Algoney Hamdan Dagalo runs the gold. The sanctions arrived two years late.

The Dagalo brother who actually procures the RSF's weapons was designated by OFAC in October 2024. The architecture he built has outrun every list trying to catch it.

The Dagalo brother who actually procures the weapons was finally designated by OFAC in October 2024. The architecture he built has long outrun the lists trying to catch up with it.

The U.S. Treasury sanctioned Mohamed Hamdan Dagalo, Hemedti, under Executive Order 14098 on January 7, 2025, the same day the State Department issued its genocide determination against the Rapid Support Forces.[1] By that point the announcement had become belated administrative housekeeping. Hemedti had been the most-named individual in Sudan since the April 2023 outbreak; his face had been on the cover of Foreign Affairs. Designating him personally added nothing operational. Treasury was sanctioning a brand.

The more consequential designation had landed three months earlier and drew almost no press. On October 8, 2024, OFAC placed Hemedti's younger brother, Algoney Hamdan Dagalo Mousa, on the Specially Designated Nationals list as the procurement director of the Rapid Support Forces.[2] Treasury described him as leading RSF efforts to procure weapons and military matériel, and named front companies he controlled, including the Dubai vehicle Tradive General Trading, which imported vehicles to Sudan on behalf of the RSF.[2] The January 2025 package went further, designating the gold-purchasing house Al Zumoroud and Al Yaqoot Gold & Jewellers (AZ Gold), managed by the Sudanese national Abu Dharr, and detailing how Algoney maintained access to AZ Gold's UAE bank account.[1] The European Union has added members of the network to its own sanctions list.[3]

The choice to focus on Algoney rather than on the older brother Abdul Rahim Dagalo, the RSF's deputy commander and the public face of its political wing, reflected a consensus among the analysts who track the Dagalo family. Hemedti is the commander; Abdul Rahim is the politician; Algoney is the comptroller, the one who knows the suppliers' phone numbers and signs the wire transfers. The procurement architecture he built between roughly 2019 and 2023 is the most consequential operational fact about the RSF's wartime endurance.[4][5]

What Algoney did before April 2023

The Dagalo family's economic transformation began in 2017 when the RSF — then still nominally a paramilitary auxiliary of the al-Bashir state — expropriated the Jebel Amer artisanal-mining complex in North Darfur from the Mahamid commander Musa Hilal. Jebel Amer was the largest single artisanal gold deposit in Sudan; controlling its export gave the Dagalos their first independent hard-currency stream.[2][4] Al Junaid Multi Activities Co. Ltd, the family holding vehicle incorporated in 2009 with Abdul Rahim as its head, became the conduit for that gold. Algoney, the youngest brother, took the operational management role.

The choice of UAE as the consolidation jurisdiction was Algoney's. Through 2018-22 the family built out a portfolio of more than a dozen UAE-registered firms covering gold trading, jewellery, real estate, and other activities.[5] The structure served two functions. It moved Jebel Amer's artisanal gold into the Dubai market. And it built commercial relationships in the Emirates that would, when the war broke out, become the basis for the UAE-to-Amdjarass weapons air bridge.

The Sentry's October 2025 mapping of the RSF's UAE business network identified several intermediaries running the operational layer of the corporate structure, naming individuals such as Mazin Fadlalla, most of whom remained unsanctioned at the time of the report.[5] The relationships Algoney built between 2019 and 2022 are what permitted the RSF, in the first weeks of the 2023 war, to begin importing matériel at a scale that surprised the Sudanese Armed Forces and most outside analysts. The infrastructure for the war was bought into existence before the war began.

What Algoney did after April 2023

The clearest illustration of Algoney's operational primacy is the Kenyan passport he was issued sometime in 2023 or 2024.

