Transcription
You arrive at Dubai International Airport. You are carrying a bag full of gold. I mean, full. Gold bars, jewelry, chunks of raw, unrefined gold. Full.
Everyone from your flight walks towards passport control, but you, you wheel your carry-on bag the other way towards the transit terminal. You sit down at a cafe, and a short while later, another traveler appears. He puts his bag down, picks yours up, and walks the other way. You finish your coffee, pick up his bag, and board the next flight back to where you just came from. You don't open the bag, but you know that inside is $2.5 million in cash.
I know it sounds like a bank heist, right? But this is how more than 400 tons of smuggled gold enters the UAE every year from Africa, worth around $30 billion. And here's the thing. Once that smuggled gold is melted, refined, and sold on the market in Dubai, it becomes 100% legal. As a new gold rush is taking over the world, driving up the price of gold to historic levels.
The UAE has strategically turned itself into a global hub for gold and gold laundering and has done this partly through financing civil war in Africa and in particular Sudan, where a brutal all-out war has waged for more than a year between the country's military and a rogue mercenary army that's figured out how to exchange gold for weapons. Now, the UAE's role in Africa is complicated. It's a weave of land purchases, regional influence, and access to the vital trade routes along the Red Sea. But the unfettered flow of gold has become the grease that oils its relationship with Sudan and its neighbors. A flow that continues unabated by war or political turmoil. So, how is this happening and how is it fueling the war in Sudan? My name is Muhammad Hassan and this is the big picture.
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Here's a graph that tells a story. It shows the price of gold over the last 50 years. What do you notice? Put simply, there is so much anxiety right now around the world and around the future of the global economy. The power of the petro dollar is waning with the Middle East increasingly unstable and more countries are looking to abandon the US currency altogether. In particular, I'm talking about China, India, and Russia. And so, central banks around the world are reacting and they've started looking for an independent currency that can secure their monetary reserves. Hence, we want the gold, sucker.
But there's one problem. Gold is not like the US dollar or even Bitcoin. It's real and it's heavy. That means it has to be physically moved from one place to another. If you want to buy gold, you have to go to where it's being sold. That's where Dubai comes in. It's had a gold souk since the early 1900s. But when the country had its oil boom in the 1970s, it started attracting people from all around the world. It built its airport, became a playground for the rich and famous, and its gold market grew and grew with a 0% tariff on bringing gold into the country. It quickly became the ideal place to import, refine, and sell. Today, the so-called city of gold is home to more than 20 gold refiners, and 7,000 gold traders. It imports more than a thousand tons of gold each year, and 2/3 of that comes from Africa.
But here is where the problem begins. Most of the uh important airports in Africa have regular flights to Dubai. So, it's also very convenient for traders to uh to go there. And when they get there, um, they have very easy access to companies that are willing to to buy the gold they they're carrying. A good part of this gold is carried with hand luggage. And once again, it's not being checked upon import. And thanks to corruption and other mechanisms. It's also sometimes not uh very often actually not um checked upon export in the African countries. So they can get away with controls at the borders. It works quite effectively.
Yuvan Schultz worked on a report earlier this year that looked at the gold transferred between Africa and the UAE. This is how much gold African countries are saying they're exporting to the UAE. But this is how much gold the UAE says it imported from African countries in 2022. There is more than 400 tons of gold missing there. According to Schultz, this is a clear sign that gold was smuggled.
But why? Despite the large gold reserves in Africa, many countries were caught off guard by the sudden spike in demand for gold over the last two decades, they didn't have the infrastructure, the equipment, or the laws in place to regulate gold mining on an industrial scale. That left a huge vacuum that was filled by artisanal and small-scale gold miners, or ASM. If you owned a piece of land that had gold on it, you could pay a private company to explore, mine, and transport that gold on your behalf. And of course, given what you're exporting is pretty valuable, that company probably needs to have its own form of security. And that's a polite way of saying a militia. And when you have an a very volatile situation or even an armed conflict like in Sudan, then of of course you have these armed groups that seek to take control of the mines and enrich themselves uh by trading the the yellow metal. And uh and that's typically what we're observing at at the moment in Sudan.
Sudan has been in a state of near constant war for decades and its former leader al Bashir fueled the conflict by empowering both the military as well as regional mercenary groups to help him quash anti-government rebellions in places like Darfur where the worst of the fighting was taking place. In 2011, the international community stepped in, splitting the country along ethnic and religious lines and forming South Sudan. The problem was 75% of Sudan's large oil reserves were in the south and overnight the government lost its single biggest source of income. Now Sudan always knew it had gold, but it had never really explored it before. It also had a big problem. After the war in Darfur, crippling US sanctions meant that Sudan couldn't just hire international mining companies to help it set up its industry. So instead, Al-Bashir handed out subsidized contracts to anyone who had the means to mine that gold. And most of those contracts went to generals and rebel leaders who'd helped him fight in Darfur. With so many actors and little to no official regulation, what should have become Sudan's burgeoning gold industry instead became ripe with corruption.
