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On 15 April 2023, Sudan unravelled into a war between the Sudanese Armed Forces (SAF) and the Rapid Support Forces (RSF), an ethnic-based mercenary militia that used to be under SAF control. The current war in Sudan uncovered a new phenomenon of Arab tribe members from the Baggara Arab Belt in Chad, Libya, and Niger joining the RSF war against SAF. This article investigates the root causes of this new mercenary dynamic emerging in Sudan and whether ethnic networks have intensified the recruitment process. The use of mercenary forces has a long history in Africa, and mercenaries have gained more clout in recent times as governments throughout Africa have found their armies unable to contain the expanding influence of armed groups. Yet existing literature has confined analysis cross-border militia recruitment to terrorism, largely ignoring the novel configuration of ethnic-based mercenarism emerging today in the Sahel region.
Yasir Zaidan (Tue,) studied this question.