October 9, 2025
The October 2025 investigation by The Sentry into Sudan’s Rapid Support Forces (RSF) exposed a sophisticated business ecosystem that stretches from Darfur’s gold mines to company registers in Dubai. Far from being an informal smuggling chain, the network resembled a distributed corporate structure — populated by real directors, legitimate-looking licences, and adaptive ownership. It demonstrates how paramilitary power in the 2020s relies less on weapons or ideology, and more on access to global markets and the ability to conceal that access through data-visible intermediaries.