‘I learnt to fire an RPG with YouTube’: How one Sudanese village fought the RSF – and won

 Before the war, al-Amin Idriss Mohammed had never used a weapon. He’d never even felt the weight of a rifle in his hands.

But a storm was approaching. 

By late 2023, Rapid Support Forces (RSF) scouts were regularly riding past his village of al-Tekeina, in central Sudan’s al-Jazira state, on motorbikes, their eyes darting over its most valuable assets.

And the sight of  Sudanese Armed Forces (SAF) soldiers was becoming rare: it was increasingly clear that any defence of al-Tekeina would not come from the military.

So, the village decided to take matters into its own hands. Mohammed, a tall 41-year-old with broad shoulders, was a businessman who, like most of al-Tekeina’s middle class, also dabbled in the odd bit of agriculture.

Now, he walks and talks with the calm assuredness of a military officer, a leader of the village’s self-taught, self-equipped militia that again and again repelled rapacious paramilitaries from al-Tekeina when other villages in al-Jazira state had been overrun.

“I’ve never received any military training, but I had to defend my home and my land,” he tells Middle East Eye. “Now I can use all kinds of light and heavy weapons. I learnt to fire an RPG by watching YouTube.”

Al-Tekeina is the kind of village where there are more donkey carts than motor vehicles. Low walls and alleyways surround private courtyards where visitors sip strong ginger coffee under trees.

To its east, boxy, low-rise homes ease into reed beds and the quick currents of the Blue Nile. Small fishing boats knock against the riverbank.

Sudan’s latest war broke out in April 2023, when plans to fold the RSF paramilitaries into the regular military exploded into a conflict that has ravaged the country, killed tens of thousands and displaced 12 million.

At first, al-Tekeina’s residents believed the conflict would be fought far from them. There was little in their village for the belligerents, they believed. Surely the fighting would concentrate in urban centres like Khartoum?

But then came the troubling reports of RSF atrocities in remote areas of the western region of Darfur, where hundreds of people were being massacred and sexual violence was used as a weapon of war.

Residents of al-Tekeina, like most villages in the state, backed the SAF over the RSF as they saw the army as a national institution, despite its problematic history of coups, military rule and conflict. 

And although al-Tekeina was indeed rural, it nonetheless was on a paved road that runs along the Blue Nile to Khartoum, 50km to the north.

By late 2023, the RSF was making significant advances. On 18 December, it took Wad Madani, the capital of al-Jazira, opening up the rest of the state to its fighters.

Now, the horror stories were on al-Tekeina’s doorstep.

‘The order was to fight until the very end’

Magd Omar Mohammed Ibrahim is a member of al-Tekeina’s popular resistance committee, a governing body elected by the villagers.

“We started by digging trenches and closing the main roads,” he tells MEE. “Sometimes the fighters on motorbikes would come and start clashes, but we were able to resist them with the light weapons we already had. Even the young boys would throw stones at them.”

As the news of serious and escalating violations in al-Jazira’s villages grew, so did al-Tekeina’s concerns. Residents began collecting bits of wood, farming equipment, crates and doors – anything that could be used to barricade the streets. The odd discarded plough can still be seen at entrances to the village, evidence of the inhabitants’ ad hoc defences.

Young men were trained for combat. A call was sent to the village’s diaspora, who had moved away from Sudan, to urgently send money home.

Much of that cash bought weapons that could defend the village: according to Ibrahim, they were easy to purchase.

“We simply bought them off the RSF itself,” he says. “They will do anything for money.”

On 24 May 2024, the RSF finally came for al-Tekeina. Dozens of vehicles mounted with guns were deployed along the main road, encircling the village. At 10am, they began shooting, firing relentlessly until six that evening.

“We knew that we had reached a serious point,” Ibrahim says. “So we took our women over the Blue Nile in boats and left them on the other side with plenty of food.”

Al-Tekeina was shelled for three days. Twenty-two villagers were killed. “The order was to fight until the very end and never let anyone enter our village,” Ibrahim recalls.

Another 40 people were wounded. “We formed a medical team. Though there were only a few medics, they worked hard and on shifts to save the lives of wounded people.”

Eventually, the RSF attacks receded – and six months of siege began.

Despite being surrounded by the enemy, al-Tekeina found ways to survive. People in the diaspora continued to send money, which was picked up in Shendi 170km to the north and then used to buy food and medical supplies that were surreptitiously ferried across the river.

“We ate one meal a day. A public kitchen made food and distributed it to people, including the men manning the barricades, which were never left unattended.”

