Experter ser inget stopp på striderna – trots RSF:s ja till vapenvila

The Rapid Support Forces (RSF; Arabic: قوات الدعم السريع, romanized: Quwwāt ad-daʿm as-sarīʿ) are a Sudanese paramilitary force under the command of Muhammad Hamdan Dagalo Musa, better known as Hemedti. They began as Janjaweed militias used by the Sudanese government during the war in Darfur, which the government grouped into a paramilitary organization in August 2013 under Hemedti's command. Since 2023, they have been fighting a civil war against the Sudanese Armed Forces (SAF) for control of the country, after having taken power along with the SAF in a military coup in 2021. As of 2025, they have established a parallel government with their allies called the Government of Peace and Unity to rule over the territories under their control. The RSF's motives are widely characterized by academics, journalists, and other local and international observers as Arab supremacist and economic in nature. Their forces have been documented committing war crimes on a vast scale against members of non-Arab ethnicities in Sudan, and many of their fighters come from Arab tribes and ethnic groups across the wider region, including outside of Sudan's borders. 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. As a result of these activities, the leaders of the RSF have become some of the richest people in the country. 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 RSF's relations with other states are complex and largely veiled. The UAE has been widely accused of secretly supplying it with funds and money, leading U.S. Democrats to attempt to halt all arms sales from the U.S. to the UAE. The RSF has recruited many fighters from neighboring Chad, the government of which has also been accused of supplying it with arms and military assistance; Chad has ceased any formal relations with Sudan in an effort to quell these accusations. The UN has reported that RSF supply lines run in part through Libya, and that RSF forces have been deployed to Libya to work for the Libyan National Army. They have also fought in the Yemeni civil war on a mercenary basis as part of Saudi Arabia's intervention in the conflict. Al Monitor reported at the outset of the civil war in 2023 that the Israeli government was privately split on which side to back, citing an anonymous Israeli official, with the Ministry of Foreign Affairs said to favor the SAF and the Mossad said to favor the RSF. 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.