Question to the Foreign, Commonwealth & Development Office:

To ask the Secretary of State for Foreign and Commonwealth Affairs, what recent assessment he has made of the strength of Sudan’s rapid support forces.

The UK does not routinely engage with Sudan’s Rapid Support Forces (RSF). There are not officially published figures of the number of personnel within the RSF, although there have been publically reported graduation ceremonies for over 9,000 RSF members between May 2017 and April 2019. In a public address in Khartoum on 22 June, Mohamed Hamdan Dagolo (known as Hemetti), Commander of the RSF and Deputy Chair of the Transitional Military Council, stated that there are 30,000 Sudanese soldiers are in Yemen. We cannot guarantee the accuracy of this information nor can we assess how much of this deployment is RSF. In light of this statement and given recent recruitment it is likely that the total numbers of RSF are above 30,000.