The luxury jet touched down in Juba, the capital of South Sudan, on a mission to collect hundreds of pounds of illicit gold.
On board was a representative of a ruthless paramilitary group accused of ethnic cleansing in Sudan’s sprawling civil war, the flight manifest showed. The gold itself had been smuggled from Darfur, a region of famine and fear in Sudan that is largely under his group’s brutal control.
Porters grunted as they heaved cases filled with gold, about $25 million worth, onto the plane, said three people involved with or briefed on the deal. Airport officials discreetly maintained a perimeter around the jet, which stood out in the main airport of one of the world’s poorest countries.
After 90 minutes, the jet took off again, landing before dawn on March 6 at a private airport in the United Arab Emirates, flight data showed. Its gleaming cargo soon vanished into the global gold market.
As Sudan burns and its people starve, a gold rush is underway.
War has shattered Sudan’s economy, collapsed its health system and turned much of the once-proud capital into piles of rubble. Fighting has also set off one of the world’s worst famines in decades, with 26 million people facing acute hunger or starvation.
But the gold trade is humming. The production and trade of gold, which lies in rich deposits across the vast nation, has actually surpassed prewar levels — and that’s just the official figure in a country rife with smuggling.
Indeed, billions of dollars in gold are flowing out of Sudan in virtually every direction, helping to turn the Sahel region of Africa into one of the world’s largest gold producers at a time when prices are hitting record highs.
But instead of using the windfall to help the legions of hungry and homeless people, Sudan’s warring sides are wielding the gold to bankroll their fight, deploying what U.N. experts call “starvation tactics” against tens of millions of people.
Gold helps pay for the drones, guns and missiles that have killed tens of thousands of civilians and forced 11 million from their homes. It is the prize for rampaging fighters and mercenaries who have robbed so many banks and homes that the capital now resembles a giant crime scene, with fighters gleefully vaunting piles of stolen jewelry and gold bars on social media.
The Sudanese people once hoped that gold would lift up their country. Instead, it is turning out to be their downfall. It even helps explain why the war started — and why it is so hard to stop.
“Gold is destroying Sudan,” said Suliman Baldo, a Sudanese expert on the nation’s resources, “and it’s destroying the Sudanese.”
The civil war pits the nation’s military and what remains of the government against their former ally, a paramilitary group known as the Rapid Support Forces.
The group’s commander, Lt. Gen. Mohamed Hamdan, is a camel trader turned warlord whose forces grew especially powerful after they seized one of Sudan’s most lucrative gold mines in 2017.
“It’s nothing, just an area in Darfur that belongs to us,” he told The New York Times in a 2019 interview, trying to downplay its significance.
The mine became the cornerstone of a billion-dollar empire that transformed his armed group, the R.S.F., into a formidable force. General Hamdan later sold the mine to the government for $200 million, helping him buy even more weapons and political influence.
But that wealth and ambition led to a standoff with the Sudanese military, paving the way for the civil war that has all but destroyed the country.
The fight for gold only intensified when the war broke out in 2023. In one of his opening salvos, General Hamdan seized back the mine he had sold to the government. Weeks later, his fighters marched on the national gold refinery in the capital as well, making away with $150 million in gold bars, the government says.
Gold drives the war for Sudan’s military, too. It has bombed R.S.F. mines, while ramping up gold production in areas still under government control, often by inviting foreign powers to do the mining. Sudanese officials have been negotiating gun and gold deals with Russia and are seeking to woo Chinese mining executives. They even share a gold mine with Gulf leaders accused of arming their enemies.
The war’s foreign sponsors play both sides as well.
President Vladimir V. Putin has long heralded Russian gold mining in Sudan, and his country’s Wagner Group worked with the military and its rivals even before they went to war.
Now that Wagner’s boss is dead, killed in a plane crash after his brief mutiny against Russia’s military leaders, the Kremlin has taken over the group’s business and appears to be pursuing gold on either side of the front line, partnering with the R.S.F. in the west and the nation’s army in the east.
