Al Junaid Multi Activities Company Limited was a Sudanese holding company based in Khartoum with eleven subsidiaries across gold mining, livestock, construction and transport. Its directors were two brothers. One of them commanded a paramilitary force of several hundred thousand men. The other was that force’s deputy commander.
The company’s name, Al Junaid, means the soldiers.
By the early 2020s its asset base was valued at around a billion dollars with annual revenues in the range of a hundred and sixty to a hundred and eighty million. Around it sat roughly fifty further companies: a construction firm, an IT firm, a medical firm, a general trading company in Dubai, a majority stake in a Khartoum bank, a security company, a furnishings store in Rwanda, an interior design business in the Emirates, a mining company in Mali, and an importer of baby formula. The diversification is the tell: a criminal enterprise launders, and an organisation that buys a furnishings store in Rwanda is investing.
This is what happened to the Janjaweed after 2003. It did not disband, and it did not simply become a state force. It incorporated, diversified, opened offices abroad, appointed nominees, and eventually went to war with the government that created it, funded by its own balance sheet.
Janjaweed Inc is not a metaphor. It is a corporate structure with a sanctions listing, and tracing how a mobilised militia acquired one is the most instructive case in this subject of a client becoming a principal.
What the Janjaweed was for
The origin is a counter-insurgency problem and the solution was deniability, which is the same solution this subject has been documenting since 1950.
When rebellions broke out in Darfur in 2003, Khartoum mobilised Arab militias, principally from camel-herding Abbala communities, arming and directing them against non-Arab populations. The campaign produced the atrocities that led to a genocide determination and an International Criminal Court indictment of the president.
An American assessment states the logic without decoration: the government unleashed the Janjaweed in Darfur because both the deniability and the out-of-control nature of the militia helped achieve military objectives that would have been significantly harder with conventional forces alone.
Read that carefully, because it contains two distinct products rather than one. Deniability is the obvious one. The second is that the force’s indiscipline was itself useful, since a regular army committing the same acts is the state committing them, and a militia doing so is a regrettable excess by irregulars the government cannot fully control.
That is the Air America proposition applied to ground forces, with an additional feature. A proprietary airline was deniable and controlled. A militia is deniable and not controlled, and the lack of control is part of what is being purchased. Excess by irregulars is a diplomatic problem. Excess by a national army is a legal one, and the difference is worth something to a government facing an international court.
The problem with buying that product is the one every sponsor in this subject eventually encounters. A force you do not control is a force you do not control.
How the Janjaweed became a company
The transformation happened in identifiable steps and each one is documented.
In 2007 a faction under Mohamed Hamdan Dagalo, known as Hemedti, a former camel trader from the Rizeigat with no formal military training, broke with Khartoum over a lack of financial support. There was also a dispute with Musa Hilal, the tribal leader then serving as militia commander.
Khartoum resolved it commercially. It replaced Hilal with Hemedti, promised retroactive financial support, armed his forces, and granted military ranks to his fighters. A militia leader who withdrew his labour was brought back with money and status, which establishes the relationship for everything that follows. From that point Khartoum was not commanding a subordinate. It was retaining a supplier, and suppliers renegotiate.
In August 2013 the Rapid Support Forces were formed from the Janjaweed and placed under the National Intelligence and Security Service. The armed forces chief of staff had refused to take them, so they became a separate force reporting directly to the president.
In January 2017 the Rapid Support Forces Act nominally integrated the RSF into the armed forces structure while preserving its operational independence and direct reporting to the presidency. Hemedti retained full autonomy over recruitment, deployment and logistics.
That last clause is the whole thing. A statute created a regular armed force, parallel to the national army, whose commander controlled who joined it, where it went, and how it was supplied. Bashir’s purpose was a counterweight to the regular army, which is a rational autocrat’s calculation and which requires the counterweight to be genuinely independent to work.
He got what he asked for, which is the standing hazard in every sponsorship arrangement in this trade and the one sponsors consistently underprice.
The mine
Independence requires revenue, and in 2017 the RSF acquired some.
Hemedti’s forces took control of the Jebel Amer goldmines in North Darfur from Musa Hilal, the man he had replaced a decade earlier. Bashir allowed him to keep it. The United States Treasury later described the event in a sanctions designation as the RSF’s expropriation of the Jebel Amer gold mine, after which gold mining and export became a vital revenue source for the Dagalo family and the force.
Gold is close to an ideal commodity for this purpose. It is dense, valuable by weight, chemically stable, universally accepted, and once refined it carries no origin. A militia holding a producing mine has an income stream requiring no bank, no tax authority, no export licence and no customer relationship that anybody has to approve. Compare that with an oil field, which needs a pipeline, a terminal, a tanker and a buyer with a refinery, every one of which is a chokepoint somebody can close. Gold needs a bag and a flight.
