Fonday Sankoh (17 October 1937 – 29 July 2003) was a Sierra Leonean warlord who founded the Revolutionary United Front, the primary antagonistic faction of the Sierra Leone Civil War that was supported by Liberian President Charles Taylor.
The RUF was founded by Sankoh in 1991 and was supplimented by Liberian special forces troops supplied by Taylor, and launched its first attack in villages in Kailahun District in the diamond-rich Eastern Province of Sierra Leone.
The RUF became notorious for brutal practices such as mass rapes and amputations during the civil war. Sankoh personally ordered many operations, including one called "Operation Pay Yourself" that encouraged troops to loot anything they could find. After complaining about such tactics, Kanu and Mansaray were summarily executed.
In March 1997, Sankoh fled to Nigeria, where he was put under house arrest and then imprisoned. From this time until Sankoh's release in 1999, Sam Bockarie performed the task of director of military operations of the RUF. During the ten-year war, Sankoh broke several promises to stop fighting, including the Abidjan Peace Accord and the Lomé Peace Accord signed in 1999. Eventually the United Kingdom and ECOMOG intervened with their own small, but professional, military forces, and the RUF was eventually crushed.