(The Turkish Post) – Air strikes on an informal gold mine near Sudan’s border with Egypt killed at least 72 gold miners on Saturday, Oct. 10, the Sudanese rights group Emergency Lawyers said, and it accused the Egyptian air force of carrying out the attack. A Sudanese medical group gave a lower toll of 13 dead.
Egypt has not commented on the accusation, and Sudanese authorities have made no public statement on the strikes. The figures could not be independently verified. It was the second deadly air attack on the same mining area this year.
Gold miners killed at Jabal al-Uqaydat
The strikes hit the Jabal al-Uqaydat mining area, a mountainous stretch of desert in the northern Wadi area near the Ansari market, where thousands of gold miners dig by hand. Emergency Lawyers said the site lies inside Sudanese territory.
In a statement issued after the attack, the group said the attack “resulted in the deaths of 72 civilian miners, according to preliminary information,” and that it was still documenting the full toll. It said Egyptian fighter jets had targeted civilian gold miners.
The Sudan Doctors Network, a medical group, said at least 13 gold miners were killed and 28 wounded in an air strike on artisanal mining sites in the border area. It did not say who carried out the strike and said it expected the death toll to rise.
Survivors and other Sudanese groups have given higher estimates of more than 200 dead. Those figures could not be verified either.
Survivors describe five strikes
Abdelaziz Youssef, a miner who survived the attack, said an aircraft appeared at about 8 a.m. and struck the mine five times, killing many people. He said other gold miners fled into the mountains for fear of further strikes.
Another miner, Sharaf Ali, said thousands of people were working at the remote site and scattered in different directions after the attack, so nobody knew exactly how many had been killed. Both men said they saw bodies on the ground. Survivors said more people could be trapped under rubble, hours from the nearest town.
Images shared on social media and by local rights groups showed bodies among rubble. The images could not be verified.
Emergency Lawyers accuse Egypt
Emergency Lawyers, a group of Sudanese lawyers that documents abuses in the country’s war, said the attacks reflected Egypt’s wish to expand its control over Sudan’s natural resources.
The Egyptian army has not claimed the strikes. After similar strikes on the same site in June killed 23 workers, the army said it had carried out a “large-scale operation” against illegal gold mining within its borders.
The army later said that operation took place “within Egyptian territory.” It said 223 people were detained, 136 of them foreign nationals, and announced a campaign against illegal gold mining and arms smuggling in the area.
A disputed border and the Halayeb triangle
The mineral-rich mountains along the border stretch for hundreds of kilometers and include the Halayeb triangle, an area on the Red Sea coast that both Sudan and Egypt claim. Egypt has administered the triangle since the 1990s.
The dispute goes back to the period of British rule. A boundary drawn in 1899 along the 22nd parallel places the triangle in Egypt, while an administrative line set in 1902 put it under Sudanese administration.
The border between the two countries runs about 1,200 kilometers from the Red Sea to Libya. Cairo backs Sudan’s army chief, Gen. Abdel Fattah al-Burhan, in his war against the paramilitary Rapid Support Forces (RSF), and regards the fighting along its southern frontier as a threat to its own security.
Gold miners and Sudan’s war
The war between the army and the RSF, led by Mohamed Hamdan Dagalo, known as Hemedti, began on April 15, 2023, and has killed more than 200,000 people. The fighting has pushed many Sudanese into gold mining, and income from gold helps finance both sides of the conflict.
