The gold that funds both sides of Sudan's war passes through the same Dubai trade

Both armies in Sudan's war sell their gold into the same UAE refining sector. A single enforcement action could squeeze both war chests at once.

The Rapid Support Forces and the Sudanese Armed Forces are in their third year of trying to destroy each other. Their gold ends up in the same place.

When the Sudanese Armed Forces and the Rapid Support Forces began killing each other in Khartoum in April 2023, the country was already exporting roughly $4 billion in gold a year, the vast majority of it smuggled.[1] Most of that flow terminates in the United Arab Emirates, where it converges on a small cluster of Dubai refiners, the best-documented of which is the Kaloti Group.[2][3]

The convergence is not figurative. The Sudanese central bank, the asset arm of the SAF-controlled Khartoum government, has for years shipped its gold mainly to UAE refiners.[4] Al Junaid Multi Activities Co., the family conglomerate of RSF commander Mohamed Hamdan Dagalo, known as Hemedti, sells its gold into the same Emirati market.[1][3] The two sides of Sudan's war are, in commercial terms, customers of the same buyer.

That fact anchors the conflict's economy. It is also why every U.S., U.K. and EU sanctions step against the Sudanese parties has had so little effect on either army's ability to keep buying drones, fuel and bullets. The pipeline is one pipeline, and it has a single bottleneck that the Emirati state has spent years protecting.

The mechanics: from a Darfur pit to a Sharjah safe in a week

Sudanese gold is mined in two ways. A small share comes from registered industrial mines, the bulk of which sit in the Red Sea and River Nile states under SAF control. The rest, the great majority, is artisanal: hand-dug pits worked by tens of thousands of itinerant prospectors and processed locally by mercury amalgamation.[5][6] Chatham House's March 2025 study finds that artisanal mining makes up most of Sudan's output and that official figures capture only a fraction of the true total.[6]

Once smelted into doré bars in roadside mills, the gold moves through one of several corridors. The longest-running is the desert route from Darfur across Chad and onward by chartered cargo to Dubai. The Sentry's 2020 advisory describes how artisanal Sudanese gold is smuggled through transit countries including Chad to the UAE, its origins masked by re-melting once it arrives.[7] A second corridor runs out of Khartoum and Port Sudan by commercial flight, used principally by the central bank when the airport is functional. Smuggling routes documented in 2024 also ran through Egypt, Chad and Libya before the metal reached the UAE.[5]

The corridors deposit the metal in the same set of UAE refiners. Swissaid's audit of customs data found that in 2022 some 405 tonnes of African gold imported by the UAE went undeclared by the exporting states, two-thirds of the total African inflow, a gap the Geneva NGO ties directly to conflict-gold laundering.[8] Sudan is among the largest single contributors to that gap.[6]

Kaloti: the firm the United States decided not to sanction

Kaloti is not the only refiner doing this work, but it is the one whose name appears most often in the underlying documents.

An Ernst & Young audit commissioned in 2013 by the Dubai Multi Commodities Centre, led by the partner Amjad Rihan, found that Kaloti had failed to report potentially suspicious cash transactions worth more than $5.2 billion and had knowingly accepted tonnes of gold imported under falsified paperwork.[4][9] Rihan reported the findings up the chain, was pressed to revise them, refused, and was eased out of the firm. In 2020 a London court found that E&Y had colluded to suppress the report and ordered it to pay Rihan £8.6 million, about $10.8 million.[4][9] The audit findings became public; no enforcement action followed.

Years later, the International Consortium of Investigative Journalists' *FinCEN Files* project reported that U.S. Treasury officials had prepared but never pursued a case against Kaloti. According to ICIJ, the decision on whether to move ahead "was deferred for fear of angering the United Arab Emirates, a key U.S. ally in the Middle East." The investigation was shelved.[4]

What Treasury declined to do, Global Witness traced down the supply chain. The Swiss refiner Valcambi, one of the world's largest, bought substantial volumes of gold from Kaloti, almost certainly including Sudanese conflict gold, according to the NGO's *Beneath the Shine* investigation.[3] Refined Valcambi bullion is sold onward to banks, electronics manufacturers and central banks across the OECD economies that have led the diplomatic chorus against Sudan's war. The chain of custody is broken at a single point, and that point sits inside a Dubai refiner's vault.

