On the threshold of her mud house in Qahwa Laban, South Darfur, 41-year old Khadija Abdel Rahim sat holding her son Hammoudi, 17. Her smile returned after months of anxiety since the boy vanished, taken with tribe members to fight with the Rapid Support Forces (RSF).
“They took my child from my lap,” Khadija says, her voice choking. “The sheikh ordered men to hand over their sons and said their staying on the land depended on them joining the war. I tried to stop my husband, but he yielded to tribal pressure.”
Hammoudi’s story is not exceptional. Thousands of children, adolescents and young men in Darfur have become fuel for a war they did not choose, recruited through customary administrations and tribal leaders under promises of protection or posts, or under direct threat of arms. A social institution meant to shield communities has been turned into a mechanism to tear families apart and send sons to combat.
Tribal recruitment
SAF airstrikes on villages and markets justify the tribe’s sons standing with the RSF.
Nazir Mahmoud Musa Madbo
Since the conflict erupted between Sudanese Armed Forces (SAF) and the RSF, both sides have sought to court tribes to bolster their ranks. In October 2024, RSF commander Mohamed Hamdan Dagalo, better known as Hemedti, accused the SAF of targeting the social bases of his forces. In December, SAF chief Abdel Fattah al-Burhan announced support for arming tribes in Al Jazira State.
In Darfur, tribal alliances helped the RSF seize control of most states after leaders from several tribes sided with it in July 2023. Leaders of Beni Helba, Tarjam, Hubaniya, Fallata, Messiriya and Ta’aysha said the war was “a battle between right and wrong” and against remnants of the former regime who “exploit the armed forces to return to power.” They urged members of the SAF to join the RSF, weakening the SAF’s manpower.
Officials also justified some tribes’ alignment with the RSF.
In June 2024, Nazir of the Rizigat, Mahmoud Musa Madbo, said the “war targets certain social components, including the Rizigat,” and that airstrikes on villages and markets “justify the tribe’s sons standing with the RSF.
Madbo praised RSF fighters who, he said, “fight on behalf of the marginalized in Sudan.” That view deepened after members of those groups faced discriminatory practices in SAF-controlled areas, from security restrictions to everyday civil transactions, reinforcing a sense of existential threat and that joining the RSF was safer.
By contrast, some tribes such as the Zaghawa sided with the SAF, citing a history of enmity with Arab tribes. Armed movements linked to them, including the Sudan Liberation Movement led by Minni Arko Minawi and the Justice and Equality Movement led by Jibril Ibrahim, fought with the SAF, slowing the RSF’s advance toward El Fasher, the capital of North Darfur, the only major town outside RSF control.
Since the earliest days after independence, successive Sudanese governments, civilian and military alike, have fallen into the trap of arming tribes and cultivating militias. During the 1963 uprising in Upper Nile, the military regime of Ibrahim Abboud (1958–64) supplied arms to the Nuer in Nasir, the Murle in Pibor and the Shilluk in Kodok, ostensibly to protect their people and property from the rebellion. The May regime led by Jaafar Nimeiri (1969–85) continued issuing rifles to tribes bordering the southern provinces after the 1972 Addis Ababa Agreement with the Anyanya, aiming to prevent intercommunal fighting that might have undermined the accord.
The 1986–89 civilian government also armed tribes in Kordofan to safeguard themselves and their livestock during the war spilling out of the south. Explaining the decision, then-Defense Minister Burmah Nasser said officials feared the kind of indiscriminate arming that war could force upon tribes and preferred that the army supervise weapons distribution through sultans and sheikhs in South Kordofan, among both Nubian and Arab communities.
Under the National Salvation regime, tribal structures were subordinated to party organization and repurposed as instruments of mobilization for elections and wars, including the southern conflict, and later to supply fighters for the campaign in Yemen through what became known as the “tribal quota.” Tribal leaders were courted with patronage and cash inducements to deliver more men.
The Rapid Support Forces inherited and expanded that legacy. Hemedti long relied on tribal loyalties before the current fighting, recruiting leaders with a mixture of enticement and coercion. The SAF, for its part, has used the same methods, leaning on sheikhs to produce fighters, turning tribes into a shared human reservoir for both sides and eroding their traditional social role.
Testimonies from within
Youths are exploited in the tribe’s name while leaders reap financial and political gains.
Tayeb al-Ahmadi
Khadija’s account echoes that of Tayeb al-Ahmadi (a pseudonym), a former recruit who says the sheikh assembled dozens of village youths and declared that “going to fight is a tribal duty that cannot be avoided.”
Al-Ahmadi says he was promised an officer’s rank but got a private’s rank after training, and served under commanders elevated for tribal loyalty rather than competence. He says tribal recruitment is built on false promises: youths are exploited in the tribe’s name while leaders reap financial and political gains, and that the Rapid Support Forces refined these mechanisms to secure loyalty and redistribute influence.
Another account from a sheikh of the Hawara in West Darfur, who asked not to be named, says the RSF used customary administrations before the December 2018 uprising to recruit youths, particularly for the Yemen campaign, with tribal elders submitting lists of recruits in return for promises of money and posts.
In April, RSF deputy commander Abdel Rahim Dagalo issued explicit threats to tribal leaders in South Darfur, warning opponents with arrest or expulsion from areas under his control. Weeks later, the sheikh of Borno was detained for refusing the mobilization drive.
In September 2024, tribal mobilization shifted into politics with the founding in Kampala of the “United Civil Forces” (UCF), a tribal bloc supporting the RSF aimed at securing seats for members of those groups in any future RSF-dominated authority.
Our repeated attempts to contact multiple sources within the RSF for their comments on the testimonies and accusations, however, drew no substantive response.
Integrated strategy
Conflict researcher and journalist Ali Mansour Hasaballah says courting tribes has long been a steady practice in Sudan’s history, used by governments and opposition movements alike to build influence and seize power. That policy showed up in arming particular groups and settling them, by force of arms, on other people’s land, a process that entrenched the tribe’s role as a political instrument.
Hasaballah says the Rapid Support Forces built on that legacy: its commander, Mohamed Hamdan Dagalo, cultivated tribal loyalties years before the war, winning allegiance at times with incentives and at others with threats and coercion.
He says the RSF’s turn to tribal recruitment is not a temporary expedient but part of a comprehensive strategy: the tribal structure functions as a human reservoir that can be mobilized rapidly.
Behind that lies a broader project seeking to found authority on tribal loyalty, reducing legitimacy to battlefield control and clan alliances.
researcher Ali Mansour Hasaballah
As the war expanded after April 2023, voluntary enlistment proved insufficient, so tribal allegiance was called on to provide thousands of fighters quickly and without direct financial cost.
“Behind that lies a broader project seeking to found authority on tribal loyalty, reducing legitimacy to battlefield control and clan alliances, and producing a political system based on quota-sharing rather than citizenship.”
As the war’s footprint widened, tribal recruitment ceased to be a passing tool wielded by the RSF or the SAF and hardened into an entrenched system governed by interests and threats alike. Residents’ testimonies and researchers’ reports show that customary administrations have lost their traditional role in protecting the social fabric, becoming instruments of mobilization and conflict. As the warring parties continue to compete for loyalties, young people find themselves fuel for a war they neither decide to ignite nor to extinguish.
