Sudan has a long history of gold mining. The ancient civilization of Nubia, in northern Sudan, supplied much of the gold that was revered in ancient Egypt and Babylon — Tutankhamen’s tomb, for example, was filled with Nubian gold. Today, gold remains deeply embedded in Sudanese culture, commonly gifted at weddings and passed down through generations.
But gold today is also a globally traded commodity, and to meet that demand, Sudan in the 21st century has become Africa’s third largest gold producer, after South Africa and Ghana. Yet unlike in those two countries, the great majority of the gold — an estimated 85 percent — comes not from large industrial mines but from small-scale “artisanal” mining, carried out in rural areas by villagers who have limited or no information about the dangers from the chemicals on which they rely.
Around 2 million people are believed to be engaged in this form of mining in Sudan. Since the start of the country’s brutal civil war in April 2023, mining and gold trading have been controlled and expanded by the two rival military forces: the Rapid Support Forces (RSF), a militia with an estimated 70,000 soldiers run by General Mohamed Hamdan Dagalo, widely known simply as Hemedti, and the government’s own armed forces.
“Both main factions in the current conflict… nurture cross-border networks to channel illicit gold, often plundered from [artisanal and small-scale gold mining] communities, to enable them to rearm and sustain their military efforts,” concluded a report last year authored by former British foreign secretary Dominic Raab for the World Gold Council, an industry trade association.
Gold makes up 70 percent of Sudan’s exports. Most of it is smuggled illegally into the United Arab Emirates.
Soon after the conflict erupted, the RSF took control of artisanal gold mining areas in the sandy hills of North Darfur, in the country’s southwest. Weeks later, after seizing a reported $150 million worth of gold bars from the national gold refinery in Khartoum, the RSF began securing supply routes for gold exports — west into Chad and south into South Sudan.
Meanwhile government forces assumed control of artisanal mining and trading in the north of the country, where new artisanal mining areas have opened close to the Egyptian border, across which gold is also smuggled.
Both sides reportedly work with the Africa Corps, a Russian mercenary force formerly known as the Wagner Group, which runs its own gold refinery on the Nile north of Khartoum.
The Wagner Group came to international attention as an important fighting force in Russia’s invasion of Ukraine. Its precise relationship with the Russian government has been opaque, but an analysis of the organization by the British House of Commons’ Foreign Affairs Committee in 2023 reported evidence from expert witnesses that “Wagner’s gold-smuggling operations from Sudan [were] critical to Russia’s ability to withstand the significant sanctions deployed against it for its illegal invasion of Ukraine.”
As the conflict has deepened, so has the exploitation of Sudan’s gold reserves. The country’s officially declared gold production has almost doubled since the start of the fighting, to 65 tons of bullion last year, of which 53 tons came from artisanal mining. The real figure, including illicit artisanal mining sponsored by military forces, is likely to be still higher.
Sudan is almost certainly the largest producer of artisanal gold in Africa. According to The New York Times, a confidential report submitted to the United Nations Security Council in November concluded that $860 million worth of gold had been extracted during 2024 from RSF-controlled mines in the Darfur region alone.
Most of the gold is swiftly sold abroad. According to official estimates, gold makes up 70 percent of Sudan’s exports. Most of it is smuggled illegally into the United Arab Emirates (UAE), according to Ahmed Soliman, a research fellow at the Chatham House think tank in London.
But while outsiders profit — and gold has reportedly made former camel-herder Hemedti one of Sudan’s richest men — the revenues from gold mining have also become a major driver of Sudan’s ongoing war, which has displaced a quarter of the country’s 50 million people and left many facing famine. The UAE has also been widely reported as a source of munitions for the RSF — in effect, exchanging arms for gold.
Mercury lingers long in the environment, seeping into water supplies and altering the chemical composition of soils.
“There’s significant money coming out of these operations, making the UAE a key player in Sudan’s war,” says Brian Adeba, senior policy advisor on Sudan for The Sentry, a Washington DC think tank that investigates financial networks that fuel violent conflict.
With competing armed groups controlling key mining areas, Sudan’s gold boom operates with little regulation, often at the expense of the rights and safety of the artisanal miners who drive it. “Without oversight, miners face brutal conditions,” says Adeba, “and harmful chemicals like mercury and cyanide are improperly handled, endangering both workers and the environment.” Meanwhile, he says, “the political and security situation has prevented researchers from investigating these issues.”
Although much remains unknown, studies immediately prior to the conflict showed a worsening environmental and humanitarian crisis that observers believe can only have escalated during the war.
Gold extraction in Sudan relies heavily on mercury, which is “one of the most environmentally disruptive metals,” says Saleem Ali, who directs the minerals, materials and society program at the University of Delaware. It lingers long in the environment, seeping into water supplies and altering the chemical composition of soils, killing trees and leading to the loss of vegetation.
A Sudanese boy, who was born blind and crippled, conditions his mother blames on her exposure to gold mining waste. Mercury exposure during pregnancy is known to damage fetal development.