The Hemedti side: Al Junaid and a network of front companies

The Rapid Support Forces' gold operation has long run through Al Junaid Multi Activities Co., a holding company associated with the Dagalo family. The Sentry's October 2025 investigation into the RSF's UAE business network identified more than a dozen Dubai-registered firms, including jewellery traders, a management consultancy and an interior-design business, used to move the proceeds, and named several Sudanese and Emirati intermediaries acting as frontmen for the militia.[1][2]

The U.S. Treasury sanctioned Hemedti personally in January 2025, and Algoney Hamdan Dagalo, who runs the family's UAE-facing commercial operation, has been designated by the EU and the UK.[1] The Sentry's reporting describes a network built to outrun sanctions, reorganising under new names and intermediaries faster than the designation lists can be revised.[1]

The SAF side: the central bank and the Red Sea mines

The Sudanese Armed Forces' gold flow is more institutional and therefore better documented, though it has received markedly less Western press coverage.

The Bank of Sudan, headquartered in Khartoum and now operating partly out of Port Sudan, holds the country's official mining concessions and routes the bulk of its declared exports to the UAE. Chatham House's *Gold and the War in Sudan* (March 2025) records official 2024 exports of roughly 23 to 28 tonnes, worth about $1.6 billion, with the SAF controlling the largest producing areas and seeking to divert additional volume through Egypt.[6] These official figures exclude the much larger artisanal and smuggled flow.

Where the RSF's gold passes through front companies before reaching the buyer, the central bank's consignments arrive on official Bank of Sudan paperwork and clear UAE customs as state shipments. The two warring parties' deliveries are differentiated at the point of intake and indistinguishable once refined. The refined bullion ships onward at 99.99 percent fine, no longer traceable to a Darfur pit or a state concession.

What the convergence pays for

The scale matters. Sudan exports gold worth several billion dollars a year, the majority of it smuggled and the majority of it bound for the UAE.[1][6] Even after intermediaries take their cut, the flow that returns to the two Sudanese armies is enough to make this one of the best-funded civil conflicts of the past three decades. Neither party has lost the ability to recruit, pay or arm fighters at any point in the war. They have lost cities, lost territory, in some cases lost the loyalty of their own units. The cash has never run short, because the gold has covered it.[5][6]

The case that the war could be constricted by cutting the gold flow is therefore not a slogan but an accountancy proposition. The chokepoint is concrete and named. It is in the UAE's refining sector. The two opposing armies are, in financial fact, customers of the same buyer, and a single sustained enforcement action against that buyer would squeeze both war chests at once.

Why it has not happened

The reason the chokepoint has been left in place is not technical. OFAC has the authority; so do the EU, the UK and Switzerland. The constraint is geopolitical. The UAE is among the United States' closest Gulf security partners and a leading purchaser of U.S. weapons, and the *FinCEN Files* reporting showed how that premium works in practice: a Treasury case prepared and then deferred rather than risk the relationship.[4]

That calculus is not unique to Washington. Switzerland hosts much of the world's bullion-refining capacity and has been reluctant to disturb it; its regulators examined Valcambi's Kaloti exposure without imposing penalties.[3] The enforcement jurisdictions that could close the chokepoint each have their own structural reasons not to.

The result is that the Rapid Support Forces, found by the United States in January 2025 to have committed genocide in Sudan, and the Sudanese Armed Forces, accused by the U.N. of indiscriminate aerial bombardment of civilian areas, continue to wage a war substantially financed through a UAE refining sector whose due-diligence failures have been on the record since the Kaloti audit.[1][9] The connection between those facts is direct, named, and for now out of reach.

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