Bonus Full Audio! Office Hours 13-Sudan: Resistance, Compradors, an Existential Fight for Liberation w/Hamza Al-Muqawi

Adnan Husain: salam hello podcast listeners this is adnan hussein just introducing this upcoming bonus episode um for you uh it's on sudan it was an office hour live stream the regular weekly live stream program I do on YouTube and stream also on X that has really been a wonderful opportunity for engagement, learning, building a community with many people in the audience for this show. And typically we haven't made those available for podcast listeners. They've been exclusively live on YouTube and available on YouTube in video form afterwards, and then shared as an audio track for patrons and supporters. But in this case, the subject was so important and current and valuable, and I had a great guest and it's not easy to find. really excellent guests with the appropriate knowledge, background, commitment to activism, support, and anti-imperial analysis as Hamza al-Muqawi, who joined me last Friday for office hours to discuss the situation in Sudan, the continuing genocidal civil war supported by and fueled by armed and funded by sub-imperial powers like the UAE to serve as part of the overall hegemonic control within West Asia and Africa. And we learned a lot in this upcoming discussion that you're about to hear about the long history of Sudan's resistance and its importance in geopolitical and strategic plans of empire as a pivot between West Asia and Africa, uh, because of its strategic position on the red sea, um, you know, connecting the Mediterranean through the Suez canal to the Indian ocean. So I think it was a very important conversation. Uh, we streamed it in addition on East as a podcast live. to build the audience further for this very important discussion and conversation. And we wanted to share it with all of you. But it also does give me an opportunity to take stock and update you on the show. It's been about nine months since I started this launch of the Adnan Hussain Show, February of 2025. And in the nine months since we relaunched this as a kind of substitute for the Mudge List, but also to grow in different directions and incorporate video, we've made a lot of strides. There's 67 videos, I think, on YouTube. There are fewer that have made it into the podcast feed and audio version. And that's because we haven't typically uh, shared the audio stream of our live stream episodes and something that I've started doing a lot more and really enjoy the sense of community that is built, um, around learning and discussion by bringing in an expert, being able to take questions and comments from the audience live on YouTube and on X, uh, where it has also streamed. Um, and, um, We've been doing that weekly, the weekly live stream of Office Hours, a regular program. I think I've only missed one week since I started doing it, and I hope to keep it as a regular feature. And also, we've been doing the struggle sessions, the live stream panel shows once a month with a group of scholars, activists, journalists, commentators to talk about what's happening in the world, give it appropriate analysis and then also to give guidance about what kinds of organizations and actions are taking place. So there's been a lot of content that has not come on to the podcast, though we still have regular interviews. and episodes, and of course, the Names of God series. I'm thinking of trying to share a little bit more of the, at least the struggle sessions once a month in audio form, but I want to encourage people, even if you are not a YouTube type, that you might find the Friday live streams, office hours, a really good opportunity to, at the end of the week, to talk with like-minded people, learn something about what's going on on a particular topic. I try to bring in interesting guests and experts. So do check us out. This isn't still a young, new channel. I think it's offering really high quality, academic level, university level, discussion, analysis on history, religion, and contemporary politics. So I hope you're finding it useful, interesting, and that we will continue to grow. You can of course always support the channel and have full access to the live streams in audio version, whether it's office hours or struggle sessions, as well as the other regular episodes. including advance access, early access to the prerecorded interviews and episodes that we're doing. We also have plans to try and do more online course type material. So there's going to be a lot that you will have access to in the future. I will, of course, try and make as much of it publicly available. But if you can support, you will have some benefits of greater access. So you can go to patreon.com slash Adnan Hussein or make a one-time contribution, buymeacoffee.com slash Adnan Hussein. You know, the platform fees, the production costs of my producer, Sina... and the people who make the title cards and graphics and so on. It's all just something I'm doing because I want to, if you can help me break even so that it's just my time. It's just what I want to share and the time of myself and my guests. That's a help. But of course, I'm committed to continuing to do this, I think, and hope that it makes a difference and that you've been enjoying this content. So without further ado, enjoy this upcoming episode on Sudan with Hamza Al-Muqawi. Until next time, peace with justice and solidarity to you all. Salam, hello, peace to you all and welcome to Office Hours, the 13th edition of our weekly Friday live stream. We try and do it every week. Occasionally we miss it, but we're back again for our regular live stream to talk about what's going on in the world and to have your comments and questions and be able to engage in this developing community and this public educational project. I always get excited because it's a wonderful opportunity at the end of the week for learning, for discussion and engagement. And if you really like that sort of thing, share it. You know, make sure that your friends, comrades, even your enemies know about this live stream so you can like the stream, get it boosted on the algorithm, share it on social media if you're watching on Twitter or Instagram. as some like to call it, you can retweet it. But if you want to participate in the discussion, come into the YouTube chat so that we can engage with you and have more of a sense of discussion and seminar. This is going to be a really great episode, a really great edition of Office Hours because it's a very important topic that gets so little attention and hardly has anybody who really has the deep background and knowledge and what I would say is an anti-imperialist framing that's so important, that's so rare. We are very lucky that we have today Hamza al-Muqawi, a writer, activist, person who established SudanFunds.com, is involved and has really developed the anti-UAE boycott for Sudan. Welcome, Hamza. It's great to have you on Office Hours.

Hamza Al-Muqawi: Thank you for having me, Adnan. I really appreciate it.

Adnan Husain: Well, I've been looking forward to this and I tweeted out for everybody and included it in the link in the description for people to go check out. A very important article that really puts many things together for people. Sudan at the Crossroads of Empire, Revolution, Counter-Revolution, and the UAE's Sub-Imperial Ambitions, which is on your sub-stack. And I think we're going to talk a lot about this, but also generally, and we welcome people's kind of comments because we recognize that so little of this has been covered in, you know, the mainstream media in a serious and deep sort of way, which is what we like to do is look at it historically and in depth, that people should go and read that, you know, it's very important and a really valuable piece. Valuable piece. So but kind of starting off, you know, a lot of people are not very familiar with Sudan as a country, as a place, its geography, you know, about its history. And we need some orientation here. You know, to get people to have a sense of the context before we come to the more contemporary situation and the sort of news and how to interpret what's going on. I'm wondering if you could maybe give... listeners and watchers to this program a little bit of the sense of Sudan's economy and geography sort of historically in the modern sort of era and its position geographically, and why it's such an important... You make the point, I mean, in your article that it is absolutely a vital geopolitical location. It's strategic. It's a hinge between what we would call the West Asia and the Arab world and the rest of Africa. So there's so many kind of key factors. I'm wondering what you would tell us by way of sort of introduction to Give people an orientation about Sudan as a place, its people. And, you know, maybe I'll follow up and ask you a little bit about the history. But why don't you just give us a little bit of a description of what kind of a, you know, territory we're talking about, a vast, huge country, you know? Yeah, of course. For those who don't know, tell us about Sudan.

Hamza Al-Muqawi: Yeah. So Sudan is a country in, uh, Northeast Africa. Uh, so already, I mean, we'll probably get into this a little bit later, but, uh, it's already a huge country as it is like in the month, like how it is right now. Uh, and that's already after South Sudan already split from it. So it actually used to be even bigger. It's just absolutely huge. So on maps, if you look on maps, uh, Africa's, uh, looks smaller than it actually is like in comparison because, uh, the way, just the way maps work. Some things have to be smaller than they are.

Adnan Husain: You mean because of the colonialist Mercator projections and so on? Yeah, that's right. They want to make us think we're small.

Hamza Al-Muqawi: Like, it's the perspective has to be a certain way, but they definitely chose which ones to make. You know, like you see South America, it just looks absolutely tiny compared to like Canada and Africa. Give me one second. Sorry.

Adnan Husain: No problem. We're on the move. This is office hours style.

Hamza Al-Muqawi: Literally office hours. Didn't think anyone was still here, but it's okay. Okay, so it's absolutely a gigantic, gigantic country. In the south, there's a lot of oil, and in the north, there's a lot of gold and different resources, and it's a very fertile country, very fertile country. like, could feed many, many, many, many countries all by its own. They, like, they literally say in other parts of Africa, like, in my home country of Morocco, if you drop a seed in Sudan, like, out of your pocket, it'll just grow, like, without having to do anything to it. Like, that's how fertile the land is, that it has these kind of sayings about it. It's also situated on the Red Sea. It will come into play later. I'll talk about that as well. It's across from the Gulf countries, from Yemen and Saudi Arabia and the UAE and that whole area right there. It's under Egypt. So another important country right there. It's next to Ethiopia. It's next to Somalia.

Adnan Husain: It's on the Nile, right? I mean, the large stretch of the Nile is through Sudan.

