Khartoum’s Occupation – The Rise of Militias and New Forms of Urban Warfare

By Adila Gaafar

The war in Sudan is in its 18th Month. Since it first started much has developed in the country and within the region. Two additional wars instigated by Israel in Palestine and recently Lebanon also rage on with countless causalities and destruction to homes and lives.

Sudan, Palestine, and Lebanon share a feature of atrocities: the capital is the main theatre of hostilities. Gaza, Beirut, Khartoum, and, to various degrees, other cities within these countries are besieged, bombed, and plundered. This is not a new occurrence as the targeting of populations and their urban life is weaponized in service of eliminating existing social and political projects to claim territory as tabula rasa. In Gaza and now in Lebanon, Zionist occupiers speak blatantly about the promise of expansion. AI models of future homes at a premium price are on exhibit in the metropoles funding the wars. Security, conflict, and urban destruction is a useful pretexts in the reordering of land relations and, with it, social and political systems, as was the case in Assad’s Syria, where entire populations were uprooted through displacement, others brought into to repurchase their homes and form a new political constituency for the regime. In Lebanon, the Gulf sought to temper Hezbollah’s and Iran’s political influence by swooping in with its petrodollars to finance postwar reconstruction.

In Sudan, while the dynamics are different, they are not separate from the ongoing global project of human (re)landscaping. Sudan has always suffered internal communal conflict over land ownership, a hangover from colonial-era governance. While some groups were given homesteads, others were only allowed controlled usage. Ethnic identities and tensions map onto land politics and are fed and shaped by them. State interference for the sake of extraction under the guise of development fanned the flames of these conflicts, eventually turning them into civil wars.

This is the story of the Rapid Defence Forces (RSF), a fighter group made up of landless constituencies (Arab nomads who span the area between Sudan’s western Darfur region, Chad, and the Sahel). Their new alliance with the state against sedentary groups (tribes with land and homesteads) -to each their agenda; the state extinguishing resistance in the peripheries, Arab Nomads accessing long sought-after lands to establish their homesteads – entered a new phase with Gulf financing. One of the major war discourses that developed after the war, led by the RSF, was that occupying Khartoum was an act of revenge as well as a delayed act of redistributive politics of the postcolonial pie that the Riverian elite (groups who hail from the center and around the banks of the Nile river) historically kept for themselves.

How did the RSF transfer some of these tactics to other places in Sudan as the war expanded? RSF’s continued presence in Khartoum over the past 18th months required, in addition to an ideological cover of ‘we are here to liberate’, a tangible technique and strategy to hold down the city and its population while the conflict raged on. The RSF is famed in other places across Sudan, most notably the periphery, for having developed a political economy of resource extraction coupled with violent repression of any form of political resistance. The ‘militia form’ as it has come to be known, manages state and private enterprises across various sectors, from agriculture to livestock and gold mining. It places armed actors as a medium between labor and the state for the latter’s benefit, which failed to develop a functional bureaucracy and political project to manage a viable social contract. As it were, when the RSF came to Khartoum, they arrived not just with weapons procured through the Emiratis but also armed with the knowledge of violently managing territories with the aim of extraction.

Khartoum, the capital, like Cairo and perhaps most postcolonial cities, is a military barricade. Military installations such as the Army Corps, ammunition storage facilities, and the Sudanese Air Forces to name a few are situated within the city, while the Military Headquarters itself ;‘Algiada Alaama’ occupies a prominent space in Khartoum’s downtown. The presence of military establishments throughout the city undermines its overall security by facilitating legitimate military targets within urban residential spaces. This shaped the RSF’s military strategy when carving up Khartoum. By attacking and placing a siege on the neighborhoods with the most army presence, communities within them were subject to the specter of starvation, arbitrary targeting, and excessive securitization. This caused an early outpouring of displaced people, escaping the deliberate targeting of their homes that were seized by RSF fighters and transformed into military operation centers. Omdurman, especially, was subject to these tactics as the sub-city with the most military facilities in the tristate capital.

