It started, as far as anyone can tell, with a single shaft giving way on Sunday. By the time word had spread and rescuers arrived at the al-Zara gold mine near Nuhud, in Sudan’s West Kordofan province, the collapse had already crawled sideways through the ground, one interconnected shaft after another folding in on itself. The site runs more than a kilometer across loose, sandy soil not exactly the kind of ground you want caving in on you while you’re thirty meters underneath it.
At least 67 people are confirmed dead. A local official told the AP that 82 bodies had actually been pulled from the rubble by Wednesday. Dozens more are still unaccounted for. The Kordofan Observatory, a monitoring group keeping its own tally, puts the number killed or missing north of 70.
There’s a detail from one survivor that’s hard to shake. Khairal-Sayed Gabara called the collapse “massive,” and said the miners had nothing no machinery to dig through dirt and stone at depths of over thirty meters. By some accounts, the entire rescue operation has been leaning on a single privately owned forklift. That’s it. That’s what stands between the people still trapped and the people trying to reach them.
Why nobody’s surprised
Sudan produces a lot of gold. It also, with grim regularity, loses people to mines that never should have been operating in the first place. The Sudan Doctors Network which has spent the last few years cataloguing casualties from the country’s civil war, and now apparently mine collapses too says al-Zara was an informal site, unregulated, without so much as basic protective equipment for the people working it.
This isn’t new. In 2021, a collapse at the nearby Darsaya mine killed at least 38 people a mine that had actually been shut down by the government for being unsafe, before miners drifted back in once the guards left. Fourteen more died in a 2023 collapse. Just this past January, six people were killed and a dozen injured when a mine in South Kordofan’s Abu Jubeiha area gave way. The names and locations change. The story doesn’t.
The war underneath the story
None of this happens in a vacuum. Sudan has been at war with itself since April 2023, when the paramilitary Rapid Support Forces turned on the national army. West Kordofan where al-Zara sits is RSF territory now. The broader conflict has killed something like 59,000 people by conservative estimates, though most people who track this stuff think the real number is considerably higher, and it’s pushed entire regions of the country toward famine.
Gold and the war are tangled together in a way that’s hard to untangle. UN-commissioned researchers have traced large volumes of it being smuggled out of RSF-held territory in Darfur and Kordofan, helping bankroll the paramilitary’s fight. So a mine like al-Zara ends up serving two purposes at once it’s how ordinary people scrape together a living, and it’s also, indirectly, fuel for the war that’s making their lives unlivable in the first place. Neither side of that equation has much reason to spend money on safety.
What happens now
Search crews are still working through the site, but without real equipment, it’s slow, and grim, and the death toll is almost certainly going to climb before it stops. Doctors’ groups have been asking for years for actual safety rules around Sudan’s informal mining sector training, oversight, equipment, something. Those calls haven’t gone anywhere yet, and there’s no particular reason to think this collapse changes that, not while the country is still fighting itself.
Until the war ends, or at least until some kind of order comes back to places like West Kordofan, this will probably happen again. The miners who go down into pits like al-Zara mostly don’t have better options they’re driven there by the same poverty and displacement the war has caused. The collapse is just one more risk stacked on top of everything else.