Hamza Al-Muqawi: Yeah, it's on the Nile. The Nile runs across all of Sudan as well. And so that's also a very important river, of course. And it's on the Red Sea and it's connected to North Africa. It's touching Egypt from the bottom. It's connected to East Africa because it is in East Africa. It's in the Horn area. So the Horn of Africa, you can access it from Sudan. And it's also connected to West Africa as well. It's, you know, in the Sahel area. And it's easier to access the Sahel from Sudan as well. And, you know, like Nigeria is literally touching from the bottom. So it's literally right in the middle of all the action, all the important things that are happening is it's right there.

Adnan Husain: Yes, so that gives it significance and importance for those who want to have control over these really crucial waterways going through the Suez Canal, connecting the Mediterranean and markets of Europe with the Indian Ocean and trade that flows through there. We recall and remember how important you know, the Evergrande, you know, a tanker running aground in the Suez. And it caused like absolute, you know, devastation for the global economy and shipping because they had to go the long way around. So the entire Red Sea region, you know, we obviously are very aware also of, the role that Yemen has played significantly in its blockade of Israeli shipping and shipping to Israel. So this is also relevant, as you're pointing out, that it's on the Red Sea. It's also really, really relevant.

Hamza Al-Muqawi: Yeah, so like I'm going to talk about later, and like I also mentioned to you the other day when we were speaking, In my opinion, some of the most important places that have been very contested about, and that's because of geography, is a big part of that, is Sudan, Yemen, and Palestine. Palestine, it's next to Egypt, so it's kind of right there between Africa and the Middle East and the Levant. And then you have Yemen on one side on the Red Sea as well. And that's kind of like a key point for the Gulf countries. And you have Sudan on the other side for Africa. And they kind of form a little triangle that, you know, there's just been so many, so many conflicts of imperialists trying to take all three of those over because whoever holds those three, like you can, you can effectively control an entire region and multiple parts and multiple continents with those three countries. But we'll get more into that later. Yeah.

Adnan Husain: Yeah, absolutely. And, you know, I just want to remind listeners, you can like the stream, share it. We're at the start of this conversation. So now's a good time. Don't be miserly, as I like to say. There's a good thing, very important discussion happening. Share it with people. And also, I just want to acknowledge that it's of such importance to be talking about Sudan right now. and have this opportunity to learn more with Hamza that we are not only streaming on my YouTube channel and X account, but also on East as a podcast. So East as a podcast listeners, welcome to you. And if you don't know about my channel, You can also subscribe and there's a lot of great things that we do here on Office Hour. So come on in. And also, it's so important that typically we don't put the live streams on the podcast channel. But it will be both on my podcast, if you're just an audio listener afterwards, and on East as a podcast, because we really feel it's so important right now and so valuable to have this chance to really talk in a significant way about Sudan. The history, in this important article, and I think you begin with this because these are the foundations really for thinking about the contemporary situation. You have to take into account this history. You really started with the colonial era, the Anglo-Egyptian. Of course, during this period, Egypt was under colonial control in the late 19th and early 20th century. Egypt itself was under control of the British and they used the resources of Egypt their control over Egypt to extend their power into Sudan. And maybe you can tell us a little bit about, because it's actually not a well-known history. I mean, there were resistance movements that took place to the Anglo-Egyptian control over the Sudan in the late 19th century, the famous Samadhi, right? There was a uprising. Maybe you can tell us a little bit about that late 19th period of resistance colonial era in Sudan and what its kind of consequences were and the kinds of resistance that developed that maybe we can think that there are some continuities in some ways between resistance at the end of the 19th century to colonialism and our own contemporary era. What was going on then?

Hamza Al-Muqawi: Yeah, so basically that was the... You guys will see how This will mirror a lot of what will also come up with Sudan and what happens after this point in history as well, which was kind of the British colonizing Sudan for the British Empire, just like many places were at the time, but through Egypt. like it was under Britain and then Egypt was also under Britain, but Sudan was kind of under Egypt, under Britain. Like it was kind of like, what are those things called? The Russian, the nesting doll, it's the nesting doll situation of colonialism, colonialism, nesting doll.

Adnan Husain: So Sudan was like sub-colonial, like you've been talking about the sub-imperial.

Hamza Al-Muqawi: Yes, yes, it was sub-colonial. It was, it was, it was, they outsourced a lot of what, needed to be done to control Sudan to Egypt. So they were different, like, you know, loyalists to the colonial British in Egypt. You know, there's always a bourgeois that sells out their people and their nation and their land for some money or for some comfort. And they're used to control the population on behalf of the colonial people. And Egypt, those bourgeois, he kind of acted in that way for the British. was kind of a headache for the british to keep going back and forth from sudan but still even um i'm pretty sure winston churchill uh one of his battles that he had fought when he was a soldier was in sudan as well to quell one of these uh rebellions and they they took some they took some heavy losses at the time as well like they they did not like the fighting that they had to do in sudan they gave them a really hard time but yeah so it was basically uh Anglo-Egypt took over Sudan. So it was under Egypt, but then it was under the British, like we said before. This was a very important period because it was one of the first times where, first of all, it was the first time where Sudan was like, officially under european colonization before that was the ottoman empire um before that it was arabization there was a lot of processes that happened before that but even with Ottoman conquering and with Arabization, which in its own way, those have their own issues and stuff that we can talk about another time. But European colonialism and conquering was a unique evil that when you come in contact with it the first time, and once they find out about you, you don't really get out of their grips. They will find other ways to continue to keep that up. Yeah, since that time, basically, Sudan has not really had any time where they've been free. I mean, they've had independence, you know, but it wasn't really, yeah.

Adnan Husain: I mean, you point out that like the classic direct colonial rule, you know, was from 1898 to 1956. And you characterize in your article, it's a period of colonial style extraction. And, you know, we can then talk about after 1956, is it, you know, I mean, it may be an independent state, but does it really actually have full sovereignty in the world system? You know, it's neocolonialism and imperialism. We can get into that. But maybe you can tell us a little bit about, like, what was the kind of... You know, a form of economy and what it was this colonial extraction, what were they trying to extract from Sudan during this period under the colonial colonial rule?

Hamza Al-Muqawi: Yes, so. You're right, that's the part that I was about to go into that next. So, first of all, there's a lot of resources, like I was mentioning earlier. Um, there is a cotton in Sudan, there's gold in Sudan, there's different minerals in Sudan. Uh, and there is, like I mentioned, which is, this is very important is the cause of a lot of people that come after a lot of, uh, imperialist States and organizations that come after Sudan is, is for its ability to grow food. It's a very important reason, especially now we're about to go into. maybe potentially climate change is causing some food scarcity, and that will be mentioned later as well about the UAE, but right now we'll stick with this. So basically Sudan was basically turned into a factory for resource extraction. So all those resources that exist in Sudan, I'm trying to remember off the top of my head everything, because it really is a lot, but I don't wanna be wrong about what it was exactly, because I was also just, talking about the DRC, and they also have a lot of resources, and some of it's kind of meshing in my head a little bit. But yeah, so cotton was a big one. Gold is one of the biggest ones. That's still one of the biggest ones today. And other different minerals and kind of things, and labor, there's a lot of people. I mean, right now, before the war, it was 50 million people. So even back then, it was a lot of people. So it was a huge labor pool as well. So it was labor extraction, resource extraction, And they basically just made Sudan a very efficient place to take things from. So even after independence, that didn't really change, it's just the faces changed into a Sudanese face and it was still the same type of setup. Just like most, like a lot of places that got independence just turned into a neo-colonialism with like a puppet regime, that colonialist place that basically just answers to them and you guys can take all our resources, that's fine, just let me run my little scheme here in my country and just steal from my people and be corrupt and all that. But yeah, so from the Anglo-Egyptian colonization of Sudan into the independence time, it just became a resource extraction factory and that just stayed after independence. That was the economy set up. It was for like exporting and not exporting for profit for Sudanese people, like just exporting stuff as efficiently as possible, as much as possible, like trying to just suck it dry. And it just kept being run like that. There's been multiple coups, multiple different government switches, different dictatorships, and every single one has just been the same. They just run the same kind of resource extraction, just with different faces and different recipients. And at the end, the West is always benefiting from this, no matter who's the one that's running this.

Adnan Husain: Yeah, you characterize this period from 1958 to 2018 as military capitalism and the security rent state. Maybe you could elaborate a little bit. What did you mean by that? You know, this military capitalism and what is a you know, how would you say are the main features that you were noticing that describe something called a security rent state? Like, how is that how is that working?

