Declan Walsh

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.

And that led us to this instance of a single shipment of about $25 million worth of gold that was mined in Darfur in the middle of the war zone, was smuggled out through South Sudan, neighboring country.

And that ended up on this luxury jet, which had been chartered from an American company and flown hundreds of miles across into the Persian Gulf to the country of the United Arab Emirates.

Which, as it turns out, is where 90% of smuggled gold from the continent of Africa ends up and nearly all of Sudanese gold is traded as well.

We are talking about billions of dollars in gold.

A lot of it is undeclared, so it's hard to know exactly how much.

But there was a study a few years ago by a Swiss group, which found that in the decade from 2012 to 2022, $115 billion worth of undeclared gold from Africa had ended up in the UAE.

And certainly a decent proportion of that would have come from Sudan.

It's a part of the UAE economy that often gets obscured by the country's image, which tends to focus around its gleaming skyscrapers or its place as a location for reality TV shows or a certain amount of glamour.

But, you know, the truth is that since the Emirates was a poor country before

Seven or eight decades ago, it has had this gold industry, and that gold industry has increased in leaps and bounds in recent years.

And a lot of the gold that is traded there comes from Africa, and most of that gold, like the gold that comes from Sudan, is smuggled.

Well, the Emirates staunchly denies that it supports either side in the conflict and in fact says that its main goal in Sudan is to work towards peace.

But that contrasts with what we found in our own reporting and what's been said by numerous other sources, including human rights groups, United Nations investigators, and even American lawmakers who've had intelligence briefings on this subject.

And all of that points to the Emirates denying

supplying weapons to the RSF.

Our reporting even showed that some of this smuggling has taken place under the flag of one of the most respected symbols in humanitarian aid, the Red Crescent and the Red Cross.

The Emiratis have supplied drones, they've supplied mercenaries to help the RSF, and they've also given political support to the group.