A gold mine didn't just kill its workers in Sudan this week — it buried them alive, one shaft pulling down the next like dominoes. At least 70 people are confirmed dead after a catastrophic collapse tore through the al-Zara mine near the town of al-Nuhud in West Kordofan, a paramilitary-controlled corner of a country already gutted by civil war. A source inside the Rapid Support Forces put the toll even higher, at 82 killed and 50 wounded, with an unknown number still entombed beneath loose, sandy soil more than 30 meters underground.

The disaster struck the interconnected shafts of the informal mining site, which stretches more than a kilometer across the desert. According to Al Jazeera's reporting from the scene, miner Amin Suleiman described the shafts as packed so tightly together that when one gave way, it dragged its neighbors down with it — "each one pulled down those beside it." There was no advance warning and no evacuation.

Digging with their hands

What's happening now is almost as grim as the collapse itself. There are no specialized rescue teams on site, according to NBC News' account of the recovery effort, which cites local reports of just a single privately owned forklift working the site. Everything else is being done by hand — shovels, rope, and the bare desperation of relatives trying to reach the missing before the sandy walls give way again.

"We do not have the machinery to lift dirt and stones and search for survivors at depths of more than 30 meters," survivor Khairal-Sayed Gabara said, describing an overnight rescue effort using nothing but rudimentary tools.

The Sudan Doctors Network, a volunteer medical monitoring group, has openly accused mine operators of "negligence," warning the death toll is all but certain to climb as crews dig deeper. This is not West Kordofan's first fatal mine collapse — a similar disaster killed 38 people in 2021 and another killed 14 in 2023 — but this week's toll dwarfs both.

The al-Zara mine sits in territory controlled by the RSF, the paramilitary force that has been at war with Sudan's army since April 2023 in a conflict that has killed at least 59,000 people by conservative counts and displaced nearly 12 million. Gold smuggled out of RSF-held mines like this one has become one of the group's primary sources of war financing, drawing scrutiny from UN-appointed experts who track the trade. With no functioning state oversight in the area, tens of thousands of artisanal miners work these unregulated shafts with essentially no safety standards, protective gear, or engineering controls.

For now, there is no functioning government authority positioned to take charge of the rescue, let alone launch an investigation into how so many interlinked shafts were allowed to be dug so close together. Relief groups are calling for outside medical and logistical support to reach al-Nuhud, but access to RSF-controlled Kordofan remains tightly restricted for aid agencies amid the broader war. Search efforts were continuing into Wednesday, with the death toll still rising and dozens of families still waiting to learn whether their relatives are among the dead, the missing, or the few pulled out alive.