Hamza Al-Muqawi: Yeah, so Sudan has been under military dictatorship for almost entirely its entirety. independent time has been under some form of military dictatorship, and for the last huge portion of time, it's been the same organization, which is what the UAE propagandists today like to attribute to the Muslim Brotherhood global organization. I mean, there are some tiny ties with some of the people that were in the army leadership, but some of those people were also the ones who we'll talk about later where helping Hamas and PIJ political bureau and fighters and commanders find refuge in Sudan and some Sudanese people who are involved in Muslim Brotherhood where before this happened like in the 2010s and the early 2000s would help Hamas spread out their investments and help them protect some of their interests and that kind of thing because they're They were under siege in Gaza, and they didn't really have any way. But this security rent situation, when they started exporting violence as well, and they would also use violence on their own people, these military dictatorships, to keep things in order. They wanted to keep running this resource extraction factory, and some of these pesky... proletariat people who are starving to death or can't even find opportunities, or the only opportunities they can find is to be thrown in a gold mine or to be made to work to make some, extract some resources for other people, started rebelling in different, there's different ethnic groups, there's different tribes, there's Arabized Sudanese, non-Arabized Sudanese, people who don't speak Arabic, who were also persecuted for other other reasons as well, because that was also part of the hierarchy, and they call them, they say these dictatorships were Islamists, but honestly, they, any, like, there's so many other governments that are also called Islamists that are really just they just slap any name label on there, whatever type of dictatorship we can run that can help us have this partnership with the West to help them extract more of our resources while we get to be corrupt there. So there was multiple rebellions. First of all, the most famous One is the SPLM, which was the Sudan People's Liberation Movement versus the Sudanese government. The Sudanese government is basically a military government. It has been for a very long time. This person was Ahmed Bashir, who was a former dictator of Sudan. He was, I think, for 30 years, maybe a little more than 30 years. I know it was at least 30 years that he was dictator of Sudan. He had the SAF, which is the Sudanese Armed Forces, which are basically the government and also the army at the same time. So it's a military dictatorship. And the SPLM, that's what would become now South Sudan at the time, was part of Sudan. And they wanted independence from Sudan. Most of them did not speak Arabic. They're also... more dark-skinned than the ones in the North. There's a lot of things, and this will be also used by Western humanitarian organizations. I mean, sometimes they say, we just want to simplify things to make it more digestible to the Western viewer, but sometimes they just straight up lie or use weird framing that's not really true to make people understand, because Sudan is a very complex topic. It's a lot of moving parts and a lot of moving variables and a lot of things happening at the same time. This military dictatorship that I was talking about before that fought with SPLM. In Sudan, they call them KZAN. That's what this... So today, you might even, if you go into Sydney spaces between Sydney's people, you'll see people get accused of being KZAN or KZAN supporters. That's what Darmal Bashir, SAF, loyalists were called, basically. They're called KZAN, singulars, because... And this is what Today, what the RSF, which we'll get into later, use as their justification for what they're doing is they say, oh, no, we're just rebelling against the Kaizen, rebelling against, I'm going to make sure you just secretly stone run Sudan, and these people are the ones who are stoning Sudan, and we're just trying to liberate our people from that, yada, yada, yada. But this same RSF is the same one that when First, with SPLM, that was the SAF often, but they committed a lot of atrocities against those people. So this muddied up the SAF's image in the global order and the Sudanese government looked terrible. So for the next thing, which was Darfur, in Darfur, people started rising and there's different ethnic groups there who are also not the majority in Sudan. They didn't want to use SAF because if they used the Army directly, then again, the same thing that would happen that was happening with the SPLM thing, which is still ongoing, but it was like on and off, basically. So they used these people, these tribal people who are in that area, who know the areas very well, who were... create, who had already created some form of militias, but they weren't, like, official militias at the time, some of the, there was, like, the Arab gatherings, uh, they were called, who got some funding from Gaddafi, uh, under his, like, pan, in his pan-Arabist phase, uh, there was a couple of other, like, different groups that would just, like, uh, cross the border from Chad, for example, to just attack, like, Sudanese farmers, uh, so these are criminals, we're talking about gang members, we're talking about drug smokers, we're talking about people who were just camel herders or sheep herders or stuff like that, who would steal other people's livestock and bring it across the border back to Chad or would do it in that area of Sudan. They didn't really have a village. They didn't have a tribe, nothing like that. They were just kind of like nomads in that area, but they knew the area well and they were already pretty, they had no connection to the Sudanese government. So that violence, now we see this again, the violence is outsourced. The violence is outsourced to Egypt before, now the violence is outsourced to this group. And there was no official group. It was just different groups of people. And in the beginning, the Sudanese people used to call them Jinjaweed. Now, most people don't know what that means. Jinjaweed literally means, in Sudanese dialect Arabic, devil on horseback or devils on horseback. because they would come a lot of times on horseback or on camels to come attack villages, basically. So these unorganized, different crime syndicates and different tribal people, it's really similar to who Israel tapped to be their collaborators in Gaza against the Fossan Brigades and against the honorable resistance, which is, you know, drug drug dealers like like uh bedouins who aren't like who are doing crime things or some some of them are we're not very good at crime so it's like yeah come come come to us here you can you can collaborate with us you can help us because they want to use the face of the those people that are in the area or that are from the area so it could be like oh it's just between them they're fighting each other that's like you know one of the most common like colonizer tactics like just use them against each other and have have them act as your proxy and then it'll just look like it's a civil dispute between them instead of like an outside or foreign interference. But yeah, so they went into Darfur to, they were supposed to just crush this rebellion basically for Ahmad Bashir, but they just, you know, burnt down villages, killed and massacred so many. They committed atrocities of, to this day, we still don't know everything that happened there. I mean, Darfur just hasn't gotten that much peace time. Since that time, it's been just on and off for that area, especially, but these, these people, this ginger weed, these tribal people would eventually become who we now know as the rapid support forces as the RSF. And just the fact that they, some of them were from that area, and they immediately turned against their people for money, like those are the kind of people who were joining the ginger weed at this time. And this, this will become very This will stab the Sudanese government itself in the back, because if you're a higher bidder, the kind of people that would join the Jindjiwi to begin with were very much ready to turn on you if you're paying out more. I am so sorry if I can just pause for like 15 seconds to grab my laptop charger because I left it in the other room.

Adnan Husain: No problem. No problem.

Hamza Al-Muqawi: Thank you. No problem.

Adnan Husain: Yeah, this gives me a chance to remind people that they should like the stream. Make sure that you've given this a like. Share it if you can on X, on other social media platforms so people can come across it and subscribe to the channel. We're also on East as a Podcast if you want to be part of the discussion. If you're on X or watching on East as a Podcast, it makes sense to come into my channel, the mainstream, the Adnan Hussain Show, because then you can be involved in the discussion. And I want to say while I'm seeing some activity there, it'd be great if people had questions. I know there are questions out there. If people had specific questions for Hamza, that would be great because, you know, we have this opportunity to talk with somebody who is very knowledgeable about the situation in Sudan. And let's use it. So if you have questions, throw them into the comments on my channel. I'm taking a look at them. you know, we'll pose them. So again, like the stream and share it on social media. So, you know, other people can come across it. So Hamza has gone to get his charger. He'll be back in, you know, just a moment. I'm seeing also suggestions that against the stream podcast did a great episode. this week on Sudan. I wonder who the guest was. I'll have to go check that out as well. And, you know, I wish I was able to keep my calm more often. Lots of situations come up, unfortunately, and get me so upset that it's very difficult to be measured. I'm trying to be when I have a guest, you know, that they can, you know, really bring the analysis and the fire. But I will just tell you, I was recently at a few meetings where we're attempting to, divest, okay, part of BDS work. And it is so difficult. But after two years of genocide, you know, and you're still dealing with people who you know, uh, we'll argue over minutia, you know, to try and raise obstacles to actually doing what's right. It's so disturbing, you know, at this point. And I can imagine Hamza, you feel, you know, much the same that, you know, it's been, it's even worse in a way because it's just been ignored. Um, you know, what's been happening. But you were just telling us, I think, a little bit about, you know, really how to think of these RSF groups as, and I thought that was a very interesting comparison that made sense to me immediately, that when you see the kind of environment in the Sinai and, you know, parts of Gaza that have been collaborating, kind of in this sort of no man's zone, you end up with drug smugglers, black market bandits. And you can even have people who are kind of, you know, ISIS type oriented as well. Like they all become a mix that are perfect for collaborating in sowing greater chaos and, in undermining, you know, popular resistance and popular mobilizations that are attempting to try and, on behalf of the people, improve the conditions and situation. So, you know, in addition to this kind of portrait of who these RSF types are, perhaps you can also link it to like who they're collaborating with, which is something I know you want to discuss and talk about the UAE's, you know, involvement in sponsoring and paying and basically turning these people into mercenaries against their own people. Perhaps you could talk a little bit about how the UAE has managed to capture, you know, and what's their purpose and point, you know, what are they attempting to do in supporting and sponsoring the RSF groups?