When Treasury updated his SDN entry on February 19, 2026, it added a notable detail: Algoney was listed not only on his Sudanese identity papers but on a Kenyan passport (number AK1586127), along with a UAE identification number.[6] The Kenyan document permitted him to travel through UAE, Saudi, and Ethiopian airports without triggering the watch-list flags that his Sudanese passport had begun generating after the European Union's preliminary 2023 designations. The passport's issuance is consistent with the broader pattern of Kenyan-Emirati-RSF cooperation that included Kenyan President William Ruto's hosting of the February 2025 Nairobi conference at which the RSF announced its parallel "Government of Peace and Unity."[6][7]

Through 2023-24 Algoney rebuilt the procurement chain on a wartime tempo. The principal lines, as documented by the U.N. Panel of Experts on Sudan and by Treasury's October 2024 designation package, were:

- An Abu Dhabi-Sharjah supply line feeding the air bridge into Amdjarass, Chad, documented by the U.N. Panel of Experts.[8]

- A consolidated gold-export operation through AZ Gold (Al Zumoroud and Al Yaqoot) in Dubai, providing the cash flow to fund procurement; Treasury named Abu Dharr as its manager.[1]

- A Russian-supplied small-arms and ammunition track via Wagner-successor logistics out of Bangui and via Eritrean intermediaries.[8][9]

- A drone-acquisition channel for Chinese-made Wing Loong IIs transhipped via the UAE, the channel behind the strike-drone capability that extended the RSF's reach in Darfur in 2024.[4]

By the time OFAC moved against Algoney in October 2024, each of these chains had been running for 12-18 months at a sustained operational tempo. The designation did not interdict any of them.

Why the designations have not worked

The structural reason that sanctioning Algoney has not closed his procurement operation is the same reason that sanctioning the Kaloti refinery would not close the gold-export operation: the UAE will not enforce against the corporate vehicles registered in its jurisdiction, and the Western jurisdictions that have designated those vehicles cannot directly compel enforcement.

OFAC's 2024-25 actions against the Al Junaid network designated the parent company and a string of affiliated entities. The Sentry's October 2025 mapping found the network still operating: firms continued under modestly altered names, with familiar bank accounts and Dubai addresses, and in some cases the same registered figures re-incorporating under fresh identities.[5] The UAE's federal Ministry of Economy did not act on the OFAC list or de-register the affected companies.

The secondary-sanctions mechanism — the threat that non-U.S. banks doing business with U.S.-sanctioned entities lose access to the U.S. dollar system — has worked to some extent at the level of the major UAE commercial banks. Mashreq, Emirates NBD, and ADCB have terminated identifiable Al Junaid accounts. But the procurement chain has migrated to smaller UAE banks, to Turkish lira-denominated channels, and to USDT crypto-rails — the same Tron-based settlement infrastructure that the Myanmar scam-compound operators use to launder fraud proceeds.[5][9] FinCEN's October 2025 final rule severing the Cambodia-registered Huione Group — found to be a foreign financial institution of primary money-laundering concern — from the U.S. financial system may eventually constrict that crypto-settlement infrastructure, but in the months since the Algoney designation no measurable reduction in RSF arms imports has been documented.[10]

The third reason the designations have not bitten is that Algoney himself, like Hemedti and Abdul Rahim, has continued to travel openly inside the UAE, Kenya, and Ethiopia. The Kenyan passport gives him a non-Sudanese cover; the Emirati authorities have given no indication of intent to detain or freeze him. More than a year after the OFAC designation, his network remained operational and his movements unconstrained.[5][6]

What Algoney's continued operation implies

The conventional model of how sanctions work, by naming the principal, freezing his assets, denying him the dollar system, and awaiting behavioural change, has produced no behavioural change here. The reason is that Algoney is not the head of a state, where sanctions can in principle compress a regime's external operating room. He is the procurement director of an irregular force whose institutional centre of gravity sits substantially outside the country whose name appears on the SDN list.

The designations of Algoney and his network have had two real effects, neither operational. One is evidentiary: they make the procurement chain administratively visible, document its chain of custody, and create the legal predicate for prosecution should Algoney ever travel to a jurisdiction prepared to act. The other is reputational: they make Western institutions marginally less willing to do business adjacent to the chain, raising friction without closing it.

The buried fact is that the principal weapons buyer for one of the war's two parties has been a named, sanctioned, locatable individual for over a year, operating openly from cities friendly to the United States, and the chain he runs has not slowed. The October 2024 designation arrived because the case for Algoney's centrality had been overwhelming for years. The gap between when the case became clear and when the sanction landed measures the distance between when an open-source analyst can identify a problem and when the U.S. national-security apparatus can persuade itself to act on the identification.

For irregular armed forces operating through cooperative Gulf jurisdictions, the conventional sanctions toolkit may be incapable of producing the change it is designed to produce. The architecture survives the sanction; only the comfort of the named individual is degraded. In Algoney's case, even that has been preserved.

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