Family-controlled companies flew gold bars worth millions to Dubai and later to Russia. The refining destination has its own chapter; what matters here is that the flights existed, and that they existed because the corridor was already running.
The second income stream
The other revenue source was the one that internationalised the organisation, and it was entirely lawful on its face.
From 2015 the RSF supplied fighters to the Saudi-led coalition in Yemen, with tens of thousands of Sudanese deploying over subsequent years. Those men were paid, and the payments went through the organisation.
That transaction changed the RSF’s character more than the gold did. Gold made Hemedti rich. Yemen made him a supplier to foreign governments, with a contractual relationship, a performance record, and counterparties in Gulf capitals who now had an interest in his organisation continuing to exist.
A militia with a mine is a wealthy militia. A militia with a mine and a foreign client is a company with a product line and a customer, and the customer is a state. That relationship also survives the sponsor it was built against: Khartoum’s leverage over the RSF declined in exact proportion to how much of the organisation’s income came from somewhere else.
By 2019 Hemedti was claiming to have donated a billion dollars to Sudan’s central bank, which is a militia commander recapitalising the treasury of the country he nominally served. Whether the figure is accurate matters less than that it was said in public and not contradicted.
A Global Witness analyst summarised the consequence in the plainest available terms: independent finances mean independent militias.
The corporate architecture
The structure that grew around the money is unusually well documented, because investigators, leaked accounts and sanctions designations have all described the same entities.
Al Junaid Multi Activities was the flagship, directed by Hemedti and his brother Abdul Rahim, with eleven subsidiaries. In 2017 the youngest brother, Algoney, established the GSK group in Khartoum, comprising a parent company, a construction arm, an IT arm and a medical arm, employing at one point between a hundred and a hundred and fifty people.
Algoney also established Tradive General Trading in the United Arab Emirates. Global Witness obtained information from the Dubai Department of Economic Development confirming him as a director and ultimate beneficial owner, found bank documents recording an eleven-million-dollar transfer from Tradive to an RSF account, and noted that one transfer’s stated purpose was described as a transfer to sister company.
In 2019 companies linked to the force bought a majority stake in Khartoum’s Al Khaleej Bank. A Dubai group called Capital Tap Holding operated with close links to the organisation.
Then, as international attention grew, the family stepped back from the paperwork. The Sentry has identified a small team of loyal lieutenants running the business empire in Dubai, with a leaked internal RSF accounting spreadsheet naming two of them, suggesting they had been part of the Dubai support team since at least 2019.
That is the free zone architecture described earlier in this subject being used exactly as designed: a family withdraws from directorships, nominees appear on the filings, the beneficial ownership register is not public, and the entities keep trading.
What the sanctions actually reached
The designation record is extensive and the pattern in it is the interesting part.
The United States sanctioned Al Junaid and Tradive in June 2023, the latter described as a front company controlled by an RSF major that imported vehicles on the force’s behalf. Algoney was designated separately as the RSF’s procurement director, for leading efforts to procure weapons and military materiel, having previously served as Hemedti’s personal secretary. Treasury noted Hemedti’s preference for staffing key roles with family members.
Al Khaleej Bank, GSK Advanced Business and the Capital Tap group were sanctioned, as was Hemedti himself, with the European Union and United Kingdom designating parts of the network. Three Dagalo brothers have been individually listed. The EU regime covers eighteen individuals and eight entities.
And then the replacement. Analysts mapping the network in 2026 identified a constellation of Dubai-registered firms mirroring Al Junaid’s business lines while distancing the family from direct ownership, with names including Al Jil Alqadem General Trading, Horizon Advanced Solutions and Natwest Logistics, declaring activities from gold and vehicle trading to consultancy and project management.
The observation to take from this is the one established in the free zone lecture and confirmed here at scale. Designating a company removes a name. A replacement costs a formation fee, and the assessment of what the sanctions accomplished is that the organisation was forced back to its core business of exporting gold from Darfur to Dubai.
Not stopped. Narrowed. The Sentry also documented a Dubai property portfolio linked to Hemedti, valued around 1.7 million dollars, situated near a military airbase.
The scale comparison
One benchmark puts the organisation in context and it is worth stating because it is easy to underestimate a militia.
Comparative assessments place the RSF’s estimated revenues among the wealthiest non-state armed groups in history, comparable to Islamic State at its 2014 to 2015 peak and exceeding Hezbollah.
The force claims a strength that has been reported at two hundred and eighty thousand in 2023 and as high as four hundred and fifty thousand more recently, which is a leader’s figure and should be treated as one.
Whatever the true number, this is an organisation with revenue in the hundreds of millions, an asset base around a billion, a corporate structure spanning multiple jurisdictions, a foreign client relationship, and a fighting force comparable to a mid-sized national army.
In 2025 it declared a parallel government. The militia-company completed the sequence by claiming to be a state.