Eventually, the RSF and al-Tekeina came to an agreement: the paramilitaries could use the main road and set up three checkpoints along it, but the village itself would be left undisturbed.

“If one of their fighters tried to cross a barricade, we had the right to kill them,” Ibrahim says. “Our people were also able to leave and take their livestock grazing without being harassed.”

‘We ambushed them from the trees’

The detente worked and, though al-Tekeina remained vigilant, tensions and danger seemed to have eased.

It was, however, a brief moment of calm. Abu Aqla Keikel, the commander of the RSF-allied Sudan Shield Forces militia, defected to the SAF in late October 2024. In frenzied retaliation the RSF targeted the al-Jazira area, from where Keikel and his men were from.

Attacks on villages in the region spread over the following days and weeks. In November, thousands of bedraggled refugees from nearby villages began arriving to al-Tekeina, fleeing the RSF onslaught.

‘Thanks to the mobilisation of the people and the strong anger against the RSF, we were able to defeat them’

– al-Amin Idriss Mohammed, militia commander, al-Tekeina

“The situation was very bad,” says Ibrahim. “There were large numbers of women, children, disabled people, the old, the wounded, the sick.”

All had been forced to leave and walk for days to escape.

“When people reached here, they were almost fainting and hadn’t eaten or drunk anything for days. We knew to give them just a small amount of water with sugar and salt, and a little bread, because it’s dangerous to feed starving people too much at once.”

In a 2010 census, al-Tekeina’s population was around 500 people. Ibrahim says they received hundreds more from neighbouring villages after the attacks.

“We set up 200 tents and opened 20 public kitchens,” Ibrahim says, estimating it cost around 425 million Sudanese pounds ($200,000) to host the displaced.

In December, the RSF came for al-Tekeina again. “This time we had two armies: al-Tekeina’s fighters at the front with the heavy weapons, and the other villages behind us with light ones.”

The heaviest fighting was on al-Tekeina’s north side, an area that came to be known as the “battle neighbourhood”. It still wears the scars from that time on its walls.

Mohammed, the militia commander, triumphantly points to the place along the river where he killed two RSF officers.

“We ambushed them from the trees here,” he says. “I’m proud to have killed them. Thanks to the mobilisation of the people and the strong anger against the RSF we were able to defeat them.”

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Among the defenders of al-Tekeina was Abdul Rafet Babakir, 28. He was back from the UAE, where he worked, visiting relatives when al-Tekeina first came under attack. 

Babakir stayed in Sudan to defend his home and family. When the RSF attacked again in November, he was one of the first to respond.

“When we heard the sounds of gunfire and clashes he picked up a Kalashnikov and told his family to go shelter with relatives,” his father, Ibrahim Babakir, tells MEE.

“I encouraged him to go defend his people. I wouldn’t have been able to stop him even if I wanted to.”

Ibrahim was was sheltering with the rest of the village’s elderly when when he discovered his son had been killed.

“They brought in his body and I cried out: ‘God is the greatest’. It was a great moment because he died a martyr. He had been shot with a bullet to the heart.”

Again, al-Tekeina fought off the paramilitaries. Again, it came at a cost: 30 villagers dead and around 50 others wounded.

‘We will never hand over our guns’

The Rapid Support Forces are now gone. When SAF soldiers returned to the village, they were welcomed with celebrations. Yet resentment remains: the village feels abandoned by the military and the government.

“We have to say that the state has never supported us with anything, in terms of food, weapons, medicine – anything,” says Ibrahim.

The wounded of al-Tekeina are still receiving treatment, but all organised and paid for by the residents’ collective efforts. 

 ‘We bought the weapons with our own money when we had been abandoned by the government’

– Magd Omar Mohammed Ibrahim, member of resistance committee, al-Tekeina

Ibrahim says it’s as if the government “doesn’t care about the people. We feel like the local government is intentionally neglecting us for taking a stand, because other villages are receiving services.”

After the SAF retook al-Jazira, al-Tekeina’s popular resistance committee wrote to the governor with a list of demands. It asked for representatives of the village to be part of the local administration and to make al-Tekeina its own district.

“As yet we have not received a response, or even an acknowledgement that they got it,” Ibrahim says.

As for the dozens of weapons the village used to defeat the RSF, they are now being stored in a secret location. It will not be straightforward for the government and military to disarm villages like al-Tekeina after the guns fall silent across Sudan.

 “We bought the weapons with our own money when we had been abandoned by the government,” Ibrahim says.

“We will never hand over our guns.”