The United Arab Emirates is also lighting both ends of the fuse. On the battlefield, it backs the R.S.F., sending it powerful drones and missiles in a covert operation under the guise of a humanitarian mission.
Yet when it comes to gold, the Emiratis are also helping to fund the opposing side. An Emirati company, linked by officials to the royal family, owns the largest industrial mine in Sudan. It sits in government-controlled territory and delivers a chunk of money to the army’s cash-strapped war machine — yet another example of the dizzying array of alliances and counter-alliances fueling the war.
Motorbikes, trucks and planes spirit gold out of the nation at every turn, shuttling it across the porous borders with Sudan’s seven neighboring countries. Ultimately, nearly all of it ends up in the United Arab Emirates, the prime destination for smuggled gold from Sudan, the State Department says.
Along the way, a motley chain of profiteers take their cut — criminals, warlords, spymasters, generals and corrupt officials, the cogs of an expanding war economy that provides a powerful financial incentive for the conflict to grind on, experts say.
Some now liken Sudan’s gold to so-called blood diamonds and other conflict minerals.
“To end the war, follow the money,” said Mo Ibrahim, a Sudanese tycoon whose foundation promotes good governance. “Gold feeds the supply of weapons, and we need to pressure the individuals behind it. At the end of the day, they are merchants of death.”
An Empire of Gold
In the Spain-sized region of Darfur, where a genocide spurred global outrage two decades ago, the horrors have returned.
R.S.F. fighters have waged a campaign of ethnic cleansing against civilians and carried out a punishing siege on an ancient city. In the turmoil, the world’s first famine in four years started in a camp of 450,000 terrified civilians.
“I shouted and screamed,” said Zuhal al-Zein Hussain, a woman from Darfur who recounted being gang-raped by R.S.F. fighters last year. “But it was useless.”
Yet in a corner of Darfur largely untouched by the war, the R.S.F. has also been quietly building a vast, secretive gold mining operation.
The enterprise, worth hundreds of millions a year, expanded with the help of Russia’s Wagner mercenaries and has become the financial fuel of a military campaign notorious for atrocities.
In the savanna around Songo, a mining town hacked out of a nature reserve, tens of thousands of miners labor in sandy pits in a region rich with gold, uranium and possibly diamonds. The mines provide rare, though often dangerous, jobs at a time of near total economic breakdown.
But a fortune is being made by the R.S.F., whose fighters control every aspect of the gold trade.
The mines are the latest offshoot of a vast family business that began well before the war.
When General Hamdan seized a major gold mine in Darfur in 2017 — effectively becoming Sudan’s biggest gold trader overnight — he channeled the profits into a network of as many as 50 companies that paid for weapons, influence and fighters, the U.N. says.
His paramilitary force ballooned in size, and General Hamdan grew so wealthy from gold and supplying mercenaries for the war in Yemen that he publicly offered $1 billion in 2019 to stabilize Sudan’s tottering economy.
One company anchors his empire of guns and gold. It’s called Al Junaid, and the United States sanctioned it last year, saying that gold had become “a vital source of revenue” for General Hamdan and his fighters.
As violence has engulfed Sudan, Al Junaid has focused on hundreds of square miles around Songo, where the R.S.F. has long worked closely with Wagner.
Production across the region has been brisk, according to witnesses, satellite images and documents obtained by The Times. A confidential report submitted to the United Nations Security Council in November found that $860 million worth of gold had been extracted from paramilitary-controlled mines in Darfur this year alone.
The fighters don’t do the digging themselves. At about 13 sites across the region, small-scale miners work for a pittance. The R.S.F. controls everything at the barrel of a gun.
Sudanese journalists with Ayin Media, an investigative website, visited the area this year and recounted R.S.F. fighters patrolling an Al Junaid gold plant, with Russian employees stationed behind high walls.
