--:-- [Rachel Abrams, host, speaking]
--:-- Rachel Abrams: From The New York Times, I'm Rachel Abrams, and this is The Daily. What we're about to talk about next might be the most undercover story of human misery on planet Earth.
--:-- [Rachel Abrams continues]
--:-- Rachel Abrams: 20 years ago, a genocidal campaign in the Darfur region of Sudan shocked the world. Now, videos and images of new atrocities have captured global attention once more. About 150,000 people have been killed, some 12 million displaced, half of them children. As another bloody conflict has returned to the region.
--:-- [Rachel Abrams introduces her guest]
--:-- Rachel Abrams: This week, the people of Al-Fashir, beaten and threatened, fled for their lives from a murderous militia that films itself unleashing ferocious violence. Today, my colleague Declan Walsh on what has become the worst humanitarian conflict in decades and the precious metal that is fueling it.
--:-- [Rachel Abrams introduces the topic]
--:-- Rachel Abrams: It's Monday, November 10th. Declan, in recent weeks, there have been many horrific images coming out of Sudan, including what appear to be these very graphic execution videos. And this is all occurring as part of a civil war that you have been covering since the start. Tell me what has happened in Darfur over the past couple of weeks.
--:-- Declan Walsh: Well, after 18 months of a pretty brutal siege led by this paramilitary group, the Rapid Support Forces, which had been trying to seize control of this city called El Fasher. It was the last major urban center in Western Sudan that was beyond its control. It finally broke the siege and its troops seized the entire city. They expelled the Sudanese military from it. And what followed was really days of reports of atrocities against about a quarter million civilians who'd been trapped inside the city.
--:-- Declan Walsh: First, we saw these videos start to come out showing bodies piled in buildings, sometimes fighters executing wounded people lying on the ground, often quite casually. These videos, it must be said, are filmed by the fighters themselves as kind of trophies for the war, which is a pattern we've seen since the start of the Sudan war.
--:-- Declan Walsh: And since then, that's been added to by accounts from witnesses, from people who fled the city, from aid groups, and now from open source investigators who are using satellite images to try and determine what's been happening in El Fasher. And just last week, a new report from one of those groups saying that they had uncovered evidence that 80 people had been killed in one specific incident.
--:-- Declan Walsh: Others have found traces, in fact, from satellites of blood on the sands of the area around El Fasher. This is, of course, coming 20 years after another bloody conflict made Darfur basically a byword for human rights atrocities.
--:-- Declan Walsh: Can you talk to us about what is different this time?
--:-- Declan Walsh: That's right. I mean, 20 years ago, Darfur in fact became synonymous with the word genocide. And that's because at that time, there was an armed militia called the Janjaweed that was leading a lot of the killing in Darfur, a conflict that killed as many as 300,000 people.
--:-- Declan Walsh: The difference this time is that the Janjaweed has been replaced by another group called the Rapid Support Forces, effectively its descendant. And that group is better armed than ever before. In the past, the Janjaweed fought with horses and camels. This time, the rapid support forces have got armored vehicles, extremely sophisticated Chinese drones.
--:-- Declan Walsh: Last time, the Janjaweed were fighting alongside Sudan's army. This time, it's fighting against the army. And its ambitions are no longer limited to control of Darfur. It's part of this struggle for control of the entire country.
--:-- Declan Walsh: Since the war started over two years ago, at least 12 million people have been forced from their homes in Sudan. As many as 400,000 have been killed by some estimates. And about half the country is facing acute hunger with many instances of declared famine, mostly in the same region of Darfur.
--:-- Declan Walsh: And that's part of this civil war that's been raging in Sudan for the last two and a half years. and that war has led to what is now widely recognized as the world's largest humanitarian crisis.
--:-- Declan Walsh: These numbers are obviously staggering. You mentioned 400,000 people have been killed. And I want to talk about what is driving this conflict, which is something that you have spent a lot of time trying to report out.
--:-- Declan Walsh: And you're reporting one of Pulitzer actually this year. Tell us about what you have learned about why this conflict has gotten so bloody.
--:-- Declan Walsh: Well, when it started in April 2023, it looked quite simply like a power struggle between two rival generals at the top of Sudan's security forces. But very quickly, that conflict spread from the capital Khartoum across the country, engulfing Africa's third largest country.
--:-- Declan Walsh: And, you know, the next logical question that stemmed from that for me was how are they all funding it? Right. So follow the money really became a central part of our reporting.