Hamza Al-Muqawi: Absolutely. So okay, so the you from where we were, which was around 2004 2005, I think, which is the ginger weed group that we were talking about, right, that tribal militia, they did such a good job at the massacres in the genocide that the commitment are for that they became an official fighting force for the Sudanese. We will get to the UAE, you'll see it, it'll be right there. Because like professional mercenaries. That's what they were. They were professional mercenaries, not for the Sudanese state for Amr al-Bashir. And Hamati was Muhammad Hamdan Degelo. He's the leader of the Janjaweed and now he's the leader of the RSF. His nickname is Hamati. Now this is a rumor. I don't know if this is the reason why his name is Hamati. He was always called Hamati. That's always how I was introduced to him. That's how always other people have known him. But people say it's because he used to be called Hamati or my protection by Amr al-Bashir himself, uh, Hemeti in Arabic is my protection. So that's where Hemeti comes from. It's my protector or my protection. And he even had gifted Degelo a gold mine for himself just for his great job in genociding Darfurians. He gave him that and basically the art stuff was just always just used to just do the essay of dirty work that they couldn't do openly. Right. So it's kind of like the secret wing of of the army that wasn't actually part of the army and in 2013 they officially became the rsf as we know the rapid support forces uh and became like an official thing and the uae uh needed people to fight in yemen for the saudi coalition so the saudi arabia and and the UAE, their little duo. So other than all the ISIS people and the tech theories and all the different, you know, like extremists from all around the world, anyone that basically wanted just to, the sectarian people, anyone who wants to just pick a bone with some group that they don't like and had a lot of issues and just wanted to go shoot a gun somewhere, they're like, yeah, please come, we'll give you money, we'll let you into Yemen. And they also requested from a lot of different, like, puppet regimes and for help for different mercenaries, because they just did not have the force capable of taking and holding Yemen and fighting people who are familiar with the area, who are familiar with the mountains. I mean, Yemen, Afghanistan, and Gaza have been always those three people, those three places that have been almost impossible to control for a long period of time. They've always been a place that if you're familiar with the area and you're from there, the native people would always be able to Uh, either win and defend their land, or even if you do success, like successfully take it over for a little bit, they end up kicking you out and they always end up being able to resist. So Yemen is one of those places, as we know, and we know they were fighting, uh, and star law at the time and fighting the, uh, the Yemeni revolution. So that's, that's another part of this, which is the UAE being a counter-revolutionary force, uh, along with Saudi Arabia. So there, they were the second in command. to the Saudi Arabia as part of the Saudi Arabia Coalition. The UAE, when it first started, it was those seven states in Amman that were, I mean, it was just Ammani desert. The UAE is not a real, country. There's no Emirati culture. I mean, I'm pretty sure the whole country has maybe like 50 of them at this point. I mean, they're like a very, very minority in their own country. They have to bring in labor forces from, well, labor is a nice word, a lot of slavery. You know, they take people's passports, they offer them really nice jobs, and then they take their passport to the system. And they just have them trapped there basically for years and years and years.

Adnan Husain: uh so we know i mean just on that point i mean we know that those small principalities and political enclaves were carved out during the era of british colonial rule in first to serve their purpose of controlling, you know, the trade and access to India, you know, through the Persian Gulf into the Indian Ocean. It was seen as absolutely vital. You know, there were also a lot of resources to exploit. There was a lot of pearls and pearl diving right in the In the Arabian Gulf, the Persian Gulf, you know, places like Bahrain, Qatar, etc. But what they want, especially once they discovered that there were a lot of oil resources there, they didn't want these resources to be under the control of larger scale countries. political powers who that could use those resources on behalf of sovereign development of the society as a whole for many people. So they concentrated in the hands of a small kind of ruling kind of family elite. And in order to sequester those vast resources from the rest of, you know, the population and the people, you know, like, so that's, that's clearly the, part of the kind of game and the strategy, but I like also how you were pointing out that the place of the UAE and Saudi in Yemen is very parallel to their ambitions and the pattern of their involvement in sponsoring mercenary type forces and fomenting this chaotic conflict. There's a lot of parallels between what they did with the forces that they support in the so-called Yemeni civil war, you know, it's like really outside intervention. And that's also how very often it's framed within, as you were pointing out, in Sudan, as it's like, oh, it's just these people can't get along. And in fact, they then manufacture a kind of simplistic narrative that this must be the difference between Muslim populations and non-Muslim populations. Or if that doesn't work, then they say, oh, it's the Arab versus the African populations or So they use this kind of frame to kind of make the focus be that there are some kind of ethnic or religious differences. That is how to explain and understand this conflict that's taking place and not have any of the sense of how these external forces work. are pumping in money, guns, and all of that to feed this kind of chaotic situation to allow them to undermine. And this is something I do want to ask you more to elaborate on, to undermine popular forces. Like you pointed out in this, that this is counter-revolutionary. counter-revolution implies there were revolutionary forces that have to be undermined and stopped and maybe you can talk a little bit about those these resistance committees um you know what happened in 2018 and why that was so threatening to you know these imperial powers uh that would be i think valuable for people to go back to that 2018 period and really understand from you You know, what were those revolutionary forces and why they had to be stopped and how they are being undermined today?

Hamza Al-Muqawi: Yeah, so it was definitely this is definitely a counterrevolution. That's always how I framed it. It was a direct response to the 2018 revolution. And it it. When, as we just talked about in Yemen, when the UAE needed people to fight there, Sudan had sent the RSF. So they met the Emiratis there. So this is how they get to know each other. And they basically see them doing a counter-revolution very well. They're like, wow, these people are very good mercenaries. So we're going to keep that in mind for later. We're going to see it come up. And then the 2018 revolution happens. The RSF is sent out as to basically like to sick, they sick them on the Sudanese people. These were a lot of, it was all normal people. There was no, like organization, huge organization or something like that, or like an NGO that was setting this up. There was no election that set this up. There was no liberal democracy that they were just like, oh, we have to, we have to, you know, it was people just were tired of the small ruling class in Khartoum getting everything while people couldn't even afford bread. They say it started about bread, but that's a very small part of it. Like this was, as I mentioned in my piece, Sudan was a very good example of necropolitics where people were basically colonized people are left to live just like a certain way. You're allowed to live how we allow you to live. You're allowed to live just enough to be alive, but not enough to actually prosper in any way. But you're technically alive. So when people stand up and they try to fight back, you're like, wow, you're dumb. Why are you fighting? You had a good life before. You were alive at least. You weren't in war. You weren't going through this thing. And that's the thing that you were just talking about, which is they act like... 50 countries just want to go to war all of a sudden, all the time. There's always 30 countries at war, naturally. There is definitely no outside force that's creating chaos and inspiring chaos and divide and conquer. But also, if countries with a lot of resources stay destabilized and chaotic all the time, it's very easy to just take the resources out without any trouble. If there's no organized government, it either has to be a puppet regime or once the puppet regime falls, civil war, immediately. There's always something that happens there. And the RSF was already used as a counter-revolutionary force, first in Darfur, and then against the Yemenis. And in Libya, they were used to help Haftar's forces, which is another militia that we're gonna talk about later as we talk more about the UAE's proxies. And then in 2018, they were used by the Sudanese government against the Sudanese people. Once they saw that... like these resistance committees, which was basically just normal students, revolutionary students who just wanted to make their country better. They wanted to liberate their country. They knew that they were still under colonization and they needed to not only free themselves from , but free themselves from the Western hold that the West has on them, basically. So there was these resistance committees uh who are in every state there is there's a resistance committee and then there's in every city there's also a resistance committee so these were normal youth groups that were just basically uh grassroots led um that took care of their people so at this time when when the very lit when the very little things that the government was might have been providing was taken away as punishment for the protests They took care of themselves. When the soldiers were shooting at people in the streets, people were their own medics. They took care of each other. Mothers and uncles and aunties and everybody were cooking for their neighbors and making sure everybody got fed. And this was the start of the community kitchen that we know today, which is every neighborhood has a kitchen of just volunteers who cook food for the community, for the neighborhood. They take care of each other. um and there's also the emergency response rooms which is another part of this so it's the resistance committees and the communications and the emergency response rooms these are all like working class led like from the grass rules from the bottom up um orgs and setups to help their own people they have um like they create their own makeshift medical facilities they they were helping bring food to people in the front lines of fighting the army during the revolution they they were like treating wounds like uh rubber bullets and and tear gas and and that kind of thing and they were they were learning as this was happening and they were setting up this infrastructure which would later be crucial actually if this didn't exist there'd be way more deaths right now during this genocide. There's already so many, but these infrastructures that they created during the revolution to be revolutionary continue to be used to this day. So when the Sudanese people who had one of the worst dictatorships in this region, and the Arab Spring had already all but basically failed, anybody who actually overthrew anyone, they just immediately punished them by putting somebody who's worse. They'd give them like, three seconds of democracy and then just be like, okay, military cool. Let's just put this guy that we like. And he's just going to throw all of you guys in prison and we'll never happen again.

