Hunger, Gold, and Mercenaries: Sudan’s Invisible War

 By Dr Abdelnasser Solum Hamed

 

In Sudan’s Darfur region, starvation has been weaponized. The RSF funds its war through smuggled gold and foreign mercenaries, while the world looks away. This conflict will not stay contained.

 

 

In Sudan’s besieged city of El Fasher, hunger has become deadlier than bullets. Families are not just threatened by shelling, but by the slow death of empty stomachs — a strategy designed to break an entire population.

 

 

At dawn, the hum of drones has replaced the call to prayer. Children mimic the sound in their games, while their parents queue for hours in bread lines that rarely deliver bread. In Zamzam camp, a displaced woman whispered: “I no longer pray for peace. I pray for food.”

 

 

This is not collateral damage. In Darfur, starvation is deliberate strategy.

 

 

Darfur has become less a battlefield than a global marketplace of mercenaries. Fighters flow in from Chad, Niger, Mali, and Libya, men scarred by other wars. In Kutum, a young man told me bitterly: “They fight here as if they own the land. But when they die, they are buried in our soil, not theirs.”

 

 

The RSF’s reach now stretches beyond Africa. According to investigative reports, it has increasingly relied on private security companies to bring in fighters from Latin America, particularly Colombia. These men, reportedly paid up to $2,000 a month, carry combat experience from years of counterinsurgency. For the RSF, they are hired muscle. For Sudanese civilians, they are strangers enforcing someone else’s war.

 

This is not a local war. It is global business.

 

 

If mercenaries are the muscle, gold is the currency. Sudan is Africa’s third-largest producer, with nearly 100 tons mined annually. Yet as much as 80 percent is smuggled out, costing the state up to $4 billion a year.

 

 

After the loss of oil revenues in 2011, Sudan’s economy leaned on gold. But instead of hospitals or schools, this wealth bought drones, rifles, and foreign fighters. Darfur’s mines became the RSF’s private treasury.

The cycle sustains itself: gold funds mercenaries, mercenaries protect the mines. Locals describe it bitterly as “the economy of blood and gold.”

Much of this gold flows quietly through Dubai, where its bloody fingerprints are erased in global markets. From there, it enters international finance — linking Sudan’s war economy not just to Gulf trade hubs, but indirectly to Wall Street and European investors who rarely ask where their gold originates.

This is not just Sudan’s problem. It is global complicity.

Darfur’s war has erased the idea of borders. Routes once used for livestock now carry fighters, weapons, and smuggled gold. Traders in Tina describe night convoys: sacks of millet stacked above hidden gold dust, armed men riding in the back.

The consequences reach far beyond Sudan. For Egypt, the 1,200-kilometer border has become a trafficking corridor. More ominously, Sudan’s collapse threatens the Red Sea corridor — from Bab el-Mandeb to the Suez Canal — through which nearly 12 percent of global trade flows.

As one Cairo analyst warned: “If Sudan collapses, the Red Sea will not remain stable for long — and global trade will feel it.”

For Washington and Brussels, ignoring Sudan risks not only another humanitarian catastrophe but a destabilized Red Sea — one of the world’s most critical trade arteries.

 

This is not a distant crisis. It is a global warning.

 

 

The RSF is no longer just a militia. Controlling gold, commanding mercenaries, and running supply chains, it functions as a parallel state.

 

 

This autonomy ensures that even if the fighting pauses, the war economy endures. In Sudan, conflict itself has become the economy. Sanctions targeting individuals mean little when a group finances itself through gold and smuggling networks. Without dismantling this war economy, diplomacy will fail.

 

 

International law is unambiguous. The 1989 UN Mercenary Convention bans recruitment and financing of mercenaries. The Geneva Conventions forbid starvation as a weapon. Blocking humanitarian aid is not just theft; it is a war crime.

 

 

Yet in Sudan, every malnourished child testifies to law without enforcement. A displaced teacher told me: “We are killed twice — once by bullets, and once by hunger.”

 

 

Human Rights Watch and Amnesty International have documented these crimes in detail. But without political will, their findings remain reports gathering dust, not shields for the vulnerable.

 

 

From Leningrad to Sarajevo to Syria’s Madaya and Yemen’s Taiz, starvation has been used as a cruel language of war. El Fasher is its newest translation. Yet the world’s response has been muted.

 

 

The African Union and Arab League have offered symbolic appeals. The United Nations, overstretched and divided, has failed to secure humanitarian access. Western powers, distracted by Ukraine and Gaza, treat Sudan as peripheral.

 

 

Indifference has become complicity. By allowing Sudan’s agony to fade into background noise, the world signals that some wars matter, and others do not.

 

 

In Zamzam camp, a mother holding her frail child told me: “We no longer count the days by the sun, but by how many times the children cry from hunger.” Her words capture Sudan’s invisible war — time measured not in hours or days, but in cries of hunger.

 

 

But this war will not stay within Sudan. Its mercenaries already cross borders. Its gold fuels global markets. Its hunger destabilizes regions.

 

 

If the world continues to look away, Sudan’s war will not only consume a nation. It will bleed into global markets, destabilize the Red Sea, and expose the emptiness of international law.

 

 

The cost of ignoring Sudan will not be paid by Sudanese alone.

 

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Dr. Abdelnasser Solum Hamed is a senior researcher specializing in crisis management and counter-terrorism. He is the Director of the East Africa & Sudan Program at FOXS Research, Sweden.