NAIROBI — Sudan’s gold trade has become the central financial artery of the war between the Sudanese Armed Forces and the Rapid Support Forces, with bullion moving from mining zones in Darfur, Kordofan and northern Sudan through smuggling routes and official export channels that increasingly converge on the United Arab Emirates, April 15, 2026.
The trade matters because gold can be mined quickly, moved quietly and sold for dollars outside the formal banking system. In practice, that makes it ideal for buying weapons, paying fighters and preserving the patronage networks that keep both sides in the field even as Sudan’s wider economy fractures.
How the Sudan gold trade keeps both war machines running
A 2025 Chatham House report argues that the struggle over gold assets did not simply survive the war; it helped shape it. The report says artisanal and small-scale mining makes up most of Sudan’s output and that competition over those sites was already sharpening the rivalry between the army and the RSF before fighting erupted in April 2023.
That helps explain why gold now sits at the center of Sudan’s conflict economy. The army can still monetize production in areas under its control through state-linked channels and taxation, while the RSF benefits from direct control over mines, protection rackets, cross-border transport and relationships with traders who can blend conflict gold into wider regional flows.
Where the metal moves
The trade is split between formal exports and a much larger shadow market. Reuters reported in October 2025 that the UAE imported almost 90% of Sudan’s legal gold exports in the first half of that year, about 8.8 tonnes valued at roughly $840 million. The same report said traders and analysts also view the UAE as the ultimate destination for much of Sudan’s smuggled gold.
The unofficial routes are broader. SWISSAID said in November 2025 that the UAE imported 29 tonnes of gold directly from Sudan in 2024, alongside 27 tonnes from Egypt, 18 tonnes from Chad and 9 tonnes from Libya. SWISSAID said Chad and Libya function as exit points for gold controlled by the RSF, underscoring how quickly Sudanese supply can be relabeled once it crosses a border. The UAE says it has tightened responsible-sourcing rules and denies backing the RSF.
That is what makes the network so resilient. A bar dug from an artisanal pit in Sudan can pass through several hands, cross multiple frontiers and re-enter the market with cleaner paperwork than it had at the mine mouth.
Why the Sudan gold trade is so hard to stop
A May 2025 C4ADS report said both the SAF and the RSF are still funding operations with revenue tied to gold and mineral production, and argued that many of the most important upstream actors remain untouched by sanctions. That includes mine operators, tax nodes, logistics facilitators and suppliers of chemicals used in gold processing.
In other words, enforcement has often focused on the last visible transaction rather than the full chain. As long as artisanal output is weakly regulated, border enforcement is fragmented and neighboring transit points profit from the flow, the trade can adapt faster than the sanctions regime built to contain it.
Washington tried to raise the cost in January 2025, when the U.S. Treasury sanctioned Hemedti and several UAE-based firms, alleging that one targeted company bought Sudanese gold presumed to benefit the RSF and transported it to Dubai. The step mattered politically, but it also showed the scale of the problem: sanctioning a few traders is not the same as tracing thousands of small consignments back to mine sites scattered across a war zone.
This network predates the current war
None of this began in 2023. A 2016 Reuters report on U.N. experts described illicit gold mining as a source of cash in Darfur. A 2019 Global Witness investigation then traced part of the RSF’s financial network to gold, front companies and banking links in Sudan and the UAE. By early 2022, Reuters was reporting that Sudan’s authorities were leaning even more heavily on gold exports while officials estimated that far more metal was being smuggled abroad than officially recorded.
The difference now is scale and centrality. What was once a corruption problem and a militia-financing problem has become one of the main ways this war reproduces itself.
What would actually slow it down
Any serious effort to curb the trade has to go beyond naming a few buyers. It would require tighter scrutiny of mine ownership, clearer beneficial-ownership data for trading firms, more aggressive checks on refineries and transit hubs, and coordinated pressure on the neighboring states through which Sudanese gold is routinely rerouted.
Without that, Sudan’s gold trade will remain a battlefield supply chain disguised as a commodity business. In a war that has killed tens of thousands and displaced millions, every untracked shipment means more money for armed actors and less revenue for a country being hollowed out from within.
