Sudan’s Paramilitary Ascendancy: How the RSF Is Redefining Power, Territory, and the Future of the State

As Sudan’s formal institutions erode under the weight of war and fragmentation, the Rapid Support Forces have emerged as a self-financing and drone-enabled power whose territorial reach increasingly resembles that of a sovereign authority.

By Dr. Abdelnasser Selum Hamed

Senior Researcher in Crisis Management and Counter-Terrorism, Director of the East Africa & Sudan Program at FOx Research (Sweden)

At daybreak over El Fasher, a single drone traced slow, deliberate circles above the city. It was not hunting a military target. It was performing a function that, in another reality, the state itself would have carried out: observing, mapping, and asserting authority from the sky. Within that image lies the essence of Sudan’s transformation. The country is no longer experiencing a conventional war between an established army and an armed faction. It is witnessing the emergence of a paramilitary formation—the Rapid Support Forces (RSF)—that increasingly behaves like a sovereign entity, shaping Sudan’s political geography with its own economic system, coercive instruments, and territorial logic.

The RSF’s rise is rooted in an economic foundation that grants it a rare degree of autonomy. Darfur’s goldfields—long a terrain of tribal contestation and state neglect—now form the backbone of a paramilitary economy. Mining zones such as Jebel Amer, Koloko, and Songo have been brought under RSF taxation and extraction structures that resemble a shadow ministry of finance. UN expert panels estimate that gold originating from RSF-controlled areas reached 8–10 tons annually during 2023–2024, valued at $600–$800 million. Field reports suggest that individual mines in North Darfur generated $12–$15 million per month during peak seasons.

None of this revenue enters Sudan’s collapsing institutions. Instead, it fuels a self-contained fiscal network enabling the RSF to function independently of the state. In a country where inflation exceeded 350%, the RSF remains one of the few actors capable of paying fighters reliably—often in hard currency. Analysts estimate that 20–30% of its frontline units include fighters from neighboring Sahel states, drawn by consistent pay and access to resources.

This financial infrastructure also sustains a fleet of 1,500–2,000 armed pickups, cross-border logistics corridors, and an expanding intelligence network. The result is not a militia enriched by illicit trade. It is a political economy that reproduces itself—one that generates its own momentum, loyalties, and mechanisms of control.

If gold grants the RSF economic sovereignty, drone warfare grants it operational mastery. Sudan’s army, weakened by years of sanctions and institutional erosion, struggles to counter the RSF’s decentralized drone doctrine. Between 2021 and 2024, the group transitioned from rudimentary quadcopters to coordinated unmanned aerial systems capable of reconnaissance, targeting, and precision strikes. Conflict monitors documented over 200 drone attacks linked to RSF units across Darfur and Kordofan during 2023–2024 alone.

RSF drone teams operate semi-autonomously under field commanders, enabling rapid adaptation in urban and rural battlespaces. The psychological effect is profound: communities across Darfur report drones lingering overhead for hours before bombardment, shaping daily patterns and instilling constant fear. Drone-guided strikes have repeatedly hit hospitals, water stations, markets, and shelters. A particularly devastating attack in late 2024 killed more than 60 civilians at a displacement site—one of the deadliest single drone-assisted assaults documented in the region.

This aerial capability allows the RSF to impose sieges, monitor mobility, disrupt supply lines, and maintain visibility over contested terrain—functions traditionally associated with state militaries, not paramilitary forces.

Yet neither gold nor drones alone explain the RSF’s consolidation of power. Its ascent is equally driven by a system of organized violence functioning as an instrument of territorial and demographic engineering. Across West and Central Darfur, patterns of identity-targeted killings, village destruction, and mass displacement reveal political intention rather than battlefield excess. Humanitarian agencies estimate that over 1.6 million people have been displaced from RSF-affected areas of West Darfur since 2021. Satellite imagery has identified more than 450 villages burned or severely damaged.

This violence is not evidence of governance collapse. It is the method through which a new form of governance is being imposed—one that dismantles traditional authorities, restructures local power structures, and secures RSF dominance across strategic corridors.

El Fasher, the last major city in Darfur outside RSF control, illustrates this strategy with chilling clarity. The city has endured a siege lasting nearly ten months, during which the RSF severed all major supply routes. By mid-2024, humanitarian assessments indicated that over 800,000 civilians inside the city faced severe food insecurity. Drone strikes repeatedly targeted critical infrastructure, including water systems and medical facilities. Local monitors recorded hundreds of artillery and drone-guided attacks, steadily eroding the city’s capacity to function.

The objective is not merely to capture El Fasher. It is to transform it—economically, socially, and psychologically—into a space where resistance collapses and RSF control becomes total.

Across western Sudan, this model has already taken shape. The RSF controls over 70% of major trade routes in Darfur and much of Kordofan. It levies taxes at checkpoints, regulates market access, oversees informal arbitration, and administers internal-security networks. In many towns, civilians now interact more with RSF structures than with any remaining institutions of the Sudanese state. The group determines who moves, who trades, who gathers, and who survives.

This is not insurgency. It is political reproduction: a paramilitary authority filling the vacuum left by a collapsing state, using extraction, coercion, and mobility control instead of law, institutions, or legitimacy.

The implications extend far beyond Sudan. Across the Sahel and Horn of Africa, similar conditions—weak institutions, abundant natural resources, porous borders, and transnational armed networks—create fertile ground for analogous formations. The RSF’s model—resource-financed, drone-enabled, and demographically engineered—may signal an emerging pattern in fragile states across the region.

Sudan is therefore not merely experiencing civil conflict. It is incubating a new form of sovereignty—one that redefines the relationship between armed power, territorial control, and state collapse. The RSF does not seek to capture ministries or parliaments. It seeks to dominate the conditions that give institutions relevance: land, population, and the means of economic survival.

Sudan’s tragedy is unfolding at immense human cost. Africa’s challenge will come after. Because if the RSF consolidates this model, Sudan will not be the last place where a paramilitary power determines who governs, who moves, who trades, and who lives under its authority.

Sudan is not just a battlefield.

It is the opening chapter of a new political reality.