Deadly gold mine air strikes highlight Egypt-Sudan border insecurity

An alleged air strike on a gold mining site in northern Sudan has killed at least 72 workers, according to a rights group, highlighting the severe security vacuum along the country’s increasingly lawless border with Egypt.

The Khartoum-based rights group Emergency Lawyers accused the Egyptian military of targeting civilian miners in the North Wadi area of Jabal al-Uqaydat, a mountainous border area between Sudan and Egypt.

Egypt has not commented on the incident.

Images allegedly from the site and shared by rights monitors showed chaotic scenes, with bodies wrapped in funeral shrouds.

A troubled border

The border region between Sudan and Egypt has a long history of tensions which continue to this day.

In 1899, the British and Egyptian governments designated the 22nd parallel north as the dividing boundary between Sudan and Egypt on maps.

But the absence of physical border demarcation along this line, coupled with the area’s gold wealth, has left the area open to dispute and lawlessness.

Abdul Kareem Al-Almin Ahmed, a specialist in Egypt-Sudan border affairs, said the Sudanese territorial borders have long been subject to historical negligence which still goes on.

“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.”

In June, another artisan gold mine in the Jabal al-Uqaydat region was targeted by drones and artillery, with a number of people killed. The Egyptian army said it carried out an operation “within Egyptian territory” and detained 223 people.

Egyptian security forces continue to conduct sweeps of the border to combat what they described as illegal migration, drug smuggling and illegal mining.

Historical border disputes

Egypt and Sudan have a long history of border tensions stretching back to the colonial period which goes beyond the Jabal al-Uqaydat area.

The Halaib Triangle, a 20,580sq km area on the African coast of the Red Sea, has been a flashpoint between Egypt and Sudan for over a century.

The dispute stems from conflicting colonial-era maps. An 1899 agreement between Britain and Egypt regarding Sudan and parts of Libya placed the triangle within Egyptian political boundaries. But a 1902 British administrative decree handed control to Khartoum because the area was closer to the Sudanese capital.

The triangle, home to the Bisharin tribe, is renowned for its fertile lands and rich mineral deposits, including uranium, granite, copper and gold.

Following clashes between the two militaries on the border in the 1990s, Sudanese forces withdrew from the area in 2000 and Cairo has maintained effective control over the territory since.

Security and sovereignty

The latest unrest follows the start of the civil war in Sudan in April 2023, which has pitted the Sudanese Armed Forces (SAF), allegedly backed by Egypt, against the Rapid Support Forces (RSF).

The conflict has devastated the country and collapsed the economy. Abject poverty has forced many into dangerous methods of gold mining, including unregulated mines on the border. The collapse of central authority in Sudan has also allowed lawlessness to flourish in the borderlands.

Sudan’s gold has been a key source of financing for both sides, but there is no indication that the gold mine revenue in the border region is going to either party in the war.

Osama Ahmed Eidrous, a professor of strategic and security studies, told Al Jazeera that foreign powers have prolonged the conflict between the two sides.

“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 posed no threat to neighbouring countries, such as Egypt, and were not involved in the war.

“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.”