Sudan’s gold pits are now being struck from the air by both sides and, reportedly, by Egypt
A drone strike on the Bajoun artisanal mine on Friday is the third attack on gold extraction or the people who work it in ten days, in a war whose liquidity runs through the pits.
RSF drones struck the Bajoun artisanal gold mine in South Kordofan on Friday 16 October, damaging processing facilities with no casualties reported, according to Sudan Tribune, which sourced the account to unnamed officials — that is, SAF-side local authorities — under a Gedeir dateline. Radio Tamazuj carried the same event under a Qadeer dateline; the discrepancy is unresolved and no RSF comment has surfaced. It follows the killing of at least 31 civilians prospecting for gold near the Abu Shandi displacement camp area at Wad al-Mahi in Blue Nile on 9 October. The Sudan Doctors Network blamed the RSF and called for an international investigation; the Council on Foreign Relations' conflict tracker states that the toll could not be independently verified. Within ten days, in two states, both belligerents have been accused of hitting the same category of target.
The third strand runs to the border. Radio Dabanga reported that Burhan ordered an investigation on 12 October into the deaths of Sudanese miners near the Egyptian frontier; that two Egyptians were killed in Khartoum on 13 October as that investigation proceeded; and that Minni Minawi urged restraint on 15 October as the fallout widened across Argeen, Ashkeet and Wadi Halfa. Dabanga published a photograph dated 13 October captioned as artisanal miners in North Wadi sheltering from a warplane. This chain is substantially single-outlet in what The Files could verify, and the reprisal killing is the most serious claim in it; it should be treated as unconfirmed. The sequence began eight days after the four-way New Alamein summit on 4 October that brought Egypt, Sudan, Eritrea and Somalia together.
Assessment: Gold is the war’s working capital, which is why extraction sites have moved from economic asset to recognised target. The Egypt strand is the more consequential one: Cairo is the army’s principal regional patron, and Burhan’s response to Sudanese miners reportedly killed by Egyptian forces was an investigation, not a protest. That ranking tells you where the dependency sits. Treat the Khartoum reprisal claim as unverified until a second outlet carries it, and treat officials-sourced mine reporting from either side as a belligerent’s account of its own damage. The sanctions research published on 13 October points at the overseas commercial networks; those are harder to strike than a pit.