In 2017, reports started reaching the country's trade ministry that Khartoum airport and the port of Sudan were being used to smuggle our gold, mostly heading to the UAE. In one example, a 2-ton barrel of sand samples being loaded onto an Emirates airline flight was found to be largely made up of raw gold. In another instance, a sick woman was driven to the door of her flight in an ambulance. But the paramedic who was helping her get onto her flight was caught trying to sneak gold bars he'd hidden inside of an oxygen cylinder into her bag.
In 2018, Sudan's trade minister, Musa Karama, sounded the alarm. One of the biggest untapped mines in the country was Jabal in North Darfur. It quickly fell into the hands of Hamedti or Muhammad Hamdan Dagaloo, the leader of the rapid support forces. The RSF was a paramilitary group that grew out of the Janjaweed militia whose leaders had been charged by the international criminal court with committing dozens of war crimes in Darfur. Kamei set up a private firm to oversee the gold production Eljunade company and left his brother in charge of it. The revenue from the gold would allow the RSF to expand, buy weapons, and make Hamedti one of the richest and most powerful men in Sudan. The RSF is rich. They have business interests and business holdings that will I mean, he bailed out the National Bank. It is one rich family and they have their fingers in everything and all their businesses are based in the UAE.
During his rise to power, Hamedti began fostering close ties to the UAE, where most of his financial operations were based, as well as Russia, which had long been Sudan's main military supplier. Russia was gearing up for an invasion of Ukraine and had begun stockpiling gold to finance its war effort. Its Wagner mercenary group had been active in Sudan since 2014, helping secure mining operations and facilitating the smuggling of gold out of the country. When Omar Bashir was toppled by a popular uprising in 2019, that relationship continued to flourish. Just days after the start of the Ukraine invasion, a Russian cargo plane carrying boxes of cookies was inspected by Khartoum airport officials. Turns out they weren't cookies. It was actually a ton of pure gold. The flight was one of 16 that year, likely facilitated by Sudan's army and likely heading to a Russian military base in Syria.
Sudan's transitional government, now headed by the army chief Abdul Fattah al-Burhan and Hamedti as deputy, attempted to consolidate the gold sector. In 2020, it nationalized the lucrative Jabal Ahmmer mine and bought it from Hamedti's brother for $200 million, offering him an additional 33% of shares in Sudamin, the company set up to oversee gold mining. Not just that, but the RSF was assigned to secure the mine's operations, and this was a sign of what was to come. Despite promising to withdraw and allow the democratic process to take place, the Sudan armed forces overthrew the transitional government and seized control in 2021. But quickly with protests outraged by the coup taking over the country, the army struggled to control it. So they turned to Hamedti for help. The army couldn't hold on to security. So they invited the RSF into the capital to secure it for them because they never thought that the RSF would turn on them because of those miscalculations. They we were at that point where actually believed that he could wage war and he could win this war.
Remember Wagner? Now they had helped train RSF forces and actually recruited them to fight in another civil war in Libya a year earlier. Russia and the UAE, who were both deeply involved in Libya, were impressed by the RSF's fighting ability and began to see Hamedti as the man they believed could rule Sudan and the man who could secure the gold. 5 months earlier, the UAE had inked a deal to build Sudan, a $6 billion port that would act as a special economic zone between the two countries. So, it was very invested. The same year, the UAE imported 39 tons of gold directly from Sudan, valued at around $2 billion. But UN data suggests that another 20 tons of gold was smuggled from Sudan through Chad, Egypt, Ethiopia, and South Sudan. By the time war broke out again in April the following year, reports suggest that nearly all the gold that left Sudan's borders was flowing straight to Dubai.
This picture was taken in March 2023. It shows shaking hands with Emirati ruler Muhammad bin Zayed during a long trip that he took to Abu Dhabi. During that trip, he also met with the other man in the photo, Deputy Prime Minister Sheikh Mansour to discuss efforts to resolve the Sudan crisis. But as soon as Hamedti returned from that trip, he put his plan into action. On April 15, RSF forces entered Khartoum and attempted to take control. An all-out war was declared against the Sudanese armed forces and Hamedti made crystal clear his ambitions to take over.
