An alleged air strike on a gold mining site in northern Sudan has killed at least 72 workers, according to a rights group, highlighting the severe security vacuum along the country’s increasingly lawless border with Egypt. The Khartoum-based rights group Emergency Lawyers accused the Egyptian military of targeting civilian miners in the North Wadi area of Jabal al-Uqaydat, a mountainous border area between Sudan and Egypt. Egypt has not commented on the incident.
Images allegedly from the site and shared by rights monitors showed chaotic scenes, with bodies wrapped in funeral shrouds. The border region between Sudan and Egypt has a long history of tensions which continue to this day. In 1899, the British and Egyptian governments designated the 22nd parallel north as the dividing boundary between Sudan and Egypt on maps.
But the absence of physical border demarcation along this line, coupled with the area’s gold wealth, has left the area open to dispute and lawlessness. Abdul Kareem Al-Almin Ahmed, a specialist in Egypt-Sudan border affairs, said the Sudanese territorial borders have long been subject to historical negligence which still goes on. This must be followed by the immediate physical demarcation of border points in this region and along the entire border strip, in addition to establishing border observation posts along the entirety of the borders.” In June, another artisan gold mine in the Jabal al-Uqaydat region was targeted by drones and artillery, with a number of people killed.
The Egyptian army said it carried out an operation “within Egyptian territory” and detained 223 people. Egyptian security forces continue to conduct sweeps of the border to combat what they described as illegal migration, drug smuggling and illegal mining. Egypt and Sudan have a long history of border tensions stretching back to the colonial period which goes beyond the Jabal al-Uqaydat area.
The Halaib Triangle, a 20,580sq km area on the African coast of the Red Sea, has been a flashpoint between Egypt and Sudan for over a century. The dispute stems from conflicting colonial-era maps. An 1899 agreement between Britain and Egypt regarding Sudan and parts of Libya placed the triangle within Egyptian political boundaries.
But a 1902 British administrative decree handed control to Khartoum because the area was closer to the Sudanese capital. The triangle, home to the Bisharin tribe, is renowned for its fertile lands and rich mineral deposits, including uranium, granite, copper and gold. Following clashes between the two militaries on the border in the 1990s, Sudanese forces withdrew from the area in 2000 and Cairo has maintained effective control over the territory since.
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