Hemedti

Mohamed Hamdan Dagalo (born 1974 or 1975), commonly known by the mononym Hemedti, is a Sudanese military officer and the current head of the paramilitary Rapid Support Forces (RSF). A Janjaweed leader from the Rizeigat tribe in Darfur, he was the Deputy head of the Transitional Military Council (TMC) following the 2019 Sudanese coup d'état. Since 2013, Hemedti has commanded the RSF. He was considered by The Economist to be the most powerful person in Sudan as of early July 2019.

On 21 August 2019, the TMC transferred power to the civilian–military Transitional Sovereignty Council, of which Hemedti is a member. Under Article 19 of the August 2019 Draft Constitutional Declaration, Hemedti and the other Sovereignty Council members were to be ineligible to run in the 2022 Sudanese general election. As of 2019, Hemedti was considered one of the richest people in Sudan via his company, al-Junaid, which had a wide array of business interests including investment, mining, transport, car rental, iron and steel. On behalf of the Transitional Military Council, Hemedti signed a Political Agreement on 17 July 2019 and a Draft Constitutional Declaration on 4 August 2019, together with Ahmed Rabee on behalf of the Forces of Freedom and Change (FFC), as major steps in the 2019 Sudanese transition to democracy. In September 2019, Hemedti helped negotiate a peace deal between groups in armed conflict in Port Sudan.

Hemedti took part in the 2021 Sudan coup d'état, but has since distanced himself from it; in February 2023 he called it a "mistake". The comments were part of a growing rift between him and army leader Abdel Fattah al-Burhan. In April 2023, Dagalo mobilized the RSF against al-Burhan's government, claiming to capture key government sites, though al-Burhan has disputed this.

According to Human Rights Watch and professor Eric Reeves, the RSF was responsible for crimes against humanity, including systematic killings of civilians and rapes, in Darfur in 2014 and 2015. Hemedti was also involved in the 23 November 2004 attack on the village of Adwa which resulted in a massacre and rape, and said that the attacks had been planned for months. According to Al Jazeera and The Daily Beast, the Sudanese Transitional Military Council, headed by the RSF, holds major responsibility for the 3 June 2019 Khartoum massacre.