The logistics dependency
Everything above depends on a physical fact, and it is the reason this belongs in a course about aircraft.
Darfur is landlocked, roadless across most of its extent, a thousand kilometres from any port, and adjacent to borders that are lines on a map. An organisation there can extract gold, and unless it can move the gold out and bring materiel in, extraction is worthless.
Gold goes out. The principal overland route has run from Jebel Amer through Chad to N’Djamena, and then by air to the Emirates, which is a truck leg followed by a flight leg, and the flight leg is the one that turns a commodity into money. A truckload of ore in Darfur is worth nothing until it reaches a refinery, and the refineries are in a Gulf state that can be reached by air in a few hours and by any other means in weeks.
Weapons and equipment come in, through the airfields the corridor serves, on aircraft chartered through companies registered somewhere convenient, which is the same architecture applied in reverse.
And fighters went out to Yemen, which required transport nobody in Darfur owned.
Remove the air link and the entire structure collapses into a regional militia with a mine it cannot monetise. The corporate architecture, the Dubai offices, the foreign clients and the parallel government all rest on the ability to fly things to and from a place with no other connection to the world.
That is the argument for why an air logistics subject spends time on a paramilitary holding company. The company exists because the flights exist.
Three ways to monetise a goldfield
The operational detail of how the money is actually extracted is worth setting out, because it explains why sanctions reach so little of it.
Analysts documenting the RSF economy describe three distinct modes. The first is direct mining through the family company, which is the visible one, the one with a corporate name, and the one a designation can touch. The second is a protection racket forcing artisanal miners to trade through the organisation’s channels, which produces revenue without the organisation mining anything. The third is individual units extracting and extorting at smaller scales on their own account.
Only the first mode has a balance sheet. The second and third are cash transactions between armed men and unarmed ones in places with no administration, and they generate no record anywhere.
The geography has also moved. Jebel Amer, the cornerstone of the original empire, was already declining before the war and has been further degraded by air strikes. The Songo mines in South Darfur became the primary production area, with the family company reported to have resumed operations there by late 2025.
Which is the durable feature of a resource-financed force. The company can be sanctioned, the mine can be bombed, and the revenue relocates, because what is being monetised is control of territory containing gold rather than any particular installation. A mine is an asset with a fixed address and armed control of a region is not.
The claims that do not hold up
An audit, since this organisation attracts both sanitisation and caricature.
The Janjaweed were disbanded is false, notwithstanding the Security Council resolutions demanding it. They were renamed, restructured, given statutory existence and a budget line.
The RSF is just the Janjaweed with a new name understates the change. The Janjaweed was a mobilised militia dependent on state supply. The RSF is a corporation with independent revenue, foreign contracts and a parallel administration, and that difference is the entire subject.
Hemedti is a Sudanese problem misses the Yemen contracts, the Dubai corporate network, the gold routed through the Emirates, and an International Court of Justice case filed by Sudan against the UAE in 2025 alleging complicity in genocide, which that state contests.
Sanctions have been ineffective is too strong. They removed named entities, complicated banking, and reportedly pushed the organisation back toward its core gold business.
Sanctions have worked is also wrong for the reasons above.
The UAE is the cause understates a structure that Khartoum built, that Bashir armed, that gold financed, and that had independent revenue before any Gulf relationship mattered.
Gold explains everything undersells the Yemen contracts and the statutory independence, without which the gold would have been seized by the state.
Hemedti built this alone ignores three brothers holding the directorships, the procurement function and the deputy command, in an organisation whose sanctions listings read like a family tree.
What Janjaweed Inc is actually telling us
The finding is about what happens to a proxy that becomes solvent.
Every sponsor in this subject wants the same thing: a capability it can use and disown. Achieving that requires the proxy to have an existence independent of the sponsor, because a force that is visibly funded, supplied and commanded by a state is that state’s force.
So independence is not a side effect of proxy warfare. It is the product being purchased, and it is purchased by giving the client resources, autonomy and a legal identity of its own.
Khartoum did all three deliberately. It gave the militia ranks and salaries in 2007, statutory existence and direct presidential reporting in 2013 and 2017, and a gold mine in the same period. Each step made the force more useful by making it less dependent, and the accumulated result was an organisation with more money than the treasury, its own foreign policy, its own logistics arrangements, and no reason to take orders.
In April 2023 it went to war with the army it had been created to counterbalance.
The pattern generalises past Sudan. A contractor industry built for somebody else’s wars, a state that rents its geography, an operator who starts as somebody’s airline: each begins as an instrument and acquires independent revenue, and once the revenue is independent the relationship inverts. The drone market runs the same way at the level of hardware: capability sold to a client becomes capability the client owns. The sponsor becomes a customer. The customer can be refused.
A company called The Soldiers, with eleven subsidiaries and a director who commands an army, is not a disguise. It is an accurate description of what a militia becomes when nobody stops it from having a balance sheet.
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