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This article contains references to murder, torture and sexual assault.

Sudan's outsider, how a paramilitary leader, fell out with the army and plunged the country into

war by an Austrian malic.

The Guardian Long Read

When I landed in Khartoum in late February, the city was tense. On the short journey to my family

home in the suburbs of Sudan's capital, our car was stopped twice at checkpoints that in recent

months have been erected after midnight. A carful of women, my mother, my sister and me,

was clearly not the threat the officers were looking out for, so we were ushered onwards.

Those manning the checkpoints were an inconsistent crew, some were in plain clothes,

others in military fatiques, the rest in police uniform. You never quite knew who you were dealing

with or exactly what they were afraid of. The only common feature they shared was a jittery

menace. They were keeping a close eye on movements in a city where tensions had been rising

between the two most powerful men in the country. Sudan's leader, General Abd al-Fatah al-Brahman,

the head of the Sudanese army, and the country's deputy leader, General Muhammad Hamdan Daqalo,

known as Hamedi, the head of a paramilitary organization called the Rapid Support Forces,

RSF, had been sharing power since late 2021 when they had jointly carried out a coup that had

ejected civilians from a transitional government. But their alliance soon frayed and they began to

regard each other with suspicion. By February, in Sides Sudan, people were growing increasingly

...