile states, following joint attacks by Sudanese Revolutionary Front rebels in North and South Kordofan in April 2013.Logo change
On 18 April 2023, the RSF removed the word "Quds", an acronym for Quwwāt ad-Daʿm as-Sarīʿ but also Arabic for "Jerusalem", from its official logo. The revised version of the logo without the word "Quds" was used in RSF's published statements, while the previous slogan remained on the RSF's Facebook and Twitter social media accounts. Prior to the logo change, the RSF described Hamas as a terrorist movement, and Israel attempted to mediate between RSF and SAF in the current civil war in Sudan.Leadership and numbers
RSF is headed by Muhammad Hamdan Dagalo Musa, who has been its leader since it was created in August 2013., Hemedti's brother Abdul Rahim Hamdan Dagalo is the deputy head of RSF. Osman Mohamed Hamid Mohamed has served as head of operations.RSF was estimated by Human Rights Watch as having about 5,0006,000 soldiers in February 2014 in Darfur. In 2016–2017, RSF had 40,000 members participating in the Yemeni civil war. In late October 2019, 10,000 had returned to Sudan. In July 2019, about 1,000 RSF soldiers were present in Libya, during the Second Libyan Civil War, supporting the Libyan National Army commanded by Khalifa Haftar.
According to Reuters, as of 2023, the paramilitary force has a personnel of over 100,000 servicemen. Many of the RSF's fighters come from Baggara Arab tribes residing in the Darfur region of Sudan, Chad or elsewhere in the "Baggara belt" of the Sahel.
Ideology
The RSF's motives are characterized by academics, journalists, and local and international observers as Arab supremacist and economic.The RSF is widely characterized as violently Arab supremacist or ethno-fascist, an ideology with a preexisting history in Sudan. The journalist Nicholas Niarchos has said that "Arab supremacy is one of the RSF's animating ideas". Jérôme Tubiana, an advisor to Médecins Sans Frontières on refugee issues with a focus on Sudan and Chad, described them in 2019 as threatening to "transform Sudan from a military regime into a militia state, and replace Islamism with Arab supremacism", and Sudanese human rights advocate Amgad Fareid Eltayeb has described them as "a fascist decentralized militia". Gregory Stanton, founder of Genocide Watch, has described both them and their antecedents in the Janjaweed as having massacred hundreds of thousands of non-Arab civilians in Sudan and driven millions from their homes. In line with this, the International Criminal Court has accused the RSF of committing genocide, systematic rape and sexual violence, deliberate imposition of starvation, and other war crimes against the non-Arab population, a position echoed by U.S. Secretary of State Antony Blinken in the closing days of the Biden administration.
Yasir Zaidan, a political researcher at the University of Washington, has advocated for a view of the RSF as "ethno-mercenarist", fueled not only by "Arab supremacy ideology" but also by "land disputes, desertification, and local and regional interventions". He claims that the RSF is not an "ideology-driven insurgency, where mobilization is doctrine-first and organizational", but rather that the RSF recruits through Arab ethnic and tribal networks in the region by offering economic incentives to fight constantly, capitalizing on widespread youth unemployment, access to local gold wealth, and the interest and patronage of corporate and state actors such as the UAE. In this picture, Arab supremacism is not the driving force behind the RSF but only one factor in what makes them possible, with purely economic considerations also playing a major role.
Following the April 2019 revolution, the RSF has taken a hard line against Islamists. Hemedti claimed to have "exposed all the schemes and the terrorists' plans and extremists' plans" following a crackdown in 2023. According to political professor and director of the Royal African Society Nicholas Westcott, the RSF's roots in anti-Islamism comes from a reaction of Islamist benefactors of Omar al-Bashir largely siding with Abdel Fatteh al Burhan.
The Sudanese author Amgad Eltayeb has claimed that while the RSF "has strategically positioned itself as a vanguard against 'Islamists, this is a way to conceal its war crimes under the guise of counter-terrorism. He also stated that "certain establishment pundits and diplomats have echoed this narrative, casting the RSF as a viable bulwark against an 'Islamist resurgence'". and 'a veneer that conceals its historical criminal nature, patronage networks, illicit resource extraction and foreign sponsorship", such that designation of the RSF as "anti-Islamist" is "partisan sloganeering" to conceal its actions and "not objective analysis" in his eyes. He has also characterized the RSF as "an entity that was established and constructed by the Islamist regime under General Omar al-Bashir to impose its ideology and racist 'civilisational project of promoting Arab supremacy and anti-African sentiment.
The researcher Jérôme Tubiana described Hemedti as leading the Janjaweed under his command to murder the mostly Muslim and non-Arab population of Darfur. According to witness testimony, "the Janjaweed rammed non-Arab men with their pickup trucks and raped women in the name of jihad and rape non-Arab civilians in the name of 'jihad' in 2006.
In February 2025, the RSF announced that it had formed an agreement with its allies to form a secular and democratic "New Sudan" government with a bill of rights. However, their stated commitment to the rule of law has also been greeted with widespread skepticism. Alan Boswell, Horn of Africa project director for the International Crisis Group, described the move as purely motivated by the RSF's desire to "increase its own legitimacy and leverage" and lamented that it was most likely to "only make the war even harder to end and Sudan even harder to piece back together". DW quoted unnamed UN officials in 2025 as making similar comments, fearing that the formation of a parallel government would only fragment Sudan further and undermine diplomatic efforts to create peace; Al Jazeera quoted a spokesman for UN secretary-general Antonio Guterres as making similar comments, expressing concern that the move would "increase the fragmentation of the country and risk making this crisis even worse". Osama Abuzaid, a political researcher affiliated with the CEDEJ in Khartoum, reported "heightened skepticism" among observers about the intentions of the RSF, citing the risk of "a facade of civilian rule without substantive democratisation" with "military-backed structures to shape power behind the scenes". In August 2025, the UN Security Council issued a statement against the RSF's formation of a parallel government, urging the RSF and SAF to instead come to a peace agreement that could lead to "a credible, inclusive transition to a civilian-led government that can lead the country towards democratic elections" and expressing "alarm" about "reports of a renewed RSF offensive this week in El Fasher".