--- title: "A Family Business With Guns: Senior RSF Commander Siddiq Ander Walks Out" description: "In video aired by Al Jazeera, Ander says Hemedti’s relatives control the RSF’s money, weapons and ranks, and that dissenters vanish" author: "Jan Sokol" published: 2026-10-31T08:09:36Z modified: 2026-10-31T11:03:41Z url: https://rews.cc/a/a-family-business-with-guns-senior-rsf-commander-siddiq-ande-d43799 language: en tags: ["sudan", "war", "defections", "rsf", "hemedti", "mideast"] publisher: "Rews (https://rews.cc)" --- # A Family Business With Guns: Senior RSF Commander Siddiq Ander Walks Out *In video aired by Al Jazeera, Ander says Hemedti’s relatives control the RSF’s money, weapons and ranks, and that dissenters vanish* By Jan Sokol · October 31, 2026 · https://rews.cc/a/a-family-business-with-guns-senior-rsf-commander-siddiq-ande-d43799 ## In brief - Senior RSF commander Siddiq Ander announced his defection in footage obtained exclusively by Al Jazeera and published on 30 October - Ander says Hemedti’s relatives control the RSF’s money, weapons, troop movements and the granting of ranks - He said anyone who speaks out faces “expulsion, imprisonment or a hidden death” - His exit follows defections this year by al-Nour Ahmed Adam, Ali Rizqallah, al-Tayeb al-Wahidu and Mohammed Azraq al-Fanjari - The war has displaced about 13 million people, and the UN says drone strikes are now the leading cause of civilian deaths On Friday, 30 October, a man named Siddiq Ander said on camera that he was finished with the Rapid Support Forces. He was no ordinary fighter. [Al Jazeera, which obtained the footage exclusively](https://aljazeera.com/news/2026/10/31/rsf-senior-commander-defects-accusing-sudan-groups-leadership-of-nepotism), calls him a senior commander of the paramilitary that has been at war with Sudan’s army since April 2023. The broadcaster gives neither his rank nor his unit. Nor does it say where he went: to the army, to another armed faction, or simply out of the war. What the footage does show is a charge sheet. Ander accused the relatives of the RSF’s leader, Mohamed Hamdan Dagalo, known across Sudan as Hemedti, of keeping the whole movement in their hands. He said he and the men around him had been serving “a purely family-based project controlled by Hemedti’s relatives”. In his account, that control covered “money, weapons, fighters’ movements and the granting of ranks.” Then came the sentence that explains why such things are usually said only on the way out: > “Anyone who speaks out and tells the whole truth faces expulsion, imprisonment or a hidden death.” ## The house of Dagalo The only relative Al Jazeera’s report names is the deputy commander, Abdul Rahim Hamdan Dagalo, Hemedti’s brother. Look at the four things Ander lists. Money, weapons, the movement of fighters, promotions. Take those away and there is not much of an army left. They are what decides who eats, who is armed, who is sent to the front and who rises. If Ander is right, these levers sit with one family. The RSF would then be less an institution than a household with artillery. That is his claim, made on the day he left, and nothing independent confirms it. Men who defect have reasons to blacken what they leave behind. But the complaint sounds familiar. In regimes and militias the world over, there is a moment when the circle that started out as comrades shrinks into a circle of kin, and the outsiders who did the fighting find that the promotions go past them. Some of them stay silent. Some keep a list. A few eventually take the list to a camera. ## A line at the door Ander is not the first to go this year. Al Jazeera counts a string of departures. In April, Major General al-Nour Ahmed Adam, known as “al-Qubba”, went over to the Sudanese Armed Forces, and army chief Abdel Fattah al-Burhan welcomed him in public. According to the Sudan Tribune, he left after disputes over military appointments. In May, Brigadier Ali Rizqallah, called “Savannah”, announced his own exit. On 25 September, the Tribune reported, al-Tayeb al-Wahidu joined the army in Omdurman with 50 fighters and cited abuses inside the RSF. On 8 October, Lieutenant Colonel Mohammed Azraq al-Fanjari left with 300 officers and soldiers and 30 vehicles. He urged others to follow and said he regretted the suffering the war had caused. Read together, these exits share a theme. The grievances are about the inner workings of the force: who gets appointed, who gets promoted, who is allowed to complain. In none of these accounts is the RSF beaten on the battlefield. The men describe an organisation that rewards closeness to its leader over service. Defections like these do not by themselves mean a force is collapsing. Armies have lost colonels before and kept fighting. What they show is that the RSF’s commanders now have somewhere to go, and that the army is willing to take them in. ## Below the drones Beneath these quarrels over rank sits the country itself. The war started as a power struggle between the army and the RSF, partly over plans to fold the paramilitary into the regular military. It has since displaced about 13 million people, and parts of Sudan face famine. Both sides now fight more and more from the air. On 26 October, strikes hit a market and homes in Nyala, in South Darfur. The rights group Emergency Lawyers reported more than 100 people killed, while other medical groups gave lower figures. The United Nations says drone strikes are now the leading cause of civilian deaths in the war. Earlier this month, drones [killed more than 160 people in four days](https://rews.cc/a/from-khartoum-to-kordofan-sudan-s-drones-kill-more-than-160--9680a7), from Khartoum to Kordofan. A commander who falls out with a family can record a video, name his grievances and change sides. Al-Qubba was greeted by the head of the army. The people at the market in Nyala had no one to defect to. Ander’s complaint is about who controls the money and the ranks. Theirs, if anyone asked, would be about what falls from the sky.