Declan Walsh

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.

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.

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.

And the leader of the group, his name is Lieutenant General Mohammed Hamdan, widely known as Hemeti.

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.

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.

What actually happens is you've got 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.

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.