Egyptian Army Sweeps Up Gold Miners Near Sudan

Egypt’s army said Thursday it arrested 151 Egyptians and 540 foreign nationals during an operation against illegal gold miners near the border with Sudan. The arrests put the state’s armed forces at the center of a crackdown on people mining gold in a contested border region.

The Army Sets the Terms

Army spokesman Ahmed Etman said more than 6,000 others surrendered before the operation began. That’s the army’s account of what happened before its forces moved in. The base report gives no further detail about who surrendered, the circumstances, or what happened to them afterward. The scale is striking: alongside those the army says it arrested, thousands more reportedly surrendered to the institution conducting the operation.

The army also released images it said showed illegal gold miners near the border. The military presented those images, but the report offers no independent confirmation of what they depict. In the official account, the army calls the miners “illegal”; neither the people arrested nor those in the images get a quoted voice. They’re absent from the account in their own words.

Deadly Force and a Denial

At least 72 gold miners died in October when airstrikes hit a gold mine on the Sudan-Egypt border. A rights organisation accused the Egyptian air force of carrying out the attack. The report doesn’t name the organisation or explain what evidence it relied on, leaving its accusation and the army spokesman’s response as distinct claims.

At a press conference, Etman appeared to deny that civilians had been targeted. “Operations were conducted based on precise and confirmed intelligence, complete with coordinates of weapons and ammunition depots, which were targeted using armed unmanned aerial vehicles (drones), no civilians were targeted,” he said. His statement describes military intelligence and drone strikes, but it wasn’t clear whether he meant the deadly October strike. That question remains unresolved. The official denial doesn’t answer it.

The sequence matters. The army announced arrests in a border operation; an earlier airstrike on a gold mine killed at least 72 miners and prompted an accusation against the air force. The report presents people affected as arrested miners, people who surrendered, and people killed. The state speaks through its spokesman and its images. It’s a stark imbalance.

Gold, War and Smuggling

According to the article, gold has played a central part in Sudan’s war. The insurgent paramilitary Rapid Support Forces smuggles thousands of tons of gold from the Darfur and Kordofan regions to fund itself. A U.N. Panel of Experts Report in 2024 said more than 50% of gold mined in Sudan was smuggled out of the country.

That context links the border crackdown to a wider contest over gold and the resources that fund armed power. But the report gives no account from the miners, details about their working conditions, or information about community-organized responses or assistance. It names no electoral or legislative proposal as a solution, either. What it does show is an army announcing mass arrests, a military account of surrender, a deadly strike under dispute, and a gold trade tied to armed conflict. The people at the bottom of that chain are those arrested, pushed out of the account, or killed.