Adnan Husain: Yeah. Mubarak to CC, you know, basically with a blink of an eye in between.

Hamza Al-Muqawi: Yeah. It's either that, or they just like, they, they would just, push they would use it the proxies every every different it was like the the race for africa where they you know that picture that famous cartoon with the cake where they're like dividing it up it's like that but every arab spring country just it was just all the different sub-imperial states the uae saudi arabia each one back their own proxy and they're like yeah let's just rush and try to take pieces of this country and just you know take all these resources and while they had those people fighting each other, they're just like sneaking stuff out of the country, and using their proxies to control parts of these lands and they even the responses to the Arab Spring, which caused now what's happening in Libya with Haftar and also what's happening in different areas of Indonesia and play in Mauritania and stuff like that, places like I say, The instability created and what it allowed for there to be put there by Gulf countries is now also used to back up the counter-revolution of Sudan that's being carried out by the RSF today. Like Haftar has backed the RSF. He allows them, well not allows, I mean, They're his backers. They tell him what to do, and he's like, okay, cool. There's a route where the Colombian mercenaries that get sent to Sudan from all the way from South America, ex-military, most of them, they get hired by a security company in the UAE. They're brought over there, and then they're shipped out to Libya, and then they take that road down from Libya into Sudan, and they all join the RSF from there with a UAE salary, an Emirati salary, basically. When the RSF and some of the Army smelled in 2018 that El Bashir was finished, there was no way he was going to get out of this one, at least publicly, you know. They turned on him. They, you know, they did that thing that they did with his name of art, for example, uh, where they're like, okay, now the army's cooing you where we're gonna overthrow you. And we're gonna, we're gonna carry out the will of the people.

Adnan Husain: But you know, just like 15 seconds ago, they were shooting at the people.

Hamza Al-Muqawi: They just, they're just looking out for their best interest. And that's what happened here. So the RSF and the SAF both survived the revolution. They, they were part of the next stage as well, which was the transitionary stage. I remember this year. uh was out uh he was arrested uh he was thrown in prison um and there was a supposed to be a transition to civilian rule and during this the SAF still had power the RSF still had power and then there was like a civilian So there was these three branches, basically, that were all together in this new government. It was supposed to be transitioning to fully civilian away from military rule. I mean, of course, that never happened. It was stomped in its tracks. But because Sudan had such a brutal dictator and such a brutal regime, if that fell successfully and stayed like fallen and the people actually took control of their country, Egypt would have, Egyptians would have rethought their situation. Maybe Libyans under Haftar rule now would maybe rethink their situation. Moroccans might rethink their situations. People in Saudi Arabia or the UAE might rethink their situation. You know, it would inspire A lot of revolts worldwide. I mean, the Arab Spring started with one Tunisian man setting himself on fire in 2011. One person caused this chain reaction that caused such a headache for colonial powers and devolved countries who worked so hard. That one caught them off guard. But now it seems that they have set up contingency plans for each of their you know, puppet regime friends, like mercenary groups, different militias, different parts of the army, different maybe intelligence, agents that are part of the government's intelligence agencies who will help them carry out the counterrevolution. They don't want to get caught off guard again. Like if they got caught off guard in 2011, some of the revolutions actually succeeded and they immediately rushed into action to shut it down and put their own people in there and then lock it down forever. And that's why they were kind of, it kind of felt like they were prepared for Sudan. They rushed into action and in 2021, Hamdouk, who was part of the leader of the civilian branch, there's this party called Tagaddam. Tagaddam means progression, so it's supposed to be this good progressive party that lets them transition into civilian rule. But then Al-Burhan, who is the current leader of the SAF and basically leader of Sudan, and Mohamed Hamdan Daglo, the leader of the RSF, overthrew him they overthrew him in 2021 and they took control of the country and it was basically just fully whatever transition to civilian rule that they pretended that they were going to do was just gone um and they they they had another transitionary government now at where borhan was the the leader and he met he was basically his vice president he was vice president of the trans transitional sovereignty council i i believe it was called Um, and the official story that's used by Western media is that, well, they couldn't really agree about the power sharing, uh, because that was 2021 by 2023, uh, the genocide starts and the war breaks out. Um, so yeah, that's the story that they're able to use. They say it's two generals. They're like really mad at each other. They're two Sudanese general, which it's funny because Hemeti, the leader of ARSA, he's not even Sudanese. He's from Chad. Uh, he grew up in Chad. I don't know when he came to Sudan. The only thing that's really known about his background is that in fifth grade, he was expelled from school and never went back for stealing a goat or sheep of some kind. So that's the kind of person that leads the people's revolution that they claim on their social media propaganda. Beforehand, the leader of the Sudanese Armed Forces wanted the RSF to be under the army or to integrate in the army. Hamati didn't want that. And even Hamati, even before all this was happening, when he was vice president, he was saying, he would say things like, you know, the Zionists, I feel so bad for them. They have to deal with the Palestinians. You know, they go on khutbah for a Friday prayer. They make the sermon where they say, oh, this guy was killed and this guy was killed. All lies. Like he was running. cover and game for israel in sudan which is a very anti-zionist country even back then like he it was very clear who his like where his loyalties laid uh he just he's there for the money so when when when they took control they were the ones who signed the abraham accords for like to uh what's that word again uh normalized to normalize relations with israel so they can get the sanctions lifted Like, Hemeti, I'm sure, was a big part of making that decision. I mean, the sanctions were suffocating. That was true. And which, by the way...

Adnan Husain: But wasn't that situation... I just want to come to this because I think I remember that after there was the democratic, revolutionary, popular, you know, against Bashir... the US kept and maintained its sanctions on Sudan and distributed funds that they had seized and been holding, you know, because of the 9-11 families. I don't know if you recall this, like, you know, there were all these resources that they could have sort of released to allow this new government, a new transition process that was based on a popular and democratic kind of, you know, you know, politics to succeed, you know, by solving some of the economic problems. And you mentioned that it started with like bread riots, but it mainly it mainly just means that like everything, the cost of living was impossible. People couldn't you know, survived. They could have helped do that, but instead they distributed all this money, you know, to the 9-11 families. And, you know, it has then produced the conditions that you were just describing that totally undermined, you know, undermined any possibility for a path forward and where people then just, you know, were susceptible easily to these mercenary kind of salaries from the UAE to exploit. and overthrow as counter-revolutionaries to those conditions. So that seems to be related to a couple of questions that we got in. You've been talking about the UAE sub-imperial role. I'm sure we'll have to return to that at some point to keep continuing our analysis, your discussion of that. But we had one question that came in from Danny Ferguson saying, 9415 what is the role of the usa with regard to sudan and that reminds me also that there was a question from ode to john trudell how much cia work has created the chaos in sudan in other words what is the super imperial kind of story? You know, if we had the sub-imperial with the UAE, is there a, you know, what's your sense of the super imperial kind of involvement in Sudan? Or at least in the situation that has resulted in Sudan?

Hamza Al-Muqawi: So it seems like, okay, a couple of points to that for the USA. First of all, For what, like in, if we're talking about in the sense of kind of how the USA is to Israel. So the UAE is that to the RSF, but the UAE isn't really like a real actual power on its own. It's just kind of like an Arab face for the different Western powers, right? But in this case, this would be actually the UK, the British government, they're more involved there and they actively went after people who tried to expose the UAE early on about what they're doing in Sudan and they covered up a lot for what they're doing as well. The EU was also heavily involved and they helped arm the RSF before this started because they They were offering them border control where they would basically stop Africans from crossing up past Sudan. So a lot of weapons that didn't come from the UAE actually came directly from the European Union. But then the United States specifically, I mean, they give a lot of weapons to the UAE. They have a huge military contract. They make like a new one every year that's even bigger and larger than the last one. That's the ones that there's ones that they're selling to them. There's ones that they're giving to them for free. I'm sure there's a lot that's going on behind the scenes that we don't see. This genocide was going on in Sudan and it was becoming increasingly obvious that was the UAE and people were, I mean, let's not pretend like Biden was any kind of like a moral person, but like he didn't even pretend to be. Like this was brought up by Congresswoman Sarah Jacobs for months now in Congress, when she talks about how the UAE, like not months now, months before, the UAE came, the delegation came to the U.S. to meet with Biden in September 2024. So this was like said in the American government, in American politics. So it was known that the UAE was doing this, but he still created an even stronger and bigger contract, military contract, and they even signed a document where they said we're strengthening military ties with the UAE, which doesn't seem like a coincidence. Israel, who's America's proxy in the region, was early on October 23, I think we saw videos, I remember when these videos first came out from the RSF, it was noticed that they were like using these launchers, that kind of seemed like to me and to some other people online, like they were the LAR 160. And it did end up I'm like, we're like 99.9999% sure that those were Israeli. They're created in Israel, only like six countries have them and none of those countries are like countries that would sell them to the RSF because they only have like three or four of them in Israel. You know, so it's, yes, there's a very small chance that they might have maybe send them to the to the UAE just for the UAE to use. But chances are that Israel probably send them to the UAE to be sent to the RSF, they want a piece of the Sudan pie. When this is all said and done, everybody, so many people just create new contracts with the UAE. So without saying, hey, you know, whatever you get of Sudan, whatever you guys get to keep, give me a little piece if I'm helping you out with this. Like, you guys need some weapons. There's some European countries who have been caught with their pants down in Sudan as well. Like, French armored vehicle technology. Like, technology that's very hard to get unless it was literally given to someone and it was found in RSF armed vehicles. That's from France. Very expensive. Like, defense stuff. Sorry, I don't remember what the exact technology was, but I do know that it was, like, a huge scandal when it first happened. There was Belgian weapons in Sudan with the RSF. It was different. So it just, like, the U.S. never, like, openly showed that it's, you know, being involved in Sudan, but obviously they were the ones choking Sudan to begin with with the sanctions. Right. Which they claim it's because the Amr al-Bashir government helped al-Qaeda. And like, that's what they say. But he was overthrown at this point and they kept him.

