Mohamed Hamdan Dagalo (Hemedti), commander of the Rapid Support Forces, which is waging a war with the Sudanese army, arrived in Kenya on Wednesday in a new stop on a tour in East Africa, where diplomatic efforts are intensifying to conduct peace negotiations between the Sudanese parties.
Kenyan President William Ruto received the commander of the Rapid Support Forces, and praised in a post on the “X” website his “commitment (…) to ending the conflict in Sudan through dialogue,” and added that “the ongoing talks led by the Intergovernmental Authority on Development in East Africa (IGAD) must… “leads to a political settlement that allows for the achievement of lasting peace in the country.”
For his part, Dagalo said that the discussions with Ruto focused on the latest developments in Sudan, “studying the root causes of the war and finding solutions to alleviate the crisis and the suffering of our people.” “I presented our strategy to stop hostilities and begin negotiations to reach a comprehensive solution,” he said on the X website.
A week ago, Hemedti visited Uganda, Ethiopia and Djibouti, in his first official visit abroad since the start of the war in Sudan in mid-April last year. This tour comes at a time when IGAD, which is headed by Djibouti, is doubling its efforts to carry him and the Sudanese army commander, Lieutenant General Abdul Al-Fattah Al-Burhan, to negotiate.
Hemedti and Al-Burhan have not met since the outbreak of the war, which led to thousands of deaths, and the battles caused the displacement of more than 7 million people, according to the United Nations.
A meeting between the two parties to the conflict was scheduled to be held under the auspices of IGAD on December 28 in Djibouti, but it was postponed to the beginning of this January for “technical reasons,” and previous mediation attempts have so far only led to brief truces that did not last long. They are respected.
The conflict has recently expanded to reach Al-Jazira State, which until then had been spared and turned into a refuge for half a million Sudanese fleeing the war.
