Philip Obaji Jr.
DW, Apr. 26, 2023
“All the while, this corrupt scheme involving the Wagner Group and the military government has been supervised by Hemeti. It always felt like both men [Hemeti and Burhan] were never on the same page regarding how to do business with Wagner.”
“The Russians buy almost everything,” Omar Sheriff, a miner in the northeastern Sudanese town of Al-Ibaidiya, told DW shortly before the current conflict between Sudan’s armed forces and the Rapid Support Forces (RSF) paramilitary group began.
Sheriff is one of dozens of artisanal miners in Al-Ibaidiya, a town on the bank of the Nile River located about 400 kilometers (248 miles) north of the capital Khartoum, who labor in searing heat to cut gold from rocks in the desert. They separate the gold from the rocks using chemical processes involving toxic substances like cyanide leaching and mercury that can harm both the miners and the environment.
Most of the gold ends up in a processing plant 16 kilometers away run by a company owned by the founder of Russia’s paramilitary Wagner Group, Yevgeny Prigozhin, a close friend of Russian President Vladimir Putin. “The Russians can pay close to $4,000 (€3,620) for a truckload of gold,” says Sheriff. “They are often desperate to buy everything.”
Wagner Group in Sudan at dictator’s invitation
The Wagner Group first surfaced in Sudan in 2017 at the invitation of then-President Omar al-Bashir following a meeting between the Sudanese dictator and Putin in Moscow. The private military organization set up Meroe Gold, a Prigozhin-controlled company which was later sanctioned by the United States, to run its operations in the African nation. Shortly afterwards, it began to explore Sudan’s gold resources.
In the process, Wagner began to build a relationship with General Mohammed Hamdan Dagalo, commonly known as Hemeti, and his paramilitary RSF. Members of the RSF, according to locals in Al-Ibaidiya, gave protection to Russian merchants who sought to buy gold from miners. The Russian-owned gold processing plant is also said to be guarded by several RSF paramilitaries who work closely with Russian security personnel believed to be from the Wagner Group. … [To read the full article, click here]