Sudan’s mines have been a big lure for Wagner, as The Times reported two years ago. New documents obtained by The Times since then further detail Wagner’s partnership with the R.S.F., including a plan to prospect for diamonds near Songo.
In one letter from 2021, a manager for Al Junaid invoked the name of the R.S.F. leader, General Hamdan, and extolled “the great work between us and the Russian company,” a common shorthand for Wagner in Sudan.
The alliance is about weapons as well as money. U.N. investigators have documented missile shipments from Wagner to the R.S.F.
Songo is now so important to General Hamdan that the mines are a military target. The Sudanese air force bombed the area last year and again in January, killing civilians, according to news reports. A video taken after one strike shows people scrambling for safety as a fire blazes nearby.
The R.S.F. has a ready market for its gold in the Emirates, where 2,500 tons of undeclared gold from Africa, worth a staggering $115 billion, were smuggled between 2012 and 2022, according to a recent study by Swiss Aid, a development group.
The challenge is getting it there.
Before the war, General Hamdan could fly his gold directly to the Emirates. But Sudan’s main airport has been destroyed in the war, its tarmac riddled with holes, and the other way out, through Port Sudan, is in army hands.
So the R.S.F. has had to find new routes through neighboring countries — as it did with the smuggling job earlier this year, when porters heaved cases filled with illicit gold across the airport tarmac.
A Luxury Jet, Loaded with Gold
The plane that landed in South Sudan on March 5 to pick up that gold was not the usual bush hopper used by many smugglers in Africa.
It was a Bombardier Global Express, a long-range business jet of a kind favored by corporate executives, and it was registered in the United States.
Its crew had a troubled history.
Seven months earlier, the pilot in command of the plane and the flight attendant had been arrested in Zambia soon after landing in another private jet. Zambian investigators who raided that plane confiscated five guns, $5.7 million in cash and 602 bars of fake gold, indicating a likely gold scam, they said.
The flight to pick up the R.S.F.’s gold, by contrast, went off smoothly, possibly because the deal involved a web of powerful officials from multiple countries who helped ease the way, according to flight documents and three people who were involved with or briefed on the deal.
After leaving Abu Dhabi, the Bombardier jet — with the same pilot and flight attendant — stopped off briefly in Uganda before landing in South Sudan. Though the plane had room for 15 passengers as well, only two were listed on a manifest obtained by The Times.
One of them was a relative of General Hamdan who has acted on behalf on R.S.F. interests before, said several officials and experts familiar with the paramilitary group’s business networks.
The other passenger on the manifest was a senior intelligence officer for Uganda, a country widely seen as a major hub for smuggled African gold. In 2022, the Treasury Department sanctioned a large gold refinery right next to Uganda’s main airport that, it said, was handling hundreds of millions of dollars in conflict gold every year.
“It’s the epicenter of gold laundering in Africa,” J.R. Mailey, an expert on corruption at the Global Initiative Against Transnational Organized Crime, said of Uganda.
Reached by phone, the senior Ugandan official confirmed that his passport details listed on the manifest were accurate, though he denied being on the plane or transporting any gold from Sudan. But the three people involved with or briefed on the deal said he was seen standing outside the Bombardier jet as porters loaded it with cases of gold weighing as much as 1,200 pounds in all.
Other regional officials appeared to take part in the deal, too. The gold had come in from Darfur through the city of Wau in South Sudan, two of the people briefed on the transfer said. From there, it was transported to Juba aboard a commercial airliner operated by South Sudanese intelligence, they said.
South Sudan is a particularly opaque corner of the international gold trade. Senior figures in the country’s elite control a gold industry that produces up to 40 tons a year, diplomats say. Yet, officially, they export next to nothing.
Only a single kilo of gold left the country through official export channels this year, said James Yousif Kundu, a director general for the nation’s mining ministry.
“The rest may be smuggled,” he said.
