Egypt’s Gold Raid Swept Up Sudan’s Border Miners

Egyptian forces detained 223 people near the Sudan border in June 2026 after airstrikes hit informal gold camps in the south-east. The military’s public tally listed 87 Egyptians and 136 foreigners, 14 vehicles, radios, cash, and unlicensed guns, and it said some people who had entered without papers turned themselves in and were sent home.

The statement never named a mine, a death toll, or a nationality. The people in those camps were already on a wartime gold route that Cairo polices on the ground and absorbs in the market.

The Army Statement Left Out the Airstrikes

Dawn on June 16, 2026, Ahmed, a 20-year-old miner from western Sudan, was asleep in the upper flood channel at Jabal al-Uqaydat, north of the Halayeb Triangle, when a strike hit the lower channel. He filmed the next pass. “Egyptian planes, guys,” he said on the clip he later shared.

Eight miners who were in the hills that week said the aircraft hit the two main pits at Shamal al-Wadi, on ground Egypt administers, then a ground force moved in. Further strikes hit Jabal al-Ahmar the next day. Mohamed Ali, a miner in the same belt, said the raids covered a wider area, and with aircraft, than the pushbacks the camps had seen before.

A Sudanese medical source working the border later put the dead at 23, after early social media counts ran much higher and then came down as missing men turned up in detention. Al-Sadig al-Gaily, who fled the same morning, said 5,000 to 7,000 workers ran for nearby towns, caves, and the open desert. Two senior Egyptian officials later confirmed airstrikes on Sudanese groups that had crossed to mine without licenses.

The armed forces account of the raids, issued on June 22, 2026, described a Southern Military Zone operation with the Interior Ministry against “criminal hotbeds” used for drugs, weapons, illegal gold mining, and illegal immigration. It said the hubs posed a direct threat to national security and hurt economic stability, the investment climate, and development. It did not mention aircraft, Jabal al-Uqaydat, or the dead.

THE WEEK THE CAMPS EMPTIED

1. June 16, 2026: Dawn airstrikes hit Shamal al-Wadi at Jabal al-Uqaydat after days of reconnaissance flights and a ground build-up from the Red Sea coast.
2. June 17, 2026: Further strikes hit the Jabal al-Ahmar mine. Miners and families lose contact with men still in the hills.
3. June 22, 2026: The armed forces announce 223 arrests, 87 of them Egyptian and 136 foreign, and say some people who entered without papers surrendered and were sent home.

Video from the pits showed people running and smoke on the ridgeline. The blotter language that followed treated a resource raid as a police job, which kept a disputed triangle and a death toll out of the official record.

Who the 136 Foreigners Were

The military did not name the foreigners’ countries. Security officials said hundreds of Sudanese had been held on accusations they entered without papers to prospect in the south-eastern desert and mountains, and that as many as 50,000 Sudanese prospectors, including members of smuggling gangs, had gathered near the border.

That 50,000 figure is an officials’ claim, not a headcount from the raids. The 223 people referred to the courts are the firm tally. A separate stream of men who surrendered at checkpoints was sent home, the statement said, after “appropriate humanitarian assistance.”

Miners swept up after the strikes were gathered, moved to Edfu, then Aswan, and put across at the Argeen crossing into Sudan’s Northern State, according to the same medical source and to Mohamed Ali, who later heard from men taken out in military vehicles. Ahmed and miner Adam Ishag said armored units then shut both Shamal al-Wadi camps. Ishag said the two sites were largely deserted.

The workers have a name in the Eastern Desert. They are the dahhaba, informal prospectors scattered through the Red Sea mountains, Halayeb, Shalateen, and Aswan. Egyptian MP Samira El Gazzar has put the number of unlicensed mills in the southern mountains at about 2,500, employing thousands of prospectors from Egypt, Sudan, and other African countries who cross the same rough border ground.

WHAT THE RAIDS TOOK

• Vehicles: 14 of mixed types, plus wireless radios used to coordinate the camps and the roads out.
• Cash: Sums in Egyptian pounds and foreign currency, seized with the mining kit rather than as a separate smuggling case file in the statement.
• Arms: Unlicensed weapons and ammunition, which the military folded into the same “criminal hubs” charge sheet as the gold gear.
• Mine kit: Large amounts of equipment used in unlicensed prospecting for mineral wealth, without a public inventory of mills, detectors, or ore.

Egyptian replies to the strike videos treated the camps as armed trespassers who had already killed an officer and pushed Egyptian workers off sites. The miners described aircraft over sleeping quarters and shafts. Both can be true in a belt where tribal levies, smugglers, and unlicensed mills sit on the same ground.

