Before the war, al-Amin Idriss Mohammed had never used a weapon. He’d never even felt the weight of a rifle in his hands. But a storm was approaching. By late 2023, Rapid Support Forces (RSF) scouts were regularly riding past his village of al-Tekeina, in central Sudan’s al-Jazira state, on motorbikes, their eyes darting over its most valuable assets.

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

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

Now, he walks and talks with the calm assuredness of a military officer, a leader of the village’s self-taught, self-equipped militia that again and again repelled rapacious paramilitaries from al-Tekeina when other villages in al-Jazira state had been overrun. “I’ve never received any military training, but I had to defend my home and my land,” he tells Middle East Eye. “Now I can use all kinds of light and heavy weapons. I learnt to fire an RPG by watching YouTube.”

Young men were trained for combat. A call was sent to the village’s diaspora, who had moved away from Sudan, to urgently send money home. Much of that cash bought weapons that could defend the village: according to Ibrahim, they were easy to purchase. “We simply bought them off the RSF itself,” he says. “They will do anything for money.”