![]() Khartoum is often thought to operate like a metropole with an imperial relationship toward regions in the south and west, and Hemetti likes to present himself as a hero of the margins rising up against this predatory and haughty center. ![]() Even amid this immense tragedy, the caustic humor of the Sudanese survives. Mocking women have derisively requested he share the secret for his skincare routine. Meanwhile, Khartoum’s supposed defender, General Abdul Fattah al-Burhan, rich in MiG planes but bereft of infantry, is holed up in a bunker in the heart of the city’s military zone, acquiring a milky pallor in the shade of its thick walls. Since fighting broke out between Sudan’s army and the RSF in April, Khartoum, a city with a population of close to nine million in its metropolitan area, has been abandoned by well over a million people-including most of the wealthy bourgeois families of the old city, whose comfortable “high houses,” when not reduced to ashes, have been stormed by the tens of thousands of looting young adventurers Hemetti has recruited from the lumpenproletariat of Darfur and the rural areas of Chad, the Central African Republic, Niger, and Mali. ![]() ![]() “People will abandon the high houses, only the cats will remain.” In June 2019, shortly after directing the massacre of a sit-in outside the army’s headquarters in the Sudanese capital, Mohammed Hamdan Daglo “Hemetti”-the commander of the Rapid Support Forces (RSF), a mercenary army of over 100,000 men-warned that “Khartoum could become Kutum.” He was referring to a much fought-over little town in North Darfur that Le Monde reported was once “emptied of its inhabitants” by his militiamen. ![]()
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