--:-- Declan Walsh: And in part, that's what brought me to Khartoum earlier this year at a very dramatic moment, just as the city was changing hands. And what did the capital look like at that point after about, I guess, two years of war?
--:-- Declan Walsh: It was absolutely devastated. You know, previously, just to paint you a brief picture, this was a very proud city on the Nile. This is a country that had significant oil resources, deep gold resources. It had a growing middle class.
--:-- Declan Walsh: And now much of the city had been laid to waste. Entire neighborhoods of homes that had been looted, buildings destroyed. And in particular, the city center around the presidential palace. The presidential palace had become one of its biggest battlegrounds.
--:-- Declan Walsh: At one point we climbed into a sniper's nest beside the Nile River and overlooking that palace. And it was amazing to see how it had been absolutely reduced to rubble by the fighting.
--:-- Declan Walsh: And it wasn't just that. The entire city centre, many tall buildings, were also pocked with bullet marks and had been turned into fighting positions. It was really incredible to see how an entire city could be reduced to rubble by this two years of war Largely it must be said without being seen by the outside world
--:-- Declan Walsh: As the Sudanese military pushed into new areas, we followed them. And often came across residents who were emerging from their homes, kind of stunned. I was frightened. I ran away.
--:-- Declan Walsh: We talked to this one man who'd seen his neighbor get gunned down by RSF fighters. He heard the shooting, came out from his house. He wanted to know what was happening. So the militia of a man, he was shot by cold blood.
--:-- Declan Walsh: And others brought these stories about abuse, about starvation, about people being killed. At one point we found ourselves at a well that contained maybe a dozen bodies. And we were told that these were people who had been killed by fighters at a nearby checkpoint and dumped there.
--:-- Declan Walsh: What was it like to report in that kind of environment? And what kind of clues could you find to answer your question about what is funding and fueling all of this destruction?
--:-- Declan Walsh: Well, as we went through the city, we found ourselves in the abandoned villas of some of the RSF leaders. In one of them in particular, there were fighters lounging outside this empty swimming pool. The house had an internal elevator, you know, sort of markings of wealth that were such a contrast with the scenes we were seeing outside.
--:-- Declan Walsh: And so as we walked through this house, I also found this sheaf of papers that evidently had been abandoned by the Orsaf leaders as they left. And when we examined them more closely, they turned out to be corporate documents related to gold mines run by the same armed group in the south of the country.
--:-- Declan Walsh: And this was a really important clue into what was funding a lot of the fighting. We already knew that, you know, Sudan had a huge gold industry going back many years, but it was very difficult to get a sense of just how important it had become to these groups that were fighting for control and how much it was fueling the fight itself.
--:-- Declan Walsh: And here was this clue that really set us further along this track of trying to uncover what's really driving this destructive war in Sudan.
--:-- Rachel Abrams: It seems unusual that a war could be boiled down to something as simple as gold. It does remind me of the blood diamonds that fuel the conflict in Sierra Leone, but I'm curious if you see it this way.
--:-- Declan Walsh: Well, look, you're absolutely right. there is a strong parallel between the issue of blood diamonds that were so famous years ago from West Africa and the importance of gold in this conflict.
--:-- Declan Walsh: But, you know, Sudan's war is about many things. The fight between these two generals exposed this much deeper rift in the country, tensions that go back to the genocide 20 years ago in Sudan that were never really healed.
--:-- Declan Walsh: And now they've become mixed with ethnic problems, political problems, and focused inside this war that has engulfed the whole country. But on top of that, this is a country with a lot of rich agricultural land. It's got ports on the Red Sea. It's a huge country.
--:-- Declan Walsh: So there are many reasons to fight over it. But gold is the one thing that is easy to mine in the middle of the conflict. And that now, of course, is worth so much money. Gold prices are higher than they've ever been.
--:-- Rachel Abrams: Declan, can you talk a little bit about the gold economy, how much it's worth, if we have any idea, how the gold actually moves, and whose hands actually touch it along the way?
--:-- Declan Walsh: Well, look, most of it is smuggled, so we don't know exactly. But it's certainly, by most estimates, is worth billions of dollars every year. And it's a huge factor on both sides of the war, but particularly for the RSF.
--:-- Declan Walsh: And the leader of the group, his name is Lieutenant General Mohamed Hamdan, widely known as Hemati, is a commander who in many ways came to prominence as a result of gold. Back in 2017, his forces seized one of the largest gold mines in the country and that became a bedrock of the expansion of his military forces, but also of this sort of business empire that he built up that helped to make him such a power broker in the country.
