Declan Walsh

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.

Then they use mercury to help separate out the gold.

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.

So that's what's known as artisanal gold mining, as opposed to industrial mining, which involves classically, as we would think, of a large plant with huge amounts of earth being moved around.

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.

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.

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.