Adnan Husain: That's exactly the point is that they got rid of that government and yet they still kind of maintain the sanctions, you know? Yeah, that's right. But what you're saying is a very important and useful point is a different kind of analysis where we often think that, oh, we have to see direct U.S. involvement in order to um you know uh have an anti-imperial perspective but in fact actually what you're pointing out is all these sets of interlinking kind of nodes of the imperial power that are operating in conjunction or in some kind of compatible sort of way where the us doesn't have to actually be as directly involved because the allies that it has are, you know, acting with the resources that it's been, you know, that's been given to them or they use the financing of the UAE, but they use like, you know, you know, various groups like we were talking about those that I think that was very important about the collaborators. And if you look at the kind of collaborators in Gaza and who is being supported and financed in Sudan, and likewise, these mercenaries who were involved in Yemen and, you know, you see a real pattern where there's a more systemic kind of set of uh relationships that are reproducing this chaos and being serving counter-revolutionary forces in the region so complath 2203 had said oh i wish there was some visual aid or interactive map showing all the imperial neo-colonial links and the groups they fund and unleash across various regions it would be so helpful I agree. I think that would be so helpful to have a visualization of it. But I think what you've been describing and talking about and making all those connections is the verbal version of exactly that kind of an interactive map. All these different lines of connection that you need to have in order to really make sense of what's been going on. So I really appreciate that. You know, we had another kind of question earlier, which was about and keep them coming, folks in the chat. I tried to get to them. Another question that had come up is like, what's been the role? I'm trying to look for that specifically so that I could post it. But it was basically about what's been the role of the African Union, you know, in they said or done anything or they. really making the situation worse? What's the, you know, what can we look to from the, oh, here it is. Okay, here was the question from Red Kitty. Is the African Union playing any role in Sudan? Mediation, interference, what? Is there any story related to the African Union in this?

Hamza Al-Muqawi: I mean, just like every other organization that's like that, there's a lot of statements of concern. They're very concerned. We're concerned. There's concern. Oh, there might be some concern as well. I think that they've shown every time some big massacre happens, they're very concerned about it. But there is no mediation. There's nothing like that. I mean, they've said that they would help with negotiating if they wanted, two warring parties want to come to the table and negotiate. But most of the African Union, like, they know what's happening, and not just that, a lot of them are in on it now, so one of the, very early on, it was, I think, December 2023, or maybe January 2024, the leader of the RSF went on an Africa tour, like, he literally visited so many different countries on an Emirati plane, and just picked them up from where he's hiding in the UAE, and he went to, he met with uh, the Kenyan president, he met with the South African president, he met with, uh, I think the Ugandan president as well. He met with, uh, the guy from Puntland, the Puntland president in, in Somalia and the Bosaso, not Bosaso, Bosaso is, uh, Somaliland, sorry, uh, so-called i'm not going to act like i'm a i'm an expert on what the somalia situation in my what what it seems like to me is that seems like it's like a bunch of different semi-sovereign states within somalia that are all like somalia but then there's kind of like presidents of regions so seeing two of those reasons work with the uae on this and this africa tour was before Like, it was right before, three or four months before the CISO and FASHA started, which lasted from April 2024 until it fell in November of this year. And before a lot of the offenses, the major offenses that the RSF were about to start doing. So it seemed like they were getting ready to, like the UAE was getting ready to launch the second stage of their plan. First, The first attempt, what it seems like to me is that in April 2023, the RSF was supposed to cool the SAF or whoever the leadership was there. Anyone that would have been loyal to them in the army would have just joined them, which did happen. And they would have just overwhelmed the people in Khartoum and they would have just taken over the government. And that's it. There would have been no war. Like, I think that was the original, it was just supposed to be like a surprise attack in April, 2023. And they take over, they try to take over the Republican palace and Khartoum as a whole. And they, it seemed like they believed that if they did that and they just took over that, like all the government buildings, then they would just become the government. That's it. Like there would be no more, you know, that just didn't happen. there was some you know so then second stage was like just start fighting and just try to take as much territory as you possibly can and they actually did have a good amount of Khartoum state for a while they had a lot of Al-Ghazira state for a while as well Al-Ghazira is very important very important a big thing behind this whole thing the Sudanese government even the corrupt Sudanese governments were like refusing to sell like large pieces of the Al-Ghazira scheme which is some of the most fertile land on like planet Earth to the UAE. They wanted to buy it permanently, like not lease it, not rent it, they just wanted it and they didn't want to sell it to them. And so they've just been trying to take it. They've just been trying, they try to buy it, they try to trick their way into it, they try to scam their way into it, and now they're just trying to take it. That was like one of the During this, around the same time as this Africa tour, that's when they went into Wed Medeni, which was the second place after Khartoum to be a displacement. All the people in Khartoum ran away to Wed Medeni, which is one of the biggest cities in Algeciras State. As he was going on that Africa tour to talk with all the African Union people and try to have some backup, basically, that's when that part of the plan started. Like I said, it seems like their crew failed. So they just started like a long, like war of attrition kind of thing and just trying to take as many territories as possible. And it was obvious that The first place was they just wanted political dominance. If they could take over the capital, maybe they could just, the government would just fall and they could take that over. So that's why they targeted Khartoum first. And they wanted a lot of the infrastructure that was there that was for the government and for the army, which is really centered in Khartoum state. And then there's Khartoum city, which is the capital. So Khartoum state also has Umdurman and other really important places. Like they want to take over the, They took over the broadcasting service that was, like, the longest day before, that kind of thing. The next thing was, like, when they took over Detroit, they took over a lot of Al Jazeera State successfully for a while. They got pushed out. Recently, they got pushed out of the SAF. the Sudanese army was able to push them out of that area. So the UAE has failed in that part as well. But the reason I say that it seems like that Africa tour was to start the next part of their plan is because like, for example, they want, they, they made a parallel government, like an RSF government. They want to create their own Sudanese government. They're like announcing it. It's like how there's, there's like the Yemeni government. And then there's like some guy in like some other country. And he's like, no, no, this is the real, the Yemeni government because we're recognized by the UN or whatever. Like they just think that they can just announce the government on behalf of the, of the colonial, the imperialists and, and everybody just has to.

Adnan Husain: Yeah. Like a Juan Guaido situation in Venezuela, you know, like let's just pick some guy who will suddenly will claim that he's the legitimate president and use that as a base or what they're trying to do now with Machado. So it's like a, imperial kind of strategy that we've been seeing not only in the West Asian and African region, but like they're ready to do it also in other parts of the imperial kind of game board as it as as it were. Yeah. Yeah, that's right. That's right. Wow. Interesting. Well, I want to come to you've alluded a couple of times about more recent events. More recently, there's been attention, some attention on the situation in Sudan, partly because of, as you're saying, the fall of al-Fashir and the, you know, kind of really horrific conditions that people are suffering, you know, with. as a consequence of that as well. But I'm wondering, what would you say about what's happening right now? Tell us about what you've been hearing, what your sources tell you about these conditions and what's been happening in recent weeks, basically, as a consequence of those military events in Sudan.

