The RSF in El-Fasher: The Wolf’s Strategy

By Abdullah Ali Ibrahim

Summary:
We cannot fully grasp the nature of the Rapid Support Forces (RSF) as a terrorist entity merely by acknowledging the atrocities they committed in El-Fasher, but rather by observing their deliberate documentation of these crimes — as if to make the absent bear witness. To understand this, one must examine the internal composition of this militia as an armed force. If it had ever learned from the devastating impact of its brutality on its own reputation, it would have learned from the blood it spilled in the villages of Al-Jazira State during its occupation there in December 2023. Atrocity, after all, is the nature of the beast that emerged in pursuit of forbidden spoils.

The RSF’s seizure of El-Fasher was a moment that could only be described as “the fear of dreams coming true.” No sooner had the group’s victory over the Sudanese Armed Forces been announced than the world recoiled in horror at the massacre of civilians that followed. Britain’s Minister for Africa and its representative to the United Nations on Sudan warned that the RSF must be held accountable for its crimes in Darfur. The Chairman of the U.S. Senate Foreign Relations Committee branded the RSF a “foreign terrorist organization,” even as Washington’s “Quartet” meetings — held on the very day El-Fasher fell — had been preparing to label the army’s Islamist allies as terrorists instead.

Nowhere was the RSF’s shattered ambition better captured than in the words of journalist Mohamed Latif of Tayba Press, known for his fierce criticism of the army — but rarely of the RSF. Latif wrote that the RSF’s own atrocities in El-Fasher turned its victory into a moral and political defeat, marking the first time he had seen “a consensus among civilian and political forces” in condemning its violations. The group, he said, squandered a major opportunity to gain legitimacy from its battlefield success; the world had been closely watching El-Fasher amid the Washington talks, interpreting the RSF’s willingness to engage as a positive signal. Had the group refrained from bloodshed, its victory might have been greeted with cautious relief — instead, it became a stain of infamy. Worse still, Latif noted, the RSF compounded its failure by attempting to justify its crimes by pointing to the army’s own abuses, when the wiser course would have been to expose and condemn all violations, not mirror them.

Among those deeply disturbed by the RSF’s actions was Khalid Kodi, the visual artist and member of the Sudan People’s Liberation Movement–North (under Abdelaziz al-Hilu), an ally of the RSF within the Ta’sis coalition. His long statement sought to distance his movement from the RSF’s crimes, making clear that one group’s sins should not taint the other. Kodi condemned without ambiguity the killing of civilians and even of soldiers who had surrendered — acts that violated both international humanitarian law and the Ta’sis charter itself. He argued that condemning the RSF’s violations was not a political choice but an ethical and revolutionary duty necessary to uphold the values of the revolution and prevent their recurrence.

Kodi reaffirmed the coalition’s full commitment to the Ta’sis charter, emphasizing that the alliance was a coordination framework rather than a merger — each organization remained independently responsible for its conduct. Any group that breached these principles, he wrote, committed “a betrayal of the revolution’s values before it is a legal crime,” for revolutionary alliances must be founded on moral discipline that makes politics an act of consciousness and responsibility, not an excuse for denial or justification.

He went further, outlining a strict reformist program for the RSF — calling on it to train its fighters in the principles of international law, human rights, and the ethics of warfare, and to embed these values within its combat doctrine. The RSF, he said, must hold itself accountable or risk replicating the very structures of oppression it claimed to fight. It was not born to replace one set of executioners with another, but to end the logic of the executioner itself.

Kodi’s proposal was well-intentioned, but one might wonder how such a noble revolutionary ideal could be entrusted to a militia defined by violence. As the saying goes, one can lead a horse to water, but cannot make it drink.

Perhaps the most resigned view came from the Chairman of the U.S. Senate Foreign Relations Committee, who declared: “The atrocities in El-Fasher were not accidents; they have been the RSF’s plan from the very beginning.” Indeed, the RSF’s fate as a terrorist organization lies not only in committing atrocities, but in documenting them as trophies. Had it learned from the reputational ruin brought by its earlier crimes in Al-Jazira, it might have restrained itself. But savagery is the beast’s nature — a nature well captured in Islamic jurisprudence under the term hirabah, denoting those who kill or plunder openly through force of arms.

Let us see how this nature manifests in practice. The RSF’s deputy commander stood before his troops in El-Fasher and authorized them to seize any state property they could lay their hands on — though he warned them not to touch civilian possessions. It was a renewal of an earlier decree, issued by another RSF officer on October 9, granting fighters ownership of any vehicle captured in battle. Previously, such spoils were handed to a committee for later redistribution. But when those committees began hoarding the vehicles, resentment brewed among rank-and-file fighters, some of whom protested that without loot, they could neither support themselves nor their families — since the RSF paid no regular wages. One fighter even claimed that the delay in capturing El-Fasher was due to the reluctance of frontline troops who had been denied their share of spoils. The officer proposed that instead of confiscating the vehicles, the committee should assess their value on the battlefield and pay the finder in cash immediately.

This brutality is rooted in the RSF’s structure — a network of semi-autonomous militias whose cohesion depends on loot. Its fighters are drawn largely from the leader’s own tribe, its weapons gathered from various sources, and it owes its members neither salary nor armament.

This internal dynamic was laid bare by a field commander known as Safna, who, when confronted by wounded RSF fighters complaining of being denied medical care, told them to take their grievances not to him but to their supreme leader, Mohamed Hamdan Dagalo (Hemedti). Their relationship with the RSF, he explained, was based on al-faza‘ — a temporary mobilization — not formal enlistment. Thus, the RSF bore no obligation for their treatment, weaponry, or logistics; even the few arms distributed were of little use. “If you are injured,” he said, “you pay for your own treatment. If you die, your family buries you. Those who wish to continue may do so; those who do not, may leave. The RSF,” he concluded, “is like a train — passengers get on and off as they please.”

Safna did not reveal how his sub-unit financed itself, but his words evoke the “Wolf Strategy” — the name given to mercenary bands during Europe’s Thirty Years’ War (1618–1648), who sustained themselves by looting villages and towns, leaving behind ruin and desolation. From their deeds came the old German proverb: “The wolf is always ready to work as a shepherd, but without pay.”

Thus, plunder and murder are not incidental to the RSF’s behavior, nor lapses of discipline — they are its very creed. Were killing and looting not the nature of this beast, the group would not have squandered the political and moral capital it might have gained in El-Fasher, only to emerge condemned by a world that had briefly entertained the possibility of its legitimacy. The belated but unequivocal condemnation of the RSF by Sudanese civilian forces — who had once hesitated to speak so plainly — is proof that they now see what they once ignored. They may have once given it the benefit of the doubt, but as the late Mahmoud Mohamed Taha once said of the Muslim Brotherhood, “it surpasses even the worst expectations.”