AMSG Calls For Intesified Rescue Efforts, As Sudan Gold Mine Collapse Death Toll Rises To 82 Amid Deadly Conflict

At least 82 people have died following the collapse of the Al Zaraa gold mine near Al Nuhud in Sudan’s West Kordofan State, with about 50 others injured and an unknown number still feared trapped underground.
The latest casualty figure was reported by local officials and activists as rescue efforts continued at the informal mining site, where adjoining shafts reportedly collapsed across a large stretch of unstable sandy terrain.
The disaster has exposed once again the deadly conditions surrounding Sudan’s extensive informal gold mining sector, where thousands of miners operate outside effective safety systems.
The Al Zaraa mine is among the many small scale and informal gold operations scattered across the country, with basic protective measures, structural assessments and specialised emergency response often lacking.
Rescue operations have also been severely constrained.
Reports indicate that local rescuers have had to depend largely on basic equipment, with only one privately owned forklift reportedly available to clear debris from sections of the mine that extend beyond 30 metres underground. Survivors have warned that people remain trapped beneath the rubble.
The security situation has compounded the emergency. Al Zaraa is in an area controlled by the Rapid Support Forces, the paramilitary organisation fighting Sudan’s military in a war that has devastated the country since 2023. The Kordofan Human Rights Observatory said the area was tightly controlled and difficult to access, creating additional obstacles to the deployment of specialised rescue teams.

Gold mining has itself become deeply entangled with Sudan’s conflict economy. The Associated Press, citing experts commissioned by the United Nations, reported that large quantities of gold have been smuggled out of Sudan and that gold producing areas in Darfur and Kordofan are controlled by the RSF. This means that the risks confronting miners at sites such as Al Zaraa extend beyond conventional occupational hazards to include the wider insecurity surrounding the country's mineral economy.
The latest tragedy is also not an isolated occurrence. Sudan has recorded repeated fatal mine collapses in recent years, including a 2023 accident that killed 14 miners and another in 2021 in which 38 people died, according to the Associated Press. The recurrence points to a persistent safety problem within parts of the country's informal mining sector rather than a single isolated failure.
The Africa Minerals Strategy Group has now called for an urgent regional response, with its Chairman and Nigeria's Minister of Solid Minerals Development, Dr Dele Alake, urging authorities and regional stakeholders to pool resources and deploy heavy lifting and excavation equipment to the site.
Alake said the collapse illustrated the extreme risks confronting artisanal and informal miners across Africa, particularly in remote and conflict affected areas where regulatory oversight and emergency response capacity are weak.
"Human life must always supersede resource extraction,” Alake said, while calling for stronger safety standards, training and institutional oversight of artisanal mining operations.
The AMSG chairman also called for accelerated formalisation of artisanal and informal mining across Africa, arguing that governments, regional institutions and industry stakeholders must work together to provide training, basic safety enforcement and institutional oversight.
For Sudan, however, formalisation presents a challenge far beyond licensing and mine inspection. Any meaningful safety intervention must contend with the country's continuing armed conflict, fragmented territorial control, illegal gold flows and limited access to mining sites.
The Al Zaraa disaster therefore presents two simultaneous crises: a rescue emergency for miners still believed to be underground and a broader warning over the human cost of an informal mineral economy operating amid conflict, weak oversight and inadequate mine safety infrastructure.
As rescue efforts continue, the final death toll remains uncertain. But the scale of the Al Zaraa collapse has already renewed the continental debate over whether Africa can expand mineral production without putting the lives of the people extracting those resources at unacceptable risk.

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Sudan Online
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