How gold has become the lifeblood of Sudan's war economy

Arab News

19-07-2025

https://arab.news/bw7sa
As the civil war in Sudan rages on, the devastation is increasingly measured in troy ounces and metric tonnes. Before the conflict began, the country officially produced 87 tonnes of gold annually, a figure that plummeted to just 2 tonnes within five months of fighting.
Yet this collapse masks a more sinister reality; an estimated 100 kg of gold now vanishes each day across Sudan's borders — approximately 60 tonnes since April 2023. This illicit flow is not incidental leakage, it is the engineered financial architecture of a seemingly unstoppable war machine.
Consider the mechanics of this deadly economy. Miners, often working in perilous conditions under the coercive control of armed groups, extract the ore. Each gram that is extracted, from artisanal pits in Darfur or industrial concessions along the Nile, converts directly into imported artillery, foreign drones, and militia salaries.
Control over mining sites, particularly those concentrated in specific geographical zones, is fiercely contested, as vital as possession of any strategic city. The Sudanese Armed Forces, which holds key production areas, imposes taxes and levies, funneling the proceeds through state-adjacent structures. Its rival, the Rapid Support Forces, operates extensive parallel networks, utilizing cross-border connections to move and monetize its share.
A significant portion of the gold moves through neighboring countries, often under murky arrangements involving state actors, or at least tolerated by them. The final destinations are international markets, via a major global hub that acts as a financial clearinghouse for both sides. There, the conflict gold is refined, legitimized and sold, its origins obscured. The proceeds are then cycled back, often through complex financial channels or purchases of essential war materiel. Weapons, fuel, and even food supplies for fighters are procured abroad using these funds, shipped back across borders, sometimes through the same neighboring countries, and distributed to the front lines.
This transnational flow transforms Sudanese gold into tangible instruments of death and displacement within Sudan itself. With official exports from SAF-controlled territories generating $1.6 billion in 2024 alone, and more than 60 percent of production from key mining states being smuggled, gold becomes the grease for a devastating conflict 'economy' that has displaced nearly 9 million people.
Moreover, the commodity's path through free-trade zones of neighboring countries and foreign refineries demonstrates the ways in which regional commercial policies actively incentivize predation. Duty exemptions and tax reductions in neighboring countries have transformed cross-border smuggling from an ancillary activity into the core revenue strategy for both of the primary belligerents in the conflict, locking the nation into a self-perpetuating cycle in which mineral wealth finances state collapse.
The mineral wealth that could rebuild the nation remains its curse, fueling a conflict measured in graves rather than grams.
Hafed Al-Ghwell
The profound tragedy lies in the complicity and enabling environment created by influential external actors. Key regional powers, driven by short-term economic gain and competing strategic agendas, have become indispensable patrons.
One state, acting as the indispensable partner of the Sudanese Armed Forces, processes vast flows of illicit gold through its territory. Reports indicate 80-90 percent of Sudanese gold bypasses official channels, draining state revenues while financing the Sudanese Armed Forces' $1 million daily war expenditure. This smuggling pipeline, enabled by lax oversight and political complicity, directly subverts Sudanese sovereignty.
Simultaneously, a second external actor functions as the financial engine for the Rapid Support Forces. By providing market access and liquidity, this patron transforms the Rapid Support Forces-controlled gold into immediate capital. Its gold refineries absorbed more than 46 tonnes of Sudanese gold in 2023 alone, worth about $2.8 billion at current prices, embedding conflict commodities into global markets. This is not passive trade, it is active conflict financing. The Rapid Support Forces' territorial losses from last year would have triggered financial collapse without this uninterrupted cash conversion.
These dual pipelines create a perverse equilibrium. Gold generates more than $1 billion annually for the warring parties, ensuring military spending consumes resources needed for the 25 million Sudanese people requiring aid.
While the Sudanese Armed Forces and Rapid Support Forces deploy gold revenues to import drones, ammunition, and fuel, Sudan's healthcare system has collapsed to about 70 percent nonfunctionality, while civilian deaths mount, as a direct consequence of economically sustainable warfare.
International responses and sanctions remain fundamentally inert against Sudan's conflict-gold architecture. The targeting of isolated entities, such as seven firms blocked by the US Treasury in June 2024, ignores the complex transnational system that is sustaining the war. This system operates through three integrated channels: smuggling corridors across Chad and Libya; sophisticated financial clearinghouses; and state-facilitated transit routes through neighboring countries, where 80-90 percent of the gold bypasses official scrutiny.
In a nutshell, sanctions against individual commanders or shell companies constitute little more than policy theater. The resilience of the gold trade lies in its networked adaptability; routes shift within weeks, front companies regenerate, and regional banking systems enable instant gold-to-cash conversion.
When the US sanctioned the Sudanese Armed Forces-linked firms in 2024, the Rapid Support Forces-aligned networks simply rerouted exports through South Sudan and the Central African Republic, demonstrating the immunity of the ecosystem to atomized pressure.
Until policymakers dismantle the entire architecture — by demanding that regional trading hubs close beneficial ownership gaps in gold exchanges and sanctioning the refiners laundering conflict minerals — the war will continue.
The language of strategic patience and alliance maintenance rings hollow when juxtaposed against the entrenched, billion-dollar illicit gold ecosystem sustaining Sudan's civil war, which is responsible for creating the massive humanitarian crisis we see today.
More than simply a missed opportunity, this is an active choice, one that permits blood-soaked commerce to flourish in exchange for diplomatic comfort and regional ambiguity. To date, financial institutions and refineries downstream have barely flinched. There has been no sweeping divestment, no collapse in buyer confidence, no multilateral embargoes. Regulatory institutions have failed not because of lack of capacity but because of an unwillingness to act, constrained by politics not logistics.
The international community must now confront the full supply chain — from the mines controlled by armed groups, through the smuggling routes across borders, to the foreign markets and financiers that launder its proceeds and facilitate the conversion into weapons — and impose coordinated, high-impact costs on all nodes, especially the external actors profiting from the chaos. Otherwise, Sudan's gold will continue to flow and the war will continue to burn. The mineral wealth that could rebuild the nation remains its curse, fueling a conflict measured in graves rather than grams.
• Hafed Al-Ghwell is a senior fellow and executive director of the North Africa Initiative at the Foreign Policy Institute of the Johns Hopkins University School of Advanced International Studies in Washington, DC. X: @HafedAlGhwell