The war devastated Sudan, killing over 15,000 civilians and leaving more than 10 million displaced. The United Nations has called the situation a humanitarian nightmare. With 26 million people, that's half of all Sudanese, at risk of acute hunger. This in a country that's still exporting billions of dollars worth of gold every year. We were dragged into this war. We had and we had warned about it as activists, as members of civic society. We had warned about this. That's why we were we were always chanting, you know, to the RSF needs to be dissolved, the army needs to be, you know, pushed back from politics and so on. But we weren't listened to. We were cast aside and and we're the ones who are now paying the price. You know, it's not the politicians, it's not the army generals, it's not the militia, it's us. You know, for for many of us, we've lost everything. And we can't even start from scratch because we're not being we're not being allowed to start from scratch. So, it's just this sense of where do we go from here? What do we do now? And and there's also that sense that no one actually cares. It's it's very disconcerting in a bit as in you know cuz I see people for example talking about Gaza the whole time. I'm all for it. But when you talk about Congo or Sudan or something else they're like oh but it's between you know it's between your own people. But they don't seem to understand that it's not between our two people. It's a proxy. We're we're being used as a proxy for other countries. And these other countries wield way too much power.
As the fighting in Sudan went on month after month, people started asking where is Hamedti getting all these weapons, all of these tanks and drones. Well, officials in Libya told us that the RSF allegedly had been armed on the Emirati behalf through Libyan proxies. The military shipments would be flown from Libyan airports to the Central African Republic, then driven overland into Darfur. Wagner Group, which has been working with the country's embattled government, had transported advanced weapons across the border into Sudan, including missiles and anti-aircraft systems. The same thing was happening in Chad where cargo flights from the UAE had been landing on a daily basis in a remote border town, supplying powerful weapons and drones, treating injured RSF fighters, and airlifting some of them to military hospitals in Abu Dhabi. In Uganda, the leadership holds strong ties with Hamedti's family and the UAE. In August 2023, this video was captured of a private plane belonging to a Ugandan company landing in Sudan's North Kordofan state. According to local sources, the plane had arrived from the UAE and was carrying Russian-made artillery rockets.
Last November, Sudan's army generals called out the Emirates directly. The UAE has denied these allegations, saying it was only providing humanitarian support and that it has consistently called for deescalation, a ceasefire, and the initiation of diplomatic dialogue. The RSF has also denied it's getting weapons from the UAE. They say that they have their own means of accessing and transporting arms. And while ceasefire talks start and stop without any progress, Hamedti has continued his diplomatic visits to African neighbors, painting himself as the man trying to save Sudan.
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We meanwhile people in Khartoum are sharing stories of RSF soldiers breaking into their houses with metal detectors specifically designed to find gold. Last year, the US, UK, and several EU countries put sanctions on private companies belonging to the RSF and the Sudan armed forces. They included the UAE based gold mining company, Aljunade, run by Hamedti's brother, who was also placed under sanctions. Then in January 2025, the Biden administration extended those sanctions to Hamedti himself, accusing the RSF of committing genocide in Sudan. But despite efforts by Sudan's government to hold the UAE responsible, the International Court of Justice threw out their case in May because the UAE had opted out of a key article in the genocide convention preventing them from being sued in the UN court.
It's a new form of land grab of colonialism. Call it what you want, but this is what's happening. And if you look at throughout the whole scale of Africa from the Sahel to the Red Sea, that's what's been happening. You know, you don't wage wars because you can't afford to wage a war, but you will pay someone to wage that war for you. In return, you will have access to things that in your own country you do not have. I mean, I'll be blunt. The UAE does not have one single gold mine in their country. Yet, they're the biggest dealers, wheelers and dealers in gold in the world right now. How can that be? It just, you know, 1 plus 1, you know, the numbers don't lie. You know, the the evidence is there and that's what's happening right now.
And you might be thinking, how can so much illegal gold flow into Dubai without anyone noticing? Well, that's because of a peculiar loophole in the way the gold market is regulated. Once gold is imported into Dubai, um it will be melted and refined. And through this process, um, gold will officially acquire a new origin. Its new origin will then be Dubai, even though it has been extracted from a mine in Sudan or perhaps in Mali or in Burkina Faso. And while the UAE has introduced new rules on gold sourcing in 2023, experts say these are only cosmetic. We already know from interviews that we've done with actors in the United Arab Emirates that the regulation has not been taken seriously. Without a serious way to figure out where it's coming from, how it's obtained, and who's really selling it, the city of gold has indeed become a global hub for gold laundering. And as the demand for gold and other precious metals continues to rise, the most powerful actors in the world are now engaged in a new scramble for Africa. A scramble that continues in peace and war, whatever the cost.
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Thank you for watching this episode of The Big Picture. If you want to know more about this story, about what's happening in Sudan, you can follow our extensive reporting at middleeast.net. You can also listen to this episode on all of our episodes wherever you get your podcast from. As always, we want to hear what you have to say. So, please leave your thoughts in the comments below. If you like this video, if you found it informative, please like it and share it and consider subscribing to our channel. And until next time, salam.
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