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Declan Walsh

๐Ÿ‘ค Speaker
427 total appearances

Appearances Over Time

Podcast Appearances

The Daily
The Gold Rush Behind a Civil War

As many as 400,000 have been killed by some estimates.

The Daily
The Gold Rush Behind a Civil War

And about half the country is facing acute hunger with many instances of hunger.

The Daily
The Gold Rush Behind a Civil War

declared famine mostly in the same region of Darfur.

The Daily
The Gold Rush Behind a Civil War

And that's part of this civil war that's been raging in Sudan for the last two and a half years.

The Daily
The Gold Rush Behind a Civil War

And that war has led to what is now widely recognized as the world's largest humanitarian crisis.

The Daily
The Gold Rush Behind a Civil War

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.

The Daily
The Gold Rush Behind a Civil War

But very quickly, that conflict spread from the capital Khartoum across the country, engulfing Africa's third largest country.

The Daily
The Gold Rush Behind a Civil War

And, you know, the next logical question that stemmed from that for me was how are they all funding it?

The Daily
The Gold Rush Behind a Civil War

So follow the money really became a central part of our reporting.

The Daily
The Gold Rush Behind a Civil War

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.

The Daily
The Gold Rush Behind a Civil War

It was absolutely devastated.

The Daily
The Gold Rush Behind a Civil War

You know, previously, just to paint you a brief picture, this was a very proud city on the Nile.

The Daily
The Gold Rush Behind a Civil War

This is a country that had significant oil resources, deep gold resources.

The Daily
The Gold Rush Behind a Civil War

It had a growing middle class.

The Daily
The Gold Rush Behind a Civil War

And now much of the city had been laid to waste.

The Daily
The Gold Rush Behind a Civil War

Entire neighborhoods of homes that had been looted, buildings destroyed, and in particular the city center around the presidential palace.

The Daily
The Gold Rush Behind a Civil War

The presidential palace had become one of its biggest battlegrounds.

The Daily
The Gold Rush Behind a Civil War

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.

The Daily
The Gold Rush Behind a Civil War

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.

The Daily
The Gold Rush Behind a Civil War

It was really incredible to see how an entire city could be reduced to rubble by this two years of war.