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Highly armed and dressed in fatigues in the desert, Sudanese Sudanese Rapid Support Forces (SFN) have been making themselves felt in Khartoum since military generals put an end to an extended sit-in.
Punched into vans mounted with machine guns or patrolling the streets, they are seen by some protesters as a new version of the infamous Janjaweed militias accused of terrible abuses in Darfur.
RSF is a paramilitary force led by the deputy chairman of the ruling military transition council, Lieutenant General Mohamed Hamdan Dagalo, nicknamed Himeidti.
Dagalo was a former leader of one of the Janjaweed Arab militias at the height of the Darfur conflict that began in 2003.
Janjaweed militias were recruited when Khartoum trained and equipped Arab raiders to crush a rebellion of ethnic minorities in the region.
The groups were sent to attack villages on camels and on horseback as part of a terror campaign in which overthrown President Omar al-Bashir was indicted for war crimes, crimes against the 39 Humanity and Genocide by the International Criminal Court (ICC).
In 2013, during clashes between Arab militias and security forces in Darfur, "Dagalo was one of the few commanders to remain loyal to the regime, which made him choose for RSF – the new paramilitary force to control and strengthen the Janjaweed, "said Jerome Tubiana, a Sudanese researcher.
Under the control of the powerful Sudanese National Intelligence and Security Services (NISS) and then the presidency, the RSF was sent to fight insurgents in Darfur, as well as in Southern Kordofan and Blue Nile states.
But the force has been accused by human rights groups of committing abuses against civilians in Darfur, such as rape, extrajudicial executions, looting, torture and village fires.
In 2014, ICC prosecutor Fatou Bensouda described them as "a new version of the Janjaweed".
The same year, Abbas Abdelaziz, the NISS officer who was jointly responsible for the force with Dagalo, said that calling RSF "Janjaweed" was an insult, insisting that men had experience of fight and had "become professionals".
According to him, the force was then composed of 6,000 members, of whom 1,500 came from the Sudanese armed forces.
Between 2017 and 2018, "several thousand RSF have been heavily rearmed (and trained by Russians) to protect Bashir," Tubiana said.
But all this changed in April when protesters staged the sit-in in front of the army headquarters in Khartoum to demand the departure of Bashir.
Himeidti refused to break the sit-in, Tubiana said.
The demonstration allowed the army to overthrow Bashir after three decades of authoritarian rule.
On Monday, members of the security forces attacked protesters at the sit-in site in front of the army headquarters in Khartoum.
Witnesses said that RSF was at the forefront of a "mbadacre" that had left dozens dead and hundreds wounded. The attackers were called "Janjaweed".
In Yemen, RSF has fought alongside the regular Sudanese army in the Saudi Arabian-led coalition against Houthi rebels backed by Iran since 2015.
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