Sudan’s Gold Already Runs North

Sudan’s war, which began in April 2023, split the country’s gold map. The Sudanese Armed Forces hold the big producing states that share a border with Egypt, Northern, River Nile, and Red Sea. The Rapid Support Forces hold much of Darfur and West Kordofan. Artisanal and small-scale mining supplies most of the metal, and most of it leaves through unofficial channels.

Researchers Ahmed Soliman and Suliman Baldo, writing for Chatham House, found that unofficial and smuggled gold exports to Egypt account for about 60 percent of that output from the three northern states. Central Bank of Sudan figures recorded only $16 million in gold exports to Egypt in 2024, 1 percent of Sudan’s official gold exports. The same research put the unofficial flow at more than 100 kg a day, more than 60 tonnes across 2023 and 2024.

It is estimated that unofficial and smuggled gold exports to Egypt account for about 60 per cent of the production from Northern, River Nile and Red Sea states.

Ahmed Soliman and Suliman Baldo, Gold and the War in Sudan, Chatham House

Port Sudan authorities reported 64.36 tonnes of gold output in SAF-held areas in 2024 and 27.96 tonnes of official exports, worth nearly $1.6 billion. Output in those areas had fallen to 23.2 tonnes in 2023, against a pre-war national figure of 87 tonnes in 2022. A UN Panel of Experts on the Sudan put extraction in RSF-held areas at around 10 tonnes in 2024, worth $860 million, a figure the Chatham House paper notes is disputed.

OFFICIAL BOOKS AND THE NORTHERN FLOW

Several prices pull the metal north. In May 2023 Egypt exempted gold imports from customs duties and tax, including unprocessed gold, regardless of quantity or how it was obtained. In October 2024 a gram of 21-carat gold sold for about $85 in Egypt and $55 to $60 in Sudan. Traders also skip Port Sudan taxes that had been 28 percent and later 20 percent, paying around 10 percent in fees to move metal to Cairo, with reported profits of 60 to 80 percent on those runs.

The return traffic is fuel, mercury, cyanide, and food. After Egypt required visas of Sudanese travellers in June 2023, the same networks moved people as well as metal, with some fares paid in grams of gold. Egypt’s economy takes in the gold, the fees, and the retail spend of displaced Sudanese families. The June raid hit the labour on that route, not the route’s official books.

Halayeb, Shalateen and a Sovereignty Message

Jabal al-Uqaydat sits about 50 km inside territory Egypt administers, Mohamed Ali said, in a mining economy that starts in Sudan and runs 50 to 70 km across the line. Sudanese maps still place some of the pits in Sudan. Cairo treats them as part of the ground adjoining Halayeb and Shalateen, which Egypt has administered since the mid-1990s while Sudan claims the triangle as part of Red Sea State.

One of the senior Egyptian officials said the strikes carried a message that Egypt will not give up sovereignty over the Halayeb and Shalateen Triangle, aimed at audiences in the region and inside Sudan. Officials also described a fear that informal mining and the armed smugglers around it could harden into groups that complicate both Sudan’s war and security in southern Egypt.

South of the triangle, in Sudan’s Ratag locality, the boom built a market town with almost no regular army presence. Miner Osman al-Siddig said the only official Sudanese armed group on that stretch was a small joint-force contingent of no more than seven combat vehicles, focused on levies rather than security. In mid-June, competition between Rashaida and Bishari groups over gold ground and markets moved toward armed mobilisation, close enough that Red Sea State’s security committee called an emergency meeting on June 17.

That is the belt the 136 foreigners were in, whether or not the statement wrote Sudan on the page. A raid framed as drugs, guns, and illegal immigration sits on a sovereignty dispute and a labour pool the war pushed north.

The Concessions Were Already Occupied

The investment climate the military said it was protecting is not an empty desert. A source at the Egyptian Mineral Resources and Mining Industries Authority said investors in most of the Eastern Desert cannot claim their blocks because prospectors are already mining there, including on licensed ground. That, the source said, is why the military has been active along the whole mountain range, not only at the Sudan line.

The state’s tool for folding the dahhaba into official metal is the Shalateen Mineral Resources Company, set up to legalize informal mining and collect the state’s share. Stakes sit with the mineral authority at 35 percent, the National Service Projects Organization at 34 percent, the National Investment Bank at 24 percent, and the Egyptian Company for Mineral Resources at 7 percent. A petroleum ministry map from 2020 showed Shalateen concessions in the disputed triangle, on stretches that straddle Egyptian and contested ground.

