An alleged air strike on an artisanal gold mining site in northern Sudan has killed at least 72 workers, according to a rights group, turning a spotlight on the security vacuum along the country’s increasingly ungoverned frontier with Egypt.
Emergency Lawyers, a rights organisation based in Khartoum, accused the Egyptian military of targeting civilian miners in the North Wadi area of Jabal al-Uqaydat, a mountainous zone that straddles the boundary between Sudan and Egypt. At least 72 workers died, the group said. Egypt has not commented on the incident.
Photographs said to have come from the site and circulated by rights monitors showed scenes of chaos, with the dead wrapped in funeral shrouds.
The frontier between the two countries has been contested on paper for well over a century. In 1899, the British and Egyptian governments fixed the 22nd parallel north as the dividing line on maps, but that line was never physically marked on the ground. The absence of demarcation, combined with the gold wealth of the surrounding area, has left the zone open to dispute and to lawlessness.
Abdul Kareem Al-Almin Ahmed, a specialist in border affairs between Egypt and Sudan, said Sudanese territory has long been neglected and that the neglect continues.
“The presence of the Egyptian Border Guard forces near the region, amid a complete lack of Sudanese military or administrative presence, has left the Sudanese highly vulnerable to Egyptian violations and encroachment,” he told Al Jazeera.
“What is required now from the Sudanese state, if it exists, is to elevate and escalate this issue to the United Nations as an encroachment on Sudanese territory. This must be followed by the immediate physical demarcation of border points in this region and along the entire border strip, in addition to establishing border observation posts along the entirety of the borders.”
The latest deaths are not the first reported at the site. In June, drones and artillery struck another artisanal gold mine in the Jabal al-Uqaydat region, killing a number of people. The Egyptian army described the operation as having taken place “within Egyptian territory” and said it had detained 223 people.
Egyptian security forces regularly sweep the border area, framing the operations as a response to illegal migration, drug smuggling and illegal mining.
A century of disputed ground
Tensions between Cairo and Khartoum stretch back to the colonial period and reach well beyond Jabal al-Uqaydat. The Halaib Triangle, a stretch of 20,580sq km on the African coast of the Red Sea, has been a flashpoint for more than a hundred years.
The quarrel rests on conflicting maps drawn up by colonial administrators. An 1899 agreement between Britain and Egypt covering Sudan and parts of Libya placed the triangle inside Egyptian political boundaries, but a British administrative decree in 1902 handed control to Khartoum on the grounds that the area sat closer to the Sudanese capital.
The triangle is home to the Bisharin tribe and is known for fertile land and rich mineral deposits, among them uranium, granite, copper and gold. After clashes between the two militaries along the border in the 1990s, Sudanese forces withdrew from the area in 2000, and Cairo has maintained effective control over the territory since.
War, poverty and gold
The recent unrest comes after the civil war that began in Sudan in April 2023, which has set the Sudanese Armed Forces, allegedly backed by Egypt, against the Rapid Support Forces.
The fighting has devastated the country and collapsed its economy. Deep poverty has pushed many Sudanese into hazardous forms of gold mining, including unregulated pits along the border, while the breakdown of central authority has allowed lawlessness to flourish in the borderlands.
Sudan’s gold has served as a crucial source of financing for both sides in the war, although there is no indication that revenue from gold mining in the border region is reaching either party.
Osama Ahmed Eidrous, a professor of strategic and security studies, told Al Jazeera that outside powers have kept the fighting going.
“What is happening in Sudan is not a civil war; despite the presence of the Rapid Support Forces as one of the fighting parties in this war, this war is a war of external aggression within a large regional project,” Eidrous said.
“Everything that is happening in Sudan now in terms of effects on the Sudanese citizen, the weakness of the central government and the difficulty of controlling the borders, all these things are caused by this ongoing war in Sudan.”
He added that the miners represented no threat to neighbouring countries such as Egypt and played no part in the conflict.
“We are talking about miners working in gold mining and we have not heard that there was an armed clash, or that they were carrying weapons, or that they were fighting the Egyptian government or the Sudanese government,” he said.
“They are Sudanese citizen miners who were suddenly attacked by the Egyptian aviation and struck for the second time, killing 85 of them.”
The figure of at least 72 dead comes from Emergency Lawyers, while Eidrous put the toll at 85. Neither number has been independently confirmed, and Cairo has yet to respond publicly to the allegations. The strike has refocused attention on an unmarked desert frontier where gold, war and poverty have converged in the absence of functioning state authority.