Khartoum’s capital other two tristate areas, Khartoum and Bahri were subject to the same dynamics albeit differently. Khartoum – as the sub-city with the least army facilities – evolved into an RSF economic center. A number of factors and techniques were essential in subduing Khartoum’s economic logic to RSF’s control. A new security order established through the sheer force of violence and the installing of security systems, mostly in the form of checkpoints manned by RSF soldiers, lined the roads from neighborhoods to markets. The checkpoints paved a new value chain of stolen/looted goods from Khartoum’s emptied-out wealth/middle class neighborhoods to new acquired market sites known as Daglo markets. Checkpoints were also an important source of revenue raising for the militia to sustain itself. People and goods passing through paid an undetermined levy at each stop to be able to move through the city or receive a permit to trade in the markets. RSF soldiers exacted taxes on merchants in markets in exchange for the permission to trade, and on people to be given permission to move across the city and at times taxes were collected from random populations/areas as a price for protection.

Central to the control of Khartoum is the re-ordering of its economic relations. Market infrastructure across the city was appropriated by the militia in the early days of the war. Renamed as Daglo markets, after the RSF general and top leader, they became a signifier of the war economy that has come to predominate after April 15th, 2023. In them, a predatory system of economic exchange reflected the absence of law and order following the collapse of the state. Goods sold in these markets, mostly came from looted homes across Khartoum. Food, furniture, electronics, valuables such as gold and jewellery, clothes, and kitchen utensils were among the sold products. Disorder also affected market pricing as the cost of goods was not dictated by a central authority and left instead to traders’ whims. The process of looting itself – through which the markets were resupplied- was not an individual act of random stealing in the absence of uniformed authority but an evolved enterprise managed by the RSF for a cut. An expansive network of actors is engaged in facilitating this. First, local informants identify houses with possible valuable assets, RSF field commanders in charge of the area give permission for trucks – parked in front of these homes in broad daylight- to haul goods through RSF manned checkpoints towards Daglo markets to be sold there as a final destination point. The intricate system of various actors ; informants, movers, field commanders giving permission, and soldier at checkpoints taxing the goods, merchants in the markets dependent on loot to make living while also paying taxes and a community cut off from legal forms of supply also dependent on predation as the only means for a livelihood or to access food. However, unlike the general public, the productive predation system of economic management placed the RSF soldiers at a preferential position of profiteering by being part of an expansive armed network that merged military and economic spheres.

Labor plays a substantial role in shaping the RSF’s political economy system in Khartoum. Initially, recruitment mostly targeted young able-bodied men to serve as soldiers. The need was increasing especially as the war period extended and RSF soldiers self-deported back to Darfur or the Sahel. Voluntary recruitment rather than conscription was the dominant model. People joined the RSF to self-protect against the militia’s random retaliation against their families and the looting of their homes. Eventually, they saw the economic prospects of enlisting as workers, whether as soldiers managing the security system that ran the predatory enterprise or as workers from below peddling its economic productivity. The swift collapse of the state and the absence of safety and support networks thrust people into the RSF’s economy out of fear of starvation and retaliation.

The economy of predation that forces Sudanese into illicit activities to survive also informs population movement during the war. People have sought to leave Khartoum despite the high cost of moving to Egypt to escape the illegal and insecure terms of employment under RSF. When Egyptian visa costs shot up, people turned to trafficking as a means to escape not just Khartoum’s insecurity but also the problematic rules governing economic exchange. In past months, mass deportation, by the Egyptian state of unregulated asylum seekers and self-deportation by Sudanese incapable of managing the cost of living in Cairo back to Khartoum increases the risk of them being absorbed into the RSF system as soldiers and workers to survive whether they like it or not.

The RSF controls Khartoum through a predatory yet productive system of connecting the public to appropriated markets connected through a checkpoint system where people serve as soldiers, informants, sellers, and buyers. This system was first developed in Darfur – with the help of the state – as a form of extractive management/control of resisting communities in the periphery. The militia form extended to serve the military strategy of the RSF in Khartoum during the war with major consequences for community welfare and prospects for peace.