Do we like them?

Do we like Mohamed Hamdan Dagalo (Hemedti)?

Our score: 1 out of 10. A long record of forces under his command accused of mass atrocities, the US genocide finding and sanctions, and only a unilateral truce to set against it.

Hemedti is Mohamed Hamdan Dagalo, and he's less a celebrity than a warlord. Jamestown reports he was born around 1974 in Darfur, into a camel-herding Rizeigat sub-clan with Chadian roots, and left primary school early to trade camels across the Libyan and Egyptian borders. Other accounts put his birth a year or so later, because rural births there often weren't registered.

When the Darfur rebellion kicked off in 2003, Jamestown reports he became a militia commander and led attacks on Fur villages. Omar al-Bashir rewarded the loyalty and later put him at the head of the Rapid Support Forces. In 2017 he took the Jebel Amer gold mines off rival Musa Hilal, and his family's gold company helped bankroll the force.

In 2019 he and army chief Abdel Fattah al-Burhan ousted Bashir, and Hemedti became deputy head of the ruling council. Vladimir Putin received him in Moscow in February 2022. By April 2023 the two generals were fighting each other, and Sudan has been in civil war since.

In January 2025 the US determined that RSF members and allied militias committed genocide in Sudan, and it sanctioned Hemedti personally. The RSF rejected that as political and unsubstantiated. Reuters notes the force has been accused of atrocities across Darfur and in al-Fashir, the city it captured in late October 2025.

After El Fasher fell, Hemedti said he was sorry for what the city's people suffered, admitted his forces committed violations and promised a committee to investigate. Rights groups pointed out that earlier RSF inquiries, such as those into el-Geneina and Gezira, never delivered anything. In February 2026 UN investigators accused the RSF of war crimes in El Fasher, which is the part that matters most here.

On the harm check, we found nothing from him on LGBTQ+ people either way, but that's hardly the point. The issue is the violence against civilians by his forces, plus political moves like swearing himself in on 30 August 2025 as head of a rival government in Nyala. In February 2026 he turned up in Uganda for talks, which Sudan's government condemned.