On March 6, the Bombardier jet landed back in Abu Dhabi, just before 3 a.m., at the Al Bateen Executive Airport used by business and government jets, flight data shows. (Fly Alliance Aviation, the Florida-based company that operates the Bombardier jet and advertises it on its website, declined to answer questions about the flight, including who had chartered it and why.)
The Emirates is a major hub for the R.S.F., which uses front companies controlled by General Hamdan and his relatives to sell gold and buy weapons, officials say. Since the war started, the United States has imposed sanctions on 11 R.S.F. companies, mostly in the Emirates, and often for their links to the gold trade.
On the sidelines of American-sponsored peace efforts in August, which failed to stop the war, General Hamdan’s younger brother, Algoney Hamdan, told The Times that he had lived in the Emirates for the past decade. But he insisted that the R.S.F. was no longer in the gold business.
“Since the war, there haven’t been any more exports,” he said.
Less than two months later, the United States imposed sanctions on him, calling him the “procurement director” for the paramilitary group, responsible for obtaining weapons “to facilitate attacks and other atrocities against their own citizens.”
The Government’s Gold
Hundreds of miles from the R.S.F.’s gritty, but lucrative, gold pits in Darfur sits a modern, industrial gold mine that helps the military keep fighting as well.
It’s called the Kush mine, with giant excavators and expensive machinery that churns out gold and generates precious income for Sudan’s wartime government.
The trick is, Sudan’s leaders haven’t always known who owns it.
They thought the mine — out in the desert, 220 miles from the capital — was controlled by Boris Ivanov, a Russian mining executive with ties to the Kremlin who flourished in the upheaval of post-Soviet Russia.
But when they looked more closely in 2021, Sudanese government officials discovered that the mine had actually passed into the hands of mysterious new investors from the United Arab Emirates, the country backing their enemy today.
Officials from the Sudanese government, which had a minority stake in the mine, said that no one bothered to tell them of their surprising new partnership. So they sent a delegation, led by Sudan’s finance minister, to Abu Dhabi to sort it out.
Kush was the jewel of Sudan’s gold boom, the largest industrial gold mine in the country. It also had geopolitical significance, as a focal point of Sudan’s strengthening ties with Russa.
Mr. Putin singled out the “flagship” project at the first Russia-Africa summit in 2019, and he named the Russian company under U.S. sanctions at the center of the effort. Mr. Ivanov, the managing director of that company, also spoke at the summit, at a session titled “Using Minerals in Africa for the Benefit of Its Peoples.”
Mr. Ivanov’s success in mining was a classic story of post-Soviet Russia. He began his career as a diplomat — posted in the 1980s to the Soviet embassy in Washington, where his portfolio included arms control — and ended up in the oil, gas and mining business. (Two former colleagues said he boasted that he was also working under cover for the K.G.B. during his time in Washington. A person briefed on Western intelligence confirmed that, but a spokesman for Mr. Ivanov denied the assertion, saying Mr. Ivanov never had any ties to Russian intelligence).
By 2015, when the Kush mine began producing gold, Russia and Sudan were both facing international sanctions — Russia for its intervention in Ukraine, and Sudan for the genocide in Darfur — and their joint gold mining only expanded from there.
Mr. Ivanov seemed to prosper as well. Property records show that he and his wife, Natasha, bought two condominiums in Manhattan, next to St. Patrick’s Cathedral on Fifth Avenue, in the early 2010s. Later, they bought a pair of adjoining beachfront homes in Juno Beach, Florida, which they are seeking to demolish to construct a single 15,000-foot mansion instead.
But when the Sudanese officials traveled to Abu Dhabi in 2021, they learned that Mr. Ivanov wasn’t the only one they were in business with.
The mine in Sudan now belonged to Emiral Resources, a new company founded by Mr. Ivanov. And behind that company was a much bigger player — Sheikh Tahnoon bin Zayed, the Emirati National security adviser and brother to the country’s leader, Sheikh Mohammed bin Zayed, according to three people familiar with the talks.
