![]() In return for his loyalty, al-Bashir allowed Hemedti to take over precious gold mines in Darfur and start amassing abundant personal wealth. The decision to legalise the Janjaweed militia and support Hemedti’s rise to the higher echelons of the armed forces was part of a calculated plan to fragment the military sector and “coup-proof” al-Bashir’s regime. The force was directly attached to the presidency. ![]() So in 2013, he decided to turn the Janjaweed militia into an official force, renaming it the Rapid Support Forces and installing one of its commanders, Mohamed Hamdan Dagalo, better known as Hemedti, as its head. Having survived a coup in 1990, al-Bashir was naturally suspicious of his own army. ![]() The Janjaweed – along with the Sudanese army – engaged in a wide variety of war crimes against Darfuris which earned al-Bashir an arrest warrant from the International Criminal Court.įearing what could happen to him if he were to lose power, the Sudanese president pursued policies which he thought would ensure the stability of his regime. ![]() It would not be an understatement to say that al-Bashir’s decision to rely on mercenaries to crush the uprising in Darfur eventually led to his political demise. But their violent creations inevitably turned against them, demonstrating just how dangerous playing a mercenary game can be, even for seasoned dictators. The force, which came to be known as Wagner, proved quite effective and became a trusted military tool for Putin to use in his foreign policy adventures.īoth al-Bashir and Putin perhaps thought that resorting to mercenaries was a smart move in their pursuit of power consolidation. To mask his invasion, he had one of his cronies, Yevgeny Prigozhin, create a mercenary force to send across the border into Ukraine. ![]() Known as the Janjaweed, they soon became a formidable force which managed to put an end to the revolt, earning al-Bashir’s trust and largesse.Ī decade later, when Ukrainians rebelled against the diktats of Moscow, Russian President Vladimir Putin decided to punish them by illegally annexing Ukraine’s Crimean peninsula and starting a conflict in the eastern part of the country. When in 2003, a rebellion erupted in Sudan’s Darfur region, triggered by decades of oppression and neglect of African communities, Sudanese President Omar al-Bashir resorted to local armed Arab groups to suppress it. ![]()
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