Hamza Al-Muqawi: Yeah, so... First, so El Paso has been a very important place for the RSF and they've had it under siege since April 2024 until like just almost the entire city was starving, basically like in full famine, like multiple stages in, like not even the early stages. Like it was very bad. People were eating animal feed and even that was starting to run out. And Fasher was basically the last place in Darfur that wasn't RSF controlled. Darfur is the only place that the RSF actually controls. So they have taken over the rest of Darfur from April 2023. They just started picking up the pieces, like little by little, massacring all the minorities. I mean, massacring everybody, really, truly. But they really didn't leave anyone who... like, isn't who they deem, like, worthy of, like, staying alive. So this mirrors the situation that happened in El Ganina in 2023 and Darfur, and they were trying, they were chipping away a little faster, trying to have it drop. That attack that caused it to fall was, I think, attack maybe 245 or 246 attempts by the RSF, like 246 pushes that the Sudanese, uh, joint forces, the tribes and the army had successfully been able to push back and hold on to it faster. So the thing I mentioned before with the parallel government that was announced in Nairobi and Kenya. So those were the kinds of things that they were setting up in those meetings when they had him at the flying around different countries. They need different African governments to give them some form of legitimacy. But to have even a parallel government, you need to at least have one state. They didn't even have one state fully.

Adnan Husain: If you look at the RSF control maps, it's just a bunch of different random dots just all over SAF control territory.

Hamza Al-Muqawi: Before, it was more. They controlled more. but they've just been pushed out of every single other area. So really the only stronghold that they really have anymore is Darfur. And to give any form of legitimacy to maybe having like a dual governing, dual governed Sudan or splitting off an RSF controlled area as their own country, which I'm sure they're trying to do, which we could get into more in a bit. They have to control Darfur. Yeah, they have to control Darfur to at least that can be their, their capital and where they're launched from and a place that they fully control and they can operate out of. Nyala Airport in Darfur is where all the weapons come into from the UAE. They either go through Somalia uh through the puntland or through somaliland and then come there or through chad where they also had bought that president like they they gave him a loan of basically the entire country's gdp um at once and he just allows them to use amjadass which is a place in chad as a, they say it's a hospital to get an aid center for Sudanese refugees. It's a very small village. There's barely even any people from Chad there, much less Sudanese people. It's really just, it's a military hospital to heal RSF fighters. And it's also, it used to be the hot zone to get weapons into Sudan. But now that they control Darfur, they started using the airport, which is like, there's an airport in that city and that's, that's there. That's actually the RSF government's capital now. So they were able, yeah, they, they announced the parallel government in Nairobi and they needed that last piece. They needed it faster. Like they started showing it every single day at, by the time it fell already like 250 or I think more healthcare. facilities, hospitals, that kind of thing, were all absolutely just obliterated. There's like one maternity hospital that was literally bombed and like 140 people died. And then there's only one hospital that was really kind of still standing and that was the Saudi hospital in Fasher, which if you guys might have heard, as soon as the RSF took over, they went in and with taking videos, just basically shot everybody in their beds and just killed them all on video. Yeah, so... I would say what my sources on the ground are telling me, but my sources on the ground were, I mean, were the people that we were working with, with our aid network to distribute food. Unfortunately, ever since it fell, I have not heard from any of them. I think I think we know what probably happened, to be honest. Like, the first people that they went for was, like, doctors. And there was a former member of the Sudanese parliament who is from El Fasher originally. She came back to El Fasher on their seats to run her own community kitchen and pass out food and help people. They walked into her house and shot her. That was like day one, hour one. And apparently, from what I've heard, from some people who were able to get away into Tawila, which is like 40 miles away. That's another city. That's like the closest city that people can run away to. They were saying that they were going into all the people who were running the community, who were working with aid organizations, who were passing out food, and they already knew where they were. They already had intelligence on this. They were watching for a very long time and they basically went to their houses one by one and just executed them.

Adnan Husain: I mean, yeah. That is really disturbing to hear, Hamza, because, you know, and for you, especially, you know, knowing these people, working with these people to be cut off, that's very, very disturbing. You know, in your article, you said that one of the political or maybe the main political lesson is analyzing people. the sub-imperial ambitions of the UAE and the way they're operating, that accountability, you say, can only come from confronting not just the UAE, but the broader imperial architecture that enables such interventions. That's really true. That's also a long term project. You know, that's like not just one location. It's how they're all feeding off one another to produce this kind of chaos, mayhem, just genocide and starvation and deprivation. The story you've been telling, it just sounds so much like what we know from Gaza. It sounds so much like what we know from Yemen. It's just being repeated over and over this pattern. Yeah. I know people, when they've heard all of this, really want to know what they can do, how they can help. You know, John, Ode to John Trudell had put, so there's no end of the killing in sight, no hope for the peace for the people. People feel really despairing when they hear about how much people are suffering and how terrible the situation is. But I'm wondering if you can maybe give people some concrete things that you've been involved in a lot of initiatives, these kind of mutual aid, those kitchens. Maybe you can talk a little bit about where you would direct people. I mean, there had been a question early on, like what are some organizations, what are some initiatives that we might be able to support, at least to do something? You know, we know just like in the Gaza situation, I mean, it's not, you want to see an end to the entire genocidal violence situation.

Hamza Al-Muqawi: you know it's very hard we keep doing our political activism but we also we hear about these people who are suffering and we want to do something what can we do um yeah of course so I just want to intro this with first of all this same uh person right here oh to John uh Trudell has another comment as well where it says why kill the people who help others make no sense about that and it's this is something that i i have always highlighted that an important front of the war on the genocide and as people who claim to be supporting the resistance and supporting the people of us people very much neglect i feel like on the internet where they're seeing these uh campaigns for people who need help and they just kind of go like well you know that's not This is the front of the war, just as the fighting, the military part is a front of the war, just like the information campaign is a front of the war, is a very important front of the war that actually shapes the reality on the ground as well. is a weapon because starvation is a weapon. They use starvation as a weapon. And I always say this on my Twitter and I always push this, that when you are helping people in Gaza, when you are helping push campaigns, when you're even creating campaign for somebody and helping them fundraise and helping a family or two families or five families or 10 families or whatever survive and eat when the enemy is uh when the axis of evil uses food and starvation as a weapon tries to kill people with by starving them to put pressure on the resistance to give in or to take a uh a deal that's gonna end in the genocide of their entire people or Like starvation, that's why he's using a fascia to make them give up as well. Food, like this was, it's being withheld. So giving them that food or giving them access to that food or fundraising for people or mutual aid is just as legitimate as a form of fighting as any other form of resistance as well. And I literally like the call, the people who help us with Gaza and with Sudan, with helping people get fed. I like to call it the support front or the support brigade. Like we are like, the resistance was already worrying about so much. They had so much on their plate. And the fact that they even have to think about the fact that their people are starving above them while they're fighting and protecting their homeland. That's something that we could help with. We could directly help them by at least lifting some of that worry away by making sure that people are fed, making sure as much as possible that we can get these campaigns in front of as many people as possible, get people help as much as possible. People would hit us with appeals for our aid network, which I'll talk about a little more in detail right now. And we would, like, tents, food, ingredients, things to cook with, the pots and pans. People left everything. Like, most people's homes were destroyed in Gaza, for example. And they would need to start over somewhere else with absolutely nothing. People were sleeping in the street, especially towards the end, before this so-called ceasefire, you know, day start. The resistance ceases and Israel continues firing as usual. People were being like pushed into the south and they were being forced to sleep in the streets. So any resource that we get help with, like we would be helping with. Like even some people, we help them get their hands on like very like cheap tablets because there's only remote learning in Gaza, for example. there's no schools, all schools are absolutely destroyed. And they'd want their kids to still join that remote learning classes. Like there's teachers I follow from class on Twitter, who are still teaching through zoom and do Skype and do different things like that. So I bring that up to say that when you are when They killed those people because those people were resistance fighters, just like the people from Al-Fasher who were resisting with guns. The people who were resisting by keeping their people alive were directly facing the war of starvation head on and pushing it back. Like that's that's also a form of fighting and.

Adnan Husain: Yeah, just that the point is that just like we see in Gaza, enabling these brave, heroic people to remain on their land and resist the attempt to just have them leave, kill them, or have them leave, that is a really huge benefit to them, of huge support, as you're pointing out. And so the same thing is true Every person we can help who are part of this kind of front against imperial ambitions is helping them continue to resist, to be resilient, to have the resources to maintain, survive and do more than survive, but to resist. So I think that's a very important message. Tell us about some of those campaigns that you've created and been involved with.

