Rescue crews in Sudan‘s West Kordofan state spent a second day pulling bodies from a collapsed gold mine on Wednesday, with the confirmed death toll climbing past 70 and an unknown number of miners still buried beneath loose, sandy soil.
The collapse struck a cluster of adjoining shafts at the al-Zaraa mine, near the town of al-Nuhud, late Tuesday. ATN has gathered that the shafts had been dug so close together that the failure of one pulled down several others in sequence, trapping workers who had gone underground with little more than hand tools. The Kordofan Observatory, a local monitoring group, put the confirmed toll at 70 as of Wednesday. A source inside the paramilitary Rapid Support Forces (RSF), which controls the territory, told AFP the figure was closer to 82 dead and 50 wounded, speaking on condition of anonymity because he was not authorized to brief journalists. Neither figure has been independently verified, and ATN could not confirm which count is more accurate.
No specialized rescue equipment had reached the site by Wednesday. Residents worked through the night with shovels and their hands, according to the Kordofan Observatory, struggling against soil that monitoring groups describe as unstable and prone to further collapse. “We don’t know how many more are still inside,” survivor Khair al-Sayyed Jabara said, describing an overnight search that he and fellow miners conducted without heavy machinery. A second miner who survived, Amin Suleiman, said the shafts had been dug in such close proximity that the ground gave way in a chain reaction, burying workers in adjacent pits who had no warning.
The Sudan Doctors Network, a Khartoum-based medical group tracking the emergency response, said Wednesday that search efforts were continuing and that the casualty count was likely to rise further. The group said the mine lacked basic protections for workers and blamed what it called institutional negligence for the scale of the disaster, calling on authorities in RSF-held territory to end unregulated mining. Local sources separately told Reuters that the high fatality count reflected the near-total absence of safety procedures or rescue capacity at the site — a pattern that has repeated at informal Sudanese mining operations for years.
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West Kordofan sits inside territory the RSF has held since fighting broke out with Sudan’s national army in April 2023, and gold extracted from mines across Darfur and Kordofan has become one of the paramilitary group’s primary sources of war financing. Sudan produced an estimated 70 tons of gold in 2025, according to figures cited by Finance Minister Gibril Ibrahim, yet only about 20 tons moved through official export channels — meaning the bulk of the country’s gold, more than 50 tons, left through smuggling networks that bypass the state treasury entirely. Separate intelligence estimates put the value of gold moved out of RSF-controlled Darfur and Kordofan in 2024 and early 2025 above $850 million, much of it flowing toward markets in the United Arab Emirates.
That informal economy has expanded even as the shafts that feed it have grown more dangerous. Collapses at unregulated or officially condemned mining sites have become a recurring feature of Sudan’s war years rather than an isolated event. A defunct mine in the same West Kordofan province collapsed in December 2021, killing at least 38 people after local miners returned to a site that had been sealed off by state authorities and then abandoned by the security forces guarding it. A separate collapse at a mine in South Kordofan in January of this year killed at least six people and left dozens missing, prompting the Sudan Doctors Network at the time to demand binding occupational safety standards for artisanal mining — a call that went unmet before Tuesday’s disaster.
Nearly two million Sudanese are estimated to work in the country’s traditional mining sector, much of it informal and concentrated in territory contested by the war between the army and the RSF. Sudan ranks among Africa’s largest gold producers, but oversight of the industry has collapsed alongside the broader state, and artisanal and parallel-market operations now account for more than 80 percent of total output, according to industry tracking cited by regional researchers.
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The Sudan Doctors Network’s Wednesday statement did not specify how many workers remained unaccounted for at al-Zaraa. It said mining under current conditions in RSF-held territory, absent safety standards or rescue capacity, “turn[s] mining into a direct threat to the lives of civilians.” The group called for the search to continue and for medical and logistical support to reach the site, and urged those controlling the area to halt unregulated mining operations. As of Wednesday evening, no timeline had been given for when the search would end.
