A collapsed gold pit in RSF-held West Kordofan kills at least 67 miners
The al-Zara mine at Nuhud sits in territory the Rapid Support Forces administer and that the army has named as its next objective. The only body counting the dead is a volunteer medical network.
The Associated Press reported on Wednesday that “a gold mine collapse in a remote area of Sudan has killed at least 67 people, a medical group and survivors said,” placing the site at the al-Zara mine near al-Nuhud in West Kordofan, territory AP describes as controlled by the Rapid Support Forces. The Sudan Doctors Network, which AP characterises as a medical group tracking the war, said the toll could rise as rescuers continued searching under rubble. By Wednesday afternoon a higher figure of at least 82 was circulating in aggregated coverage, with rescuers described as digging by hand through sandy soil; that number carries no visible attribution and The Files does not adopt it. No RSF or armed forces statement, and no independent verification of the site, the workforce or the cause, has surfaced. The counting authority here is a volunteer war-monitoring body, not a state or a UN agency.
The geography is the reason this matters beyond the toll. A Sudanese military source cited by the Arabic outlet Watan on 9 September described the army’s stated axis as an advance from North Kordofan into West Kordofan, naming Nuhud, Mazroub, al-Kuwai and Babanusa, on the argument that taking them could open the road to Darfur. That is a single unnamed source, and an intention rather than a movement. But it places the mine that collapsed this week inside the belt the army says it wants and the RSF currently holds. The gold file also runs through the Council: among the eight individuals designated this year, four were listed on 28 April 2026 on a French, British and American proposal — Al-goney Hamdan Dagalo, the RSF’s procurement director and brother of its commander, and three Colombian nationals described as facilitating RSF military operations.
Assessment: Artisanal pits are the part of Sudan’s war economy that never appears in a communiqué: they generate the revenue that buys drones and pays fighters, and the people inside them are not combatants and not counted. The collapse is being reported as an accident, and may be one; what it documents regardless is that production continues under RSF administration in a district the army has publicly marked for capture. Expect the toll to move again, and expect both belligerents to stay silent, because neither benefits from an inventory of who works the mines. Guterres’s warning about arms suppliers and this pit are the same ledger read from opposite ends.