A Sudanese court sentences the RSF chief to death. The country is still at war

A Sudanese court on 13 July 2026 sentenced Mohamed Hamdan Dagalo, the paramilitary commander better known as Hemeti, to death in his absence, along with 15 other commanders and allies of the Rapid Support Forces. The convictions covered the killing of a regional governor and a broader catalogue of war crimes committed during a war that has now ground through more than two years of fighting and famine.

The ruling lands in a country that is, at the same moment, edging back toward something like ordinary life in parts of its capital. The verdicts are meant to demonstrate that Khartoum's judicial system still functions. The street-level reality, by contrast, suggests that whatever authority the sentence expresses will be tested far more by force on the ground than by any clerk's file.

A verdict, and a man who is not there to hear it

According to BBC News reporting on 13 July 2026, the court convicted Hemeti and 15 RSF commanders and allies in absentia. The Africa Report, reporting the same day, framed the core charge as the killing of a regional governor alongside broader war crimes charges. The defendant commands a paramilitary force that still controls large tracts of Darfur and parts of Kordofan; he is not surrendering, and Sudan does not presently have a mechanism that could compel him to. The sentence is therefore a piece of legal signalling aimed at three audiences at once: a domestic public still living through the war's aftermath, an international community that has been calling for accountability, and a rival militia leadership that the army would like to see politically cornered before negotiations resume.

A death sentence issued in absentia carries weight that depends almost entirely on whether the state can enforce it. Without that capacity, the document is closer to a press release than a verdict.

What the army controls now, and what it does not

The court sits in Khartoum, a city the Sudanese Armed Forces say they have taken back from the RSF in successive operations over the past months. AfricaNews reported on 11 July 2026 that life was "slowly resuming" in Khartoum and other towns after recent military gains. That phrasing is precise and important: slowly, and in towns, and after gains that the army itself announced. It is not a description of a country at peace.

The RSF has lost the capital but retains territory across much of Darfur, including parts of the capital's hinterland, and continues to fight. The combination of a working courtroom in Khartoum and a death sentence for a man whose forces still hold provincial cities is the structural shape of Sudan's civil war in mid-2026: a state that is realigning its institutions around the army's victories, while the front lines have shifted but not closed.

The wider frame: trials, accountability, and the politics of naming

Death sentences in absentia for senior paramilitary commanders are rare in African conflict reporting and almost always serve a dual function. Inside Sudan, the verdict strengthens the army's claim to be the legitimate state and the RSF to be a criminal organisation. Abroad, it answers pressure from the United Nations, the African Union and Western governments that have spent two years demanding accountability for mass atrocities in Darfur.

The counter-read is that the trial is selective. The Sudanese Armed Forces have also been accused of war crimes during the same conflict, including strikes on civilians in Darfur and the bombing of markets and displacement camps. The Africa Report and BBC reporting focuses on the RSF convictions; coverage of parallel proceedings against SAF figures is far thinner in the international wire. If accountability is the framing, a serious read of the evidence requires that both sides face it. The sources available to this publication do not name any comparable SAF trial currently under way.

A further counter-point comes from the RSF's external backers. The paramilitary has enjoyed material support from parts of the Gulf and from neighbouring states at different points in the war; the political effect of Hemeti's conviction will be partly to harden those relationships by making any negotiated reinstatement harder to justify. Naming the paramilitary a criminal enterprise, in absentia, forecloses some options that quiet diplomacy might otherwise leave open.

Stakes: what the verdict changes, and what it does not

In the near term, very little. Hemeti is not in custody, the RSF has not dissolved, and the front lines in Darfur remain contested. The sentence does not put food into displacement camps in El Fasher, does not reopen the hospitals in Nyala, and does not return the roughly twelve million people the UN has classified as displaced or acutely food-insecure to their homes. Those numbers come from the wider reporting environment around this conflict; the specific totals and trends should be checked against current UN OCHA figures before any precise number is published.

Over a longer horizon, the verdict matters in three ways. It clarifies the army's red lines for any future negotiation, signalling that senior RSF figures will not be offered an amnesty at the table. It gives Sudan's international partners a piece of legal cover for any later move against RSF-held territory and assets. And it puts a marker down inside Sudanese politics: when this war ends, the question of who is tried and who is not will be fought over for years.

What remains uncertain

The three source items at the centre of this report cover a court ruling and a tentative return of daily life in Khartoum. They do not specify whether any further senior RSF figures have been convicted alongside the 16 named, whether parallel proceedings against SAF commanders are under way, or whether the army's recent gains hold under the kind of counter-offensive the RSF has historically launched after losing ground. The sentencing will be reported as fact; the enforcement of it is, for now, a question the sources do not answer.

Desk note: Monexus framed this around a court ruling in Khartoum and the parallel reality of a war that is still being fought in Darfur. The wire line on the verdict is consistent across BBC and The Africa Report; the street-level reporting on Khartoum's reopening comes from AfricaNews. Coverage that limits itself to the courtroom overstates the closure. Coverage that ignores the courtroom understates the legal architecture the army is now building around its territorial gains. Both are in play.