Hemedti's Commanders Are Deserting. The Men Funding Him Must Answer.

Somewhere in Sudan tonight, a mother is counting her children. Some of them are alive. Some are not. Since April 2023, the war between the Sudanese Armed Forces and the Rapid Support Forces has turned Sudan's cities into killing fields, and its people into the largest displaced population on Earth. The UN has put the number of displaced Sudanese above twelve million. Every one of them is a person whose life was taken apart by men with guns and the money to keep them shooting.

Now one of those men says he is walking away. Siddiq Ander, a senior commander in the RSF, appeared in an exclusive video obtained by Al Jazeera to announce his defection from Hemedti's command. He is the latest in a growing line of RSF commanders to break with the group. We should not pretend that one defection ends a war. But we should ask the obvious question. When the people who fight for you start leaving, what are they telling you about the cause they were asked to die for?

Consider what the RSF has been accused of. The UN fact-finding mission and multiple UN Panel of Experts reports have documented mass killings, sexual violence, and ethnically targeted attacks, most devastatingly in El Geneina in West Darfur in 2023, where the Masalit community was hunted in its own streets. The United States formally determined in January 2025 that the RSF had committed genocide in Darfur. That is not a rumour from a rival faction. It is a finding by a government that has every reason to be cautious with such language. The Sudanese people who survived those months carry the memory of what happened, and their children carry the scars.

The RSF's money and weapons did not appear from nowhere. UN Panel of Experts reports have traced supply routes that ran through Chad, Libya, and the Central African Republic, and pointed to the United Arab Emirates as a source of support for the RSF. The UAE has denied arming the group. Those denials have not made the supply lines disappear. Gold from Sudan's mines, a resource that should be building schools and clinics, has been used to pay for the war that is destroying those schools and clinics. The army led by Abdel Fattah al-Burhan is not clean either. Its own record of airstrikes on civilian areas, and its alliances with outside powers, make it another party that has chosen power over people. We will say this plainly: both generals bear responsibility for what has happened to Sudan.

The roots of this catastrophe go back further than 2023. In 2019, Sudanese citizens rose up against Omar al-Bashir, a man who had ruled through terror for three decades. They demanded civilian government, and for a short time they won a transition. Then, in October 2021, Burhan and Hemedti, who had both claimed to serve that transition, staged a coup together and crushed the civilian leadership. The war that followed was a fight between two men over who would control Sudan's wealth. The people of Sudan paid for it with their homes, their harvests, and their lives. This is the pattern we see across our continent: soldiers who promise to protect the nation and instead use it as a bank account.

Africa has already shown us what the alternative looks like. Botswana built one of the continent's most successful economies by holding regular elections, protecting property rights, and keeping its institutions independent of the men who briefly controlled them. Mauritius built prosperity on rule of law and transparent governance. Senegal, after years of tension, saw a peaceful transfer of power through the ballot box. None of these countries is perfect. All of them prove that Africans can govern themselves with competence and dignity when the rules are respected and the guns are kept in the barracks.

So what must happen now? First, the African Union must end its silence and enforce the principle it claims to hold dear. Its Peace and Security Council suspended Sudan after the 2021 coup, but suspension is not a strategy. The AU should back an independent civilian transition with a clear timetable and credible monitoring. Second, the UN Security Council must enforce the existing arms embargo and sanction every individual and company that feeds weapons, money, or fuel into this war, regardless of how powerful their sponsors believe themselves to be. Third, every government that claims to care about human rights, from Washington to Paris to London, must stop lecturing Africa about democracy while quietly doing business with the men who destroy it. You cannot demand accountability in Kyiv and shrug in Khartoum.

To defectors like Siddiq Ander, the question is not whether they are welcome to leave a criminal enterprise. The question is whether they will answer for what they did while they were in it. Amnesty for soldiers who surrender should never mean amnesty for war crimes. Real defection means cooperating with investigations, testifying about the chains of command, and handing over the evidence that the ICC and African courts will need. Anything less is just a reshuffling of the same guns.

And to us, the Africans reading this, the responsibility is ours too. Sudanese diaspora communities, civil society groups, journalists, and ordinary citizens across the continent must keep this war in the headlines. Demand that your governments name the foreign suppliers. Demand that your ministers stop hiding behind diplomatic language. Support the humanitarian networks and Sudanese civilian groups still standing in the ruins. Sudan's future will not be built by the generals who started this war. It will be built by the nurses, teachers, lawyers, and farmers who have been waiting for their country to be returned to them.

Hemedti's commanders are deserting him. The question for the rest of us is whether we will desert Sudan too.

Based on reporting by ALJAZEERA