Their activities included raiding Dinka villages, looting cattle, abducting women and children, scorched earth, and causing widespread destruction.

In the 1980s and 1990s, the Muraheleen played a crucial role in the government's counter-insurgency strategy, benefiting from state support in the form of weapons, ammunition, and logistical assistance.

Their actions were characterised by severe human rights abuses, including using scorched earth tactics, mass murder and ethnic cleansing.

In the southern region of Darfur, the Rizeigat tribe has a similar group known as the fursan, an Arabic term meaning horsemen or cavaliers.

[3] Post-independence, the northern Sudanese authorities went back on their pledge to maintain the colonial boundaries between Bahr el Ghazal, Darfur, and Kordofan.

They proposed merging the distinct grazing and fishing territories of the Mulual Dinka and the Baggara to hasten the unification of the two ethnic communities.

[11][12] After the 1985 Sudanese coup d'état and the deposition of Nimeiry, Prime Minister Sadiq al-Mahdi's government employed the Muraheleen[13] and its military successors for almost twenty years as a counterinsurgency force against the southern-based rebels, the SPLM/A.

[17] In 2004, experts of the United Nations Commission on Human Rights accused that militia of participating in the Darfur genocide by targeting Masalit, Daju, Tunjur, and Zaghawa people.

Over two days, 27–28 March, a large number of Dinka children, women, and men were brutally killed, burnt to death, and seized as booty or ghanīma.

[23][24] The raids also involved the theft of cattle, looting of grain, burning of crops and homes, and seizing of women and children as booty, played a major role in causing the famine.

[15]: 53 Human Rights Watch and others have described the contemporary form of slavery in Sudan as mainly the work of the armed, government-backed militia of the Baggara tribes, including the Muraheleen, who raid civilians—primarily of the Dinka ethnic group from the southern region of Bahr El Ghazal.