Two months before the June strikes, miners in the Egyptian-administered zone fought off “the Egyptian mining company,” the common name for Shalateen, after it tried to take production sites by force, Osman al-Siddig said. The miners organised, and the company pulled back. After the airstrikes, Ahmed said the armored units moved toward that same company presence. Clearing the pits and collecting the state’s share are the same campaign seen from opposite ends of the wadi.

THE METAL EGYPT ALREADY COUNTS

• Sukari, 2025: 500,000 ounces, up 4 percent from 481,000 ounces in 2024, at a total cash cost of $783 an ounce, according to AngloGold Ashanti’s 2025 earnings.
• National output: About 531,000 ounces in fiscal year 2025-2026, with a draft plan aiming at 557,000 ounces in 2026-27 and 800,000 ounces a year by 2030.
• Shalateen, 2026: More than 850 kg in the first nine months, up about 9.6 percent, with deliveries to the Central Bank of Egypt up about 75 kg from around 775 kg a year earlier.

AngloGold Ashanti, which bought Centamin for $2.2 billion in November 2024 and shares Sukari Gold Mines 50-50 with the Egyptian state, has talked about putting about $400 million into Egypt in 2026, after about $250 million in 2025, and lifting Sukari by about 70,000 ounces to 570,000 ounces within two years. Lifetime output at the mine has already passed 6.8 million ounces. The June raids were sold as cover for that kind of money. The ground those companies want still had people on it.

A Second Sweep Moved Through the Eastern Desert

On August 2, 2026, the armed forces said they had opened a second phase of the Eastern Desert campaign against unlicensed gold mining, with the civil police, building on the June arrests of 87 Egyptians and 136 foreigners. The first statement’s language about national resources and the rule of law came back without a new public arrest tally.

In May 2026 the mineral authority signed a contract with Spain’s Xcalibur for an aerial geological survey of the country’s main rock belts, including gold. El Gazzar has said rents on exploration ground have been cut by up to 60 percent, and that new tenders in the Eastern Desert and the Halayeb and Shalateen triangle are meant to bring in foreign operators. The same MP has described army and border-guard operations around Jabal Iqat and Shalateen’s concession areas as the security half of that pitch.

Shalateen’s own 2026 lift came from higher output on its concession partnerships and from expanding small-scale mining in the Eastern Desert, a company source said, with the Iqat mine in the mix. It has talked about opening more ground to licensed informal miners so more metal hits official channels, and about a 2030 target of around six tonnes a year. Third-quarter deliveries were around 260 kg, about 31 percent of the nine-month total, with 250 to 280 kg expected in the fourth quarter.

On September 28 and 29, 2026, Shalateen appeared as a gold sponsor of the Egypt Mining Forum in Cairo, on a bill that also had AngloGold Ashanti talking up Sukari. The June camps at Shamal al-Wadi were empty. The metal the state wants still comes, in part, from the same class of miner the aircraft and the 223-person blotter were used to clear.

Frequently Asked Questions

What Is the Halayeb and Shalateen Triangle?

It is the Red Sea border land that includes the towns of Halayeb, Shalateen, and Abu Ramad, which Egypt has administered since the mid-1990s while Sudan still maps it as part of Red Sea State. Jabal al-Uqaydat, the June strike zone, sits north of that triangle on ground Cairo treats as its own; Sudanese administrative maps have placed some of the same pits inside Sudan, which is why a mining raid there doubles as a sovereignty claim.

When Did Egypt Lift Customs Duties on Gold Imports?

In May 2023 the government exempted gold imports from customs duties and tax, including unprocessed gold, with no cap on quantity and no test of how the metal was obtained. That rule, still in force through the war years, is one reason traders move Sudanese output into Cairo rather than through Port Sudan, where taxes were 28 percent and later 20 percent.

Who Owns the Sukari Gold Mine?

Sukari Gold Mines is a 50-50 joint operating company of AngloGold Ashanti and the Egyptian state. AngloGold took its stake through the $2.2 billion purchase of Centamin in November 2024. The pit near Marsa Alam produced 500,000 ounces in 2025 and has yielded more than 6.8 million ounces since commercial production began in 2010.

How Much Gold Does Shalateen Aim to Produce by 2030?

The state-backed company has set a target of around six tonnes a year by 2030, against more than 850 kg in the first nine months of 2026. It has also pointed to a gold and silver processing complex in Aswan, planned with the mineral authority, as the plant that would pull more informal output into official bars and central-bank deliveries.