Rights Group Says Egypt Struck Sudan Gold Mine
At least 72 workers were killed in an air raid on a gold mine near the disputed Sudan-Egypt border, according to a Sudanese rights group that has accused the Egyptian military of carrying out the attack. The claim cannot be independently verified, and Egypt has issued no official comment.
Emergency Lawyers, a Khartoum-based organisation that documents atrocities in Sudan’s war, said in a post on X on Sunday that Egyptian fighter jets struck civilian miners in the northern Wadi area inside Sudanese territory. It put the toll at 72 civilians, citing preliminary information. The strike was reported to have taken place on Saturday, with survivors describing scenes of chaos in the mountainous region.
Images shared on social media and by local rights groups showed dozens of bodies lying in rubble and others wrapped in funeral shrouds, and miners described an air strike on the area. None of the images could be verified.
The reported attack hit Jabal al-Uqaydat, a gold-mining area on the border, and would be the second such strike there this year. Similar raids in June, also reportedly carried out by Egypt, killed 23 workers at a gold mining site. At the time the Egyptian military said it had conducted a “large-scale operation” against illegal gold mining within its borders. It said it acted “within Egyptian territory,” detained 223 people, including 136 foreign nationals, and announced a campaign against illegal gold mining and arms smuggling in the area.
Emergency Lawyers rejected that framing in its latest statement, saying the strike was inside Sudan. It argued that the repeated attacks on gold- and mineral-rich border regions reflect an effort by Egyptian authorities to expand and assert control over Sudan’s natural resources.
The border itself is contested. Both countries claim the resource-rich Halaib Triangle, which lies within the rugged, mineral-rich mountains that stretch for hundreds of kilometres along the frontier. The Sudan-Egypt border runs for 1,200 km (745 miles) from the Red Sea to Libya. East of the Nile, it has long served as a conduit for gold, illicit trade and human trafficking, which Egypt has tried to curb, including through mass deportations.
The strike also fits into the wider picture of Sudan’s war. Fighting between the army and the paramilitary Rapid Support Forces (RSF) since April 2023 has killed more than 200,000 people and created a humanitarian crisis that has pushed many into dangerous gold mining, an industry that funds both sides. Egypt backs the army chief, Abdel Fattah al-Burhan, but regards the war on its southern border as a significant threat to its own security.
Elsewhere in Sudan, Al Jazeera has reported a drone strike on the Blue Nile region that killed 30 people, and a UN decision to extend the Darfur arms embargo while blocking a broader proposal to cover the whole country, after Russia and China rejected the US-backed expansion.