--:-- Declan Walsh: How has this General Hemity managed to both fight a war and mine for gold at the same time? Like, how does that operation work exactly?
--:-- Declan Walsh: To be clear, his forces aren't mining the gold themselves. He relies on this enormous pool of people in Sudan who are willing to work in really terrible conditions to get the gold out of the ground. Very little of it in his areas are extracted through what you might think of as a classic industrial mine with lots of heavy machinery and so on.
--:-- Declan Walsh: What actually happens is you've got thousands, thousands, sometimes tens of thousands of people who are extracting this gold in really rudimentary ways, hacking it out of the ground, literally using pickaxes, pulling the ore out of the ground.
--:-- Declan Walsh: I've seen it firsthand myself when I visited some gold mining operations in Sudan a few years ago. And then they run it through this very rudimentary process to sift it using some pretty simple machines. Then they use mercury to help separate out the gold.
--:-- Declan Walsh: That's extremely dangerous. for people's health, obviously. And then eventually that gold is processed into sort of semi-pure bars. And then the tailings or the waste from that is further processed again and they extract the rest of the gold from that.
--:-- Declan Walsh: So that's what's known as artisanal gold mining as opposed to industrial mining, which involves classically, as we would think, a large plant with huge amounts of earth being moved around.
--:-- Declan Walsh: So in many ways, the RSF and General Hamdam have relied on the fact that Sudan is such a poor country and there are so many people who are available to do this really tough work to get that ore out of the ground and process it into gold.
--:-- Rachel Abrams: Given what we know about how desperate the situation has been in Sudan, how poor people are, obviously there's been a famine for many years, and how brutal the RSF has been, would you call it forced labor? Is it slave labor?
--:-- Declan Walsh: No, I would call it desperate labor. These are people who are turning to gold mining because frankly, there's no other source of income left. The war has devastated the country's economy.
--:-- Declan Walsh: This is a country that has a lot of very fertile land and had other sources of income. So you've seen these areas that are now almost entirely controlled by RSF fighters, sometimes with a pretty brutal regime over these gold mines, but people are flocking to it from across the region because that the only way they can get money to feed themselves or their families
--:-- Declan Walsh: But it's important to say that the RSF isn't doing this alone. Before the war, it was working with mercenaries from the Wagner Group. That's the Russian private military company that's become such a powerful force in this part of Africa. That's very closely tied to the Kremlin, right?
--:-- Declan Walsh: Yeah, very closely tied to the Kremlin. now known in some other places as Afrika Korps, but in this part of the world, they still call it Wagner. And so Wagner was working with the RSF before the war, helping to extract the gold from some of these areas or to secure the gold as they transported it out of the country.
--:-- Declan Walsh: A lot of it seems to have ended up ultimately in Moscow. And in the war itself, our reporting indicated that Wagner or the Russian mercenaries have continued to work with the RSF in parts of Darfur, particularly in this extremely remote area called Songo, where you've got dozens of these small gold mines dotted around the terrain where people are mining for gold, but also there is a central location where what they call the tailings, that's the sort of the waste from the initial pass on the gold, is processed.
--:-- Declan Walsh: And that provides an entirely new process for extracting gold that is almost entirely in the hands of the RSF and their Russian partners.
--:-- Rachel Abrams: So you've just laid out very comprehensively one side of the conflict. Tell us about how gold fuels the other side of the conflict.
--:-- Declan Walsh: Sudan's military is also deeply dependent on gold. It's a somewhat different structure on the other side of the country. over there in the eastern and northern Sudan, there are a handful of these large industrial style mines.
--:-- Declan Walsh: And in fact, production of gold, according to the official figures, has now ramped up to the point where more gold is being extracted over there than ever before, even during the relative peace before the war started.
--:-- Declan Walsh: So the military controls or has a stake and several of these huge mines. And the military, like the RSF, runs some of these mines in association with foreign players, including some Russian business people.
--:-- Declan Walsh: So Russia, in some ways, is supporting and potentially benefiting from both sides of this conflict.
--:-- Rachel Abrams: Declan, you have both sides of this conflict using gold to fund their war efforts. Obviously, any kind of commodity needs a buyer. Who is purchasing all of this gold?
