The casual observer could be forgiven for wondering how the Rapid Support Forces (RSF), a Sudanese paramilitary organization notorious for atrocities in Darfur, became powerful enough to challenge the Sudanese Armed Forces (SAF) for control of the country when its civilian government was overthrown in 2021. Believe it or not, the answer runs through the Global War on Terror, Washington’s disastrous handling of Yemen, and Barack Obama’s determination to placate Saudi Arabia.
The connections might seem tenuous. They aren’t.
For years Washington had cultivated a security partnership with the brutal Yemeni dictator Ali Abdullah Saleh. Under President George W. Bush, it was given money and military assistance and tasked with helping fight Al Qaeda in the Arabian Peninsula (AQAP), whose own origins lie in Washington’s prior intervention in Afghanistan to undermine the Soviets. Predictably, Saleh preferred to use American resources to help maintain his hold on power. Playing an incredibly complicated balancing game, which featured Saleh arming and paying pretty much everyone—from his own armed forces to Al-Islah, AQAP to (eventually) the Houthis—it was only a matter of time before the situation became untenable.
This was the mess the Obama administration inherited—it then helped make it considerably worse.
In 2011, Saleh, under pressure from Washington, was forced to relinquish power following a popular uprising and a Gulf-brokered transition. His vice president, Abdrabbuh Mansur Hadi, assumed the presidency through an election in which he was the sole candidate—these were the circumstances then-Secretary of State Hilary Clinton had hailed as “the advent of Yemeni democracy.” Hadi promptly picked up where Saleh left off, trying to use a combination of Al-Islah fighters and what was left of Yemen’s own armed forces to go after the Houthis.
This failed, and by 2014 the Houthis had seized the capital, Sana’a, and the Saudis were lobbying Washington for intervention.
Washington had a choice. It could use its considerable leverage over Riyadh to discourage a war of dubious strategic merit and press for a negotiated accommodation with the Houthis. The Houthis were enemies of Al-Qaeda, and then-commander of CENTCOM Lloyd Austin had begun sharing intelligence with the group. Instead, the Obama administration green-lit the war.
The timing was hardly incidental. Saudi Arabia was deeply alarmed by Obama’s nuclear agreement with Iran, which Riyadh feared would strengthen its regional rival and signal a weakening of American commitment to the Gulf monarchies. Rather than insist that Saudi Arabia abandon an ill-conceived military campaign that was perceived as likely to be fruitless, if not outright counterproductive, at the outset, Washington helped reassure the kingdom that the nuclear agreement did not mean the United States was abandoning it by backing one of the worst humanitarian disasters of the young twenty-first century.
Indeed, the war would go on to devastate Yemen, produce a humanitarian catastrophe, and fail to achieve anything—but the consequences were not confined to Yemen. This is because while Saudi Arabia and the UAE were bombing from the air, they needed ground forces. Sudan, seeking closer relations with the wealthy Gulf monarchies, supplied fighters from one of its regional militias, known as the Rapid Support Force (RSF). For the organization, commanded by Mohamed Hamdan Dagalo, better known as Hemedti, the deployment proved extraordinarily lucrative.
Yemen offered the RSF money, recruits, combat experience, and relationships with powerful foreign patrons, most especially the UAE, which continues to be its primary backer to this day. These deployments helped transform the organization from a Sudanese counterinsurgency force into a formidable paramilitary enterprise with independent resources and regional connections.
To be sure, the RSF’s rise had other causes, including its origins in the Darfur conflict, its involvement in Sudan’s gold economy, and the longstanding strategy of Sudanese rulers who cultivated competing security organizations to prevent any single institution from monopolizing power. But the Yemen campaign, from 2015-2019, provided an important additional source of financing, military experience, and diplomatic reach at a critical stage in the RSF’s development.
Following the overthrow of Saleh’s Sudanese counterpart, Omar al-Bashir, in 2019, the RSF emerged as a central player in Sudan’s political transition. After the military coup of 2021 displaced the civilian-led government, tensions between the RSF and the regular army (SAF) continued to grow. Their struggle over the integration of their forces and control of the state erupted into open warfare in April 2023.
Sudan has since endured mass displacement, widespread atrocities, and ethnically targeted violence. In the west of the country, the RSF and allied militias have been documented regularly engaging in large-scale civilian killing, mass rape, and the use of child soldiers. Hundreds of thousands have been killed in the civil war, which remains ongoing, with millions displaced.
While Washington did not create the RSF, and the decisions of Sudanese leaders remain central to explaining the country’s collapse, American policymakers helped sustain the regional war that strengthened this paramilitary organization, just as earlier American security policies helped shape the political environment from which Yemen’s conflict emerged. Washington helped arm Saleh in the name of counterterrorism. It subsequently backed a Saudi war that strengthened the Sudanese paramilitary force that eventually became one of the principal combatants in a catastrophic civil war that it is hard to imagine having occurred in their absence.
Not that policymakers in Washington care. The situation described is entirely familiar to critical analysts of U.S. interventionism: pursue the immediate objective, disregard the foreseeable complications, cater to clients, and leave somebody else to deal with the blowback.