Ashraf Shazly / AFP via Getty Images
A study conducted by Sudan’s Higher Council for the Environment and Natural Resources and the U.N. Industrial Development Organization estimated in 2021 that mercury was used in more than 50,000 artisanal mines and small-scale refining mills scattered across 14 of the country’s 18 states with “associated health risks to the millions of people exposed.”
Artisanal miners extract gold from rocks or river sediments by adding liquid mercury to separate the gold from other minerals. The result is a pasty amalgam of mercury and gold, which they then heat with a blowtorch to evaporate the mercury, leaving behind pieces of gold. The health hazards start here, as the mercury gas is inhaled by the miners and often their children too.
Most of what does not vaporize pours into the soil or accumulates in piles of waste, known as tailings. Much of the remaining mercury is eventually washed into soils and water sources, where it is absorbed by living organisms, accumulating in the food chain — notably in fish.
According to the World Health Organization, when ingested, mercury easily enters the human bloodstream, crossing into the brain, where it causes serious neurological disorders. Exposure during pregnancy is known to damage the brain development of fetuses.
Flash floods last August submerged gold mines and washed toxic chemicals into drinking water and irrigation sources.
Heaps of mercury-contaminated tailings are today scattered across Sudan. Nobody knows how much mercury they contain. But one study in 2021, on a 40-mile stretch between the towns of Atbara and El-Ebeidiya in northern Sudan, identified some 700 heaps. Salih Ali Salih, a geologist at the Al Neelain University in Khartoum, working with the Sudanese Environment Conservation Society and others, estimated the total amount of these tailings at around 450,000 tons.
On a field visit to El-Ebeidiya in 2022, Abdelrahman estimated that the town’s miners used around 5.6 tons of mercury a day, of which 12 percent, or some 1,500 pounds, washed from tailings into the wider environment every day.
Most of the piles surveyed by Salih’s team were within around 150 feet of homes. A fifth of the drinking water they tested contained high levels of mercury, as did more than a quarter of urine samples and 7 percent of blood, mostly taken from young children. Locals in areas with the most mercury-bearing waste reported increased rates of miscarriages and a range of diseases including paralysis and blindness.
Increasingly, artisanal miners recognize that these tailings still contain some gold, which is worth extracting. This can be done by washing them in a solution of sodium cyanide and then burning off the residual mercury. This cyanidation was until recently largely confined to industrial mining enterprises. But its adoption by artisanal miners is “fueling a dramatic expansion” in their activities, according to Boris Verbrugge of KU Leuven in Belgium.
It also escalates the hazards. In Sudan, miners sometimes take tailings home to treat with cyanide. In the Darmali area of River Nile State, Koji Arizono of Kumamoto University in Japan, reported last year finding tailings “stockpiled on farms and even within residential properties, subjecting the local population to direct exposure.”
Meanwhile, an increasingly erratic climate is compounding the dangers for mining communities. Last August, widespread flash floods across northern Sudan inundated hundreds of villages, submerging gold mines and washing toxic chemicals into drinking water and irrigation sources. “It was a huge disaster,” says Nisreen Elsaim, a leading Sudanese climate activist who is now a fellow at the Robert Bosch Academy, a policy think tank in Berlin.
From the Amazon to the Philippines, artisanal gold mining is responsible for around a fifth of all gold extraction and is a primary source of income for an estimated 50 million people worldwide. Some of that gold has practical uses in electronics, dentistry, and aerospace. But most is either made into jewelry or stored for its value — usually in the form of gold bars in bank vaults. Recent concerns about a coming global economic recession have prompted investors to buy gold, causing its price to surge to record levels, exceeding $3,000 per ounce.
Mercury and cyanide are widely used because they are cheap and available from merchants, who may also buy the gold.
But efforts to curtail the use of mercury and cyanide from artisanal mining remain fitful. The 2013 Minamata Convention — a global treaty named after the Japanese city that suffered an epidemic of neurological diseases caused by mercury waste discharged from a chemical factory — aims to regulate environmental exposure, but stops short of an outright ban.
Some countries do have formal bans. Sudan announced a ban on both mercury and cyanide in gold mining in 2019, following protests. But enforcement is rare, and the toxic chemicals remain widely used, because they are cheap and easily available from merchants, who may also buy the gold. “Everyone knows how dangerous they are, but these companies just don’t care,” says Elsaim.
With war paralyzing the country, many see the unchecked use of toxic chemicals as just one symptom of a deeper collapse, with environmental, economic, and humanitarian consequences that are still unfolding.
In 2022, the UN Special Rapporteur on toxics and human rights, Marcos Orellana, called for a global ban on mercury’s use and trade for artisanal gold mining. But for now, the activities of small-time gold diggers remain the largest source of mercury pollution on Earth, responsible for around a third of all releases. And nowhere is the contamination on a scale as wide as in Sudan.