--:-- Declan Walsh: Well, we found that nearly all of this gold, which has funded so much of the fighting and created so much misery and destruction in the country, goes to a single destination. And that's a country that has a deep interest in the war and could be the solution to ending it.
--:-- Rachel Abrams: Declan, you mentioned that all of this gold is going to a single destination. Where is it going and how did you report that out?
--:-- Declan Walsh: It's really hard to trace gold. You know, it can be melted down. It can be mixed with gold from other places. It doesn't have a sort of geological signature in the same way as diamonds do, for instance.
--:-- Declan Walsh: So I reached out to contacts in countries all around Sudan. We went through flight records, company files, in an effort to pull the thread of one single shipment of gold that was coming out of the war zone and ending up in international markets.
--:-- Declan Walsh: And that led us to this instance of a single shipment of about $25 million worth of gold that was mined in Darfur in the middle of the war zone, was smuggled out through South Sudan, neighboring country, and that ended up on this luxury jet, which had been chartered from an American company and flown hundreds of miles across into the Persian Gulf to the country of the United Arab Emirates.
--:-- Declan Walsh: which, as it turns out, is where 90% of smuggled gold from the continent of Africa ends up and nearly all of Sudanese gold is traded as well.
--:-- Rachel Abrams: So, okay, that's what it took to trace just one shipment. How much money overall are we talking about that's flowing from Sudan to the UAE?
--:-- Declan Walsh: We are talking about billions of dollars in gold. A lot of it is undeclared, so it's hard to know exactly how much. But there was a study a few years ago by a Swiss group, which found that in the decade from 2012 to 2022, $115 billion worth of undeclared gold from Africa had ended up in the UAE.
--:-- Declan Walsh: And certainly a decent proportion of that would have come from Sudan.
--:-- Rachel Abrams: It's a part of the UAE economy that often gets obscured by the country's image, which tends to focus around its gleaming skyscrapers or its place as a location for reality TV shows or a certain amount of glamour.
--:-- Declan Walsh: But, you know, the truth is that since the Emirates was a poor country seven or eight decades ago, it has had this gold industry. And that gold industry has increased in leaps and bounds in recent years.
--:-- Declan Walsh: And a lot of the gold that is traded there comes from Africa. And most of that gold, like the gold that comes from Sudan, is smuggled.
--:-- Rachel Abrams: And what have the Emirates said about their role in funding this conflict?
--:-- Declan Walsh: Well, the Emirates staunchly denies that it supports either side in the conflict. and in fact says that its main goal in Sudan is to work towards peace.
--:-- Declan Walsh: But that contrasts with what we found in our own reporting and what's been said by numerous other sources, including human rights groups, United Nations investigators, and even American lawmakers who've had intelligence briefings on this subject.
--:-- Declan Walsh: And all of that points to the Emirates supplying weapons to the RSF. Our reporting even showed that some of this smuggling has taken place under the flag of one of the most respected symbols in humanitarian aid, the Red Crescent and the Red Cross.
--:-- Declan Walsh: The Emiratis have supplied drones, they've supplied mercenaries to help the RSF, and they've also given political support to the group.
--:-- Declan Walsh: Last year, Hemeti, the leader of the RSF, did a tour of several African countries in which he met prime ministers and presidents and attempted to sort of burnish his image. And he did that on a Boeing jet, which had been supplied by the UAE.
--:-- Declan Walsh: At the same time it turns out the Emirates has an ownership stake in one of the largest government industrialized gold mines in the country That called the Kush mine
--:-- Rachel Abrams: In other words, there's evidence that the UAE is arming one side in the war while funding the other. So the UAE is hedging its bets here.
--:-- Rachel Abrams: We haven't talked about the United States and any role that the U.S. might have in ending this war. So far, the U.S. has been deeply invested in ending the wars in Ukraine and Gaza, but we have heard next to nothing about anything that the U.S. intends to do vis-a-vis Sudan.
--:-- Declan Walsh: Well, if I can pedal back just briefly to the previous administration, the Biden administration, there has certainly been a lot of U.S. concern, among some officials at least, about what's going on in Sudan.
--:-- Declan Walsh: The Biden administration recognized that the Emirates was a major factor in fueling the war and privately put pressure on the Emirates to try and stop that to little effect.
--:-- Declan Walsh: The Trump administration initially didn't seem to be very concerned with Sudan. But as things have gotten worse in recent months, particularly as the siege of the city, El Fasher, we talked about earlier, intensified, the Trump administration has suddenly become much more engaged in Sudan.
