Vladimir Putin's war has exploded into Sudan
Source: The Telegraph
Vladimir Putin’s war has exploded into Sudan
Colonel Richard Kemp
Sun, April 16, 2023 at 4:12 PM EDT·4 min read
With more than 50 civilians and many more military killed already in the power struggle between rival governing factions that erupted in Sudan over the weekend, there is no good side in this battle. But as with so many other conflicts in Africa and the Middle East in recent years, one thing we do know is that Russian troublemakers are not far from the action.
The fighting in Khartoum and elsewhere in the country was triggered by clashes between General Abdel Fattah al-Burhan, head of the Sudanese armed forces, and General Mohamed Hamdan Dagalo, or “Hemedti” for short. Burhan and Hemedti staged a coup in 2021, seizing power from the transitional council put in place following the ousting of the Islamist dictator Omar al-Bashir. Hemedti is commander of the Rapid Support Forces (RSF), a paramilitary group formed from the Janjaweed militias that helped conduct, under Bashir, the Darfur genocide, which is estimated to have killed hundreds of thousands of people in western Sudan.
Rather unsurprisingly, the RSF has been linked to Yevgeny Prigozhin’s Wagner Group, which has reportedly helped train and equip them. Wagner is believed to have been brought into Sudan by Bashir to help shore up his faltering regime in 2017, following a meeting with Putin in which Bashir promised to make the country Russia’s “key to Africa”. Among his plans was a Red Sea base for the Russian navy at Port Sudan, a Wagner-supported project.
Ever since, Wagner has supplied large quantities of weapons and equipment to Sudan, including military trucks, amphibious vehicles and two transport helicopters. And after the downfall of Bashir, the Russian mercenary group realigned with Burhan and especially Hemedti. It continues to operate the Meroe Gold company, which reportedly exploits Sudan’s mines and smuggles vast quantities of gold out of the country, supposedly lining Prigozhin’s pockets and denying much-needed revenue to Sudan. For Putin, this would help efforts to evade Western sanctions, allowing him to fuel his illegal war in Ukraine.
Now, the cash-rich and heavily-armed RSF could be about to wreak havoc on the North African region. ...
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Read more: https://news.yahoo.com/putin-war-exploded-north-africa-201216036.html
