Sudan’s Central Reserve Police (CRP) recently announced it would be deploying officers to the streets of Khartoum to “secure public and private property”. That may sound puzzling in the context of the current violence: what are the police doing in the middle of this?
The answer is simple. The CRP are not “police” in any civilian sense – they are one of several paramilitary groups in Sudan, and they are intervening on the side of the Sudan Armed Forces (SAF).
This helps explain recent events in Sudan, where history has entangled military force and state power, and has produced multiple armed groups which are now vying for control of the state.