In an email, an Emiral spokesman confirmed that the company was owned by “a leading Abu Dhabi investment group,” but declined to provide names.
The takeover was a sign of the Emiratis’ billion-dollar push into African mining. Seeking to diversify the nation’s oil-dependent economy, Sheikh Tahnoon’s companies are racing to acquire mines and the raw minerals needed for electric cars and the transition to green energy.
That means the Emiratis are effectively hedging their bets in Sudan’s war. In the past 18 months, they have smuggled vast amounts of weapons to the R.S.F., often under the guise of the Red Crescent, a potential war crime.
But the Emirati-owned Kush mine in government-controlled territory likely generates tens of millions of dollars for the Sudanese authorities, who, in turn, use the money to buy Iranian drones, Chinese planes and other weapons.
In other words, the Emirates is arming one side in the war, while funding the other.
The Biden administration raised its concerns directly to Sheikh Mohammed and Sheikh Tahnoon when they visited the White House in September, three senior U.S. officials said. Yet President Biden has been careful not to publicly criticize a wealthy Gulf nation that is an ally on Iran and Israel — infuriating many Sudanese.
A degree of mystery still surrounds the role of Mr. Ivanov, however. Records at Sudan’s mining ministry list him as part owner of the Kush mine, a senior Sudanese official said. But Emiral contested that, saying Mr. Ivanov left the business last year and that “Emiral is an Emirati company.”
Mr. Ivanov remains in the public eye. With his wife and daughter, he attended a gala dinner in Manhattan in October for the Princess Grace Foundation.
Prince Albert II, the monarch of Monaco, presented an award to the actor Michael Douglas. The program said the Ivanovs, listed as a “crown sponsor,” paid $100,000 for their table.
Blood Mineral
When Sudan’s gold boom kicked off over a decade ago, many Sudanese families built their futures around it, storing jewelry at home or in banks for a rainy day.
Now, they rely on it to survive.
Ten days into the war, Al Fatih Hashim sped through the chaotic streets of the capital, Khartoum, and held his breath through checkpoints manned by plunderous fighters. The car carried his fearful parents and siblings, their hastily-packed clothes — and bags of hidden gold.
Mr. Hashim had stashed the family’s wedding jewelry in a hidden compartment under the back seat, and even inside the fuel tank, he said, adding: “It was our insurance policy.”
The ruse worked. After weeks, the family made it to Egypt, where the gold funds their precarious new lives as refugees.
“We had to live from the gold,” he said. “So many other families have done the same.”
Even before the conflict, gold was so essential that it soared to 70 percent of the country’s exports, helping to make up for the oil revenues Sudan lost after the secession of South Sudan in 2011.
War vaporized that wealth. Gold has been looted from homes, seized at checkpoints or stolen from banks, sometimes by fighters using metal detectors to ferret it out. But the generals and their foreign allies dominate the trade.
Russian officials have streamed to Port Sudan this year, offering weapons to Sudan’s army in exchange for a naval port on the Red Sea. They also want to mine: Sudan’s minerals minister met a Russian delegation in September.
But even if the war’s foreign sponsors walked away, the gold trade is so lucrative that the belligerents could finance the conflict on their own, experts say.
In the first year of war alone, Sudanese officials say, the nation produced over 50 tons of gold — more than during the previous 12 months of peace.
One solution could be pressuring the buyers. Classifying Sudanese gold as a “conflict mineral” could require companies to keep Sudanese gold out of their products. Similar concerns over “blood diamonds” from West Africa led to a U.N.-backed certification system two decades ago.
But gold, which is often melted and mixed, can be hard to trace. And with gold prices recently smashing records, the incentives for war keep growing.
“Our country is cursed by gold,” Duaa Tariq, a volunteer aid worker, said from her home in war-torn Khartoum.
“Gold created armed groups and made some people rich,” continued Ms. Tariq, 32, an art curator who now serves meals in a food kitchen and helps victims of sexual assault. “But for most of us, it only brought trouble and war.”
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