Hamza Al-Muqawi: Yeah, absolutely. In early 2024, I did computer science, so I coded my own website for, you guys might have heard of Vesta Funds. They verify campaigns for people on Vesta, and they put them all in one site. So it was inspired by that, and I created SudanFunds.com. so that was serious for me i i made sure to get the dot com not the dot dot wordpress.net or something like that it's the sudanfunds.com like that one word um and that's basically uh consistently updated people might reach out to me with a campaign um for us like their own campaign like a sudanese family people trying to escape or a community kitchen that's serving umdurman or wet medeni or Tawila for people who escaped Al-Fasher or like in Al-Fasher before it fell for people who escaped Zamzam camp when the RCF had attacked that. So I verify these campaigns and there's like multiple levels of verification. And when I'm sure, when I'm 100% sure that this is legitimate and I do constant checkups with them. you know, to make sure everything's okay and everything, and to maintain their presence on the website. And I just have these as links. So there's different categories. There's organizations that you can donate to on Sudan Funds. And then there are people you can donate to on Sudan Funds. And the money doesn't go to Sudan Funds at all. It's just a list basically of like GoFundMe and Chuffton, different websites, campaigns. We just give you a way to help multiple people in Sudan. You have different options of people that you can help in Sudan. So that's number one. Number two is the Abu Huraira Aid Network. That's just like a mutual aid network that I also made just to try to help people in Gaza, but also help people in Sudan. So we have a team. in Deir el Balah and in Khan Yunus in Gaza and we're expanding as we keep going because we've only really received like so far we've raised around $30,000 so we're expanding slowly in Gaza so we have our own teams in Gaza who every week we try to raise enough money to send them enough to make these distributions. They go to the really neglected places, the orphans, the widows with many kids, the elderly who can't get up and go try to get food on their own. And we would like give them like a bag with ingredients that would be enough to last enough weeks a week, you know, multiple bags if they have like multiple members of their families, like that kind of thing. And in Sudan, We work with underappreciated and underfunded community kitchens. Those are the ones that we were talking about before that started during the revolution in 2018. We partner with these community kitchens, which is basically just like we're talking about like some uncle or auntie's house, their kitchen. They're just... People donate, sometimes they donate meat, they might donate food, they might donate different things, and they just make food for the entire, like a whole neighborhood or a whole part of a city. And these things exist in multiple parts of each city in Savannah. That's the only way most people are alive. And they even say when they're waiting in line, sometimes they say, when we come here, this is the only time we eat all day. Like this is the only opportunity we have to get food. And these communications, we partnered with a couple of them Before this, we were working with someone in FastShare. I don't know what's going to happen with that now. Honestly, the dust still hasn't settled. And like communication, there's a communication blackout. Like they usually hit the internet and the phones lines and the towers and stuff. And they even do that actually to try this like rent Starlink time. Like they might let you like text your family or whatever for a couple of minutes on their Starlink. And if they let you do that, you also have to like, yeah, like you'd be like, okay, oh, can you please send me like 3,000 Guinea, for example, 3,000 pounds. They make you send the amount and then they'll be like, okay, so you're giving us like 75% of this. You get to keep 25, whatever money your family sends you. And we'll give you maybe five more minutes of the Starlink time. So that's one of the reasons, but communication blackouts so nobody can talk about it. The things that you guys all saw was not from victims and was not from Sudanese people. It's from the RSF. All those videos that are fresh are from the RSF. The RSF posted it themselves. They took it themselves. They're very proud of what they're doing. But yeah, so the Abu Ghraib Network, the Sudan Funds, there is a Telegram channel that you can look up that I run that there are really a lot of sources for Sudan in English that are consistent. So that post, I post news on there where I translated from local Arabic sources and I posted in English. That's called the Sudan News. I'm not going to lie. I'm going to have to check my phone right now to see exactly what it was called because I'm, it was like, at first it was just a small thing and I didn't expect it to get so much attention. So I have to like change the name to something more. Yeah. So it's called the Sudan News Network. So you can look that up on Telegram and just like consistent, Um, like locals, like from all over in English and it's like, not from Western media view, like what's actually on the ground. Um, so those, those are the most important ones in my opinion. Uh, there's a Khartoum aid kitchen. That's not mine. Uh, but I strongly recommend. anyone who wants to donate to like grassroots organizations that feed people and they don't only feed people now they even people who are forced to be displaced and leave their land to other places um they even they're even helping them come back to Sudan to repopulate Sudan with the Sudanese people because another thing the RSF would do like people don't consider this that it's some form of settler colonialism but I genuinely think it is because most of the RSF now are fully just foreigners It's like at least 50%, if not more. I mean, we're talking about Ethiopia. We're talking about people from Chad. We're talking about people from Central African Republic. We're talking about people from Libya. We're talking about people from Mauritania, different countries. The Mauritanian, the Sudanese embassy in Mauritania was actually taken over by the RSF without the Mauritanian government knowing for a while. And it was used as a recruitment center for RSF fighters. And they pulled a lot of North Africans from that. And as a North African, it's really a shame to say, but. You know, some people will do anything for money, unfortunately.

Adnan Husain: Well, this is what we're talking about, these mercenary networks. I mean, they're drawing from all over the region and beyond. So, yeah, this is really important to hear about it in that respect. I'm going to ask you maybe after this stream to send me, you know, a list of these things so that I can post them into the YouTube feed. uh description and make these as widely available as possible and i'll post them also on my social media because i really want people to hear about sudan funds about sudan news network and all you mentioned about a bunch of them and i didn't get a chance to write them all down but Listeners, do come back to the YouTube description. We will make sure to include these both in the YouTube episode description and when this episode gets posted on audio podcast on both East as a podcast and Adnan Hussain Show podcast. We will make sure to include all of this information. It's absolutely vital that you get involved and do what you can to Hamza, the audience has been posting how much they appreciate the analysis and the knowledge and the information. This has really been so valuable and informative for people. And inshallah, it's going to lead to more people knowing about what's really happening and analyzing it in a proper anti-imperialist way and getting involved. in continuing to get people to know about what's happening and to do things that they can to support in solidarity with the people of Sudan who have been, as you've pointed out in this article, involved in revolutionary action against the empire for 100 years. They are a central front. We need to be in solidarity and to support them. So I thank you so much for... After work, you know, it's a long day. You still came and you spent a good hour and a half speaking with people. It's so much appreciated. And we're with you and we're in solidarity and Jazakallah for all of the work that you're doing. Inshallah, there will be success, you know, for these efforts, inshallah. Yeah.

Hamza Al-Muqawi: Thank you so much for having me. I truly, I really appreciate the opportunity. Big fan of the pod as well. So it was like, I saw the DM from you and it was like a comment and then the DM was like, oh my God, of course, like I was very glad. I'm very happy with the opportunity. I'm very, thank you so much for having me on. And yeah, it's absolutely my pleasure. And inshallah, there will be success. And we, like maybe even there can be in some point in the future some kind of a part two or something like that.

Adnan Husain: I was just going to say, this is not the last time we're going to have you on. Anytime you want to come on in the future, you know, you have an open door. We want to keep hearing about what's happening in Sudan. And if you write like a new piece, come on, we'll talk about it. We'll make sure to link it and make sure people, even if they don't go read the piece, they hear about what you are saying in the piece. Let's make this... Not the, this is not the last conversation. We, you know, being in solidarity means we will return and we will return to, you know, remind people about this. So, you know.

Hamza Al-Muqawi: And if somebody, for when the YouTube video gets like officially posted of this, I'm sure people, some people have like a lot of questions because there is a lot of context and nuance behind it. Like if they want to post it in the comments that come with my regular personal account and answer some of them, a handful of them. here and there, you guys please feel free to do so. I'd love to. give more information and give more context. And I'd also love to, I'd be honored to come back on at some point in the future, inshallah as well. And thank you so much for having me.

Adnan Husain: Okay. Thank you. Thank you. Well, listeners, watchers, before you drop off the stream, you know, make sure to give it a like, so more people will see it, you know, we'll see it on their feeds and you can still share it on X, you know, tweet it. And, you know, tweet the link to the YouTube video as well. And when it comes out on audio podcasts, I know not everybody wants to watch on YouTube and so on. I will be tweeting out about it and make sure that it's widely known. And you can, you know, send it to friends who like to listen on the podcast as well. You know, until next time, the Radical Academy is closed for just this evening, but we will be back next week with another topic. Hoping to have another great guest. from the Anti-Imperialist Scholars Collective, which is a wonderful new initiative that we want to learn more about. So do come back next week and, you know, look out for a struggle session coming up in a couple of weeks, our monthly live stream panel with great guests together. And also check out, we will be recording very soon, a new episode of The Names of God. You know, I mean, you can't always just talk politics. You need to do something to feed your soul. So if you're interested, come and we'll be doing an episode soon that should hopefully be out very soon on Ar-Rahman, right? And this is a world that could use more mercy, all of us to be more merciful to one another. So inshallah, we'll see you soon. Until next time, peace with justice and solidarity to you all. Bismillahirrahmanirrahim.