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.

And that provides an entirely new process for extracting gold that is almost entirely in the hands of the RSF and their Russian partners.

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.

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.

So the military controls or has a stake in 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.

Correct.

Correct.

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.

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.

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.