--:-- Declan Walsh: Since September, we've seen the U.S. bring together this diplomatic grouping, which it calls the Quad. And that is diplomats from the U.S., from Saudi Arabia, from the United Arab Emirates and from Egypt.
--:-- Declan Walsh: And they say that they are working towards a ceasefire in the country. It didn't lead to much initially, but at least provides a sort of framework for what it hopes could at least stop the fighting and the war for the first time in over two and a half years.
--:-- Rachel Abrams: But given how much money is flowing into the UAE in the form of gold from Sudan, and the fact that they won't even acknowledge that they have a role in the conflict, what incentive would the UAE have in trying to solve this?
--:-- Declan Walsh: Well, this is part of the problem. I mean, critics of this diplomatic initiative say, here's the US trying to bring peace to Sudan, but doing it through these talks with countries that are fueling either side in the war, particularly the UAE.
--:-- Rachel Abrams: And in fact, even when the UAE signed an agreement as part of the Quad in September denouncing foreign funding in the war, it was continuing to support the RSF and didn't seem to do anything to stop the terrible scenes that we've seen in Al-Fasher just over the last couple of weeks.
--:-- Declan Walsh: So it's really a very uncertain effort, but it has to be said that as these images have been coming out of Sudan, showing these atrocities, it is generating outrage and attention around the world.
--:-- Declan Walsh: And in fact, I've even heard recently from very senior American officials that President Trump himself hasn't spoken much about Sudan, but has privately told officials how appalled he was at some of the things he's been seeing and asking what the United States can do at this stage to try and stop it.
--:-- Rachel Abrams: This war in Sudan started in 2023, and it has gotten so much less attention than the war in Gaza, which also started at the end of 2023. And we may now be talking about Sudan because there is a ceasefire, a fragile ceasefire, but a ceasefire nonetheless in Gaza.
--:-- Rachel Abrams: And I wonder whether these two things are related, that there is now room and space and attention to devote to this conflict in Sudan. Do you see it that way?
--:-- Declan Walsh: I mean, look, one of the most striking things about this war in Sudan is just how little attention it's had, despite the immense destruction and human suffering that it has brought.
--:-- Declan Walsh: But what's changed recently I think is that we're seeing these images coming out as there have been in Gaza that captured people's imaginations because they are so horrified with what they've been seeing but the question now is when those images do go away whether public attention or even global attention will also wane.
--:-- Declan Walsh: And with it, even the small amount of momentum that exists now towards finding a solution to the war.
--:-- Rachel Abrams: Declan, thank you so much.
--:-- Declan Walsh: Thank you, Rachel.
--:-- Rachel Abrams: We'll be right back.
--:-- Rachel Abrams: Here's what else you need to know today. After a procedural vote Sunday night in the U.S. Senate, the federal government appears poised to end its record-breaking shutdown.
--:-- Rachel Abrams: The deal saw a handful of members of the Democratic caucus join Republican senators to advance a package of bills that would fund the government through January 30th.
--:-- Rachel Abrams: In addition, the deal would fund programs related to agriculture, military construction, and legislative programs for nearly a year.
--:-- Rachel Abrams: It would also require the government to rehire federal workers who were laid off during the shutdown.
--:-- Rachel Abrams: The deal, which Democratic leader Chuck Schumer did not support, includes no guarantee on extending the health insurance subsidies that have been at the center of Democrats' demands.
--:-- Rachel Abrams: The funding package must now be fully debated and passed by the Senate and approved by the House before the government can reopen.
--:-- Rachel Abrams: And two of the BBC's top officials resigned abruptly on Sunday following a report suggesting that a program made by the public service broadcaster had misleadingly edited a speech by President Trump.
--:-- Rachel Abrams: The resignation of the officials, the BBC's director general and its chief executive officer for BBC News, came several days after the Daily Telegraph published details of a leaked internal memo, which argued that a documentary the broadcaster aired had juxtaposed comments by the president in a way that made it appear he'd explicitly encouraged the January 6th Capitol riot.
--:-- Rachel Abrams: Today's episode was produced by Muj Zady, Nina Feldman, and Sydney Harper, with help from Jessica Chung and Ricky Nowetski.
--:-- Rachel Abrams: It was edited by Michael Benoit with help from Chris Haxel. Contains original music by Marian Lozano and was engineered by Alyssa Moxley.
--:-- Rachel Abrams: That's it for The Daily. I'm Rachel Abrams. See you tomorrow.
