How Sudan and Libya's triangle border region became a hotbed of crime and war

This lawless desert land is home to gold smuggling and people trafficking. It is also key to Sudan's war

A landscape picture of the desert in Libya's al-Kufra region (AFP)

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On 12 June, Sudan's Rapid Support Forces (RSF) paramilitary announced that it had taken control of the Sudanese portion of the triangle border region that straddles Sudan, Libya and Egypt.

This mysterious, desert region has for a long time been hidden away from the eyes of the world, a lawless place where violence and smuggling - of gold, weapons, drugs and people - thrive.

Open war now besets the triangle. This hot, dry land is a battlefield where governments, militias, and armed groups struggle, with the backing of foreign powers, for control.

The statement released by the RSF, which has been at war with the Sudanese Armed Forces (SAF) since April 2023, prompting 12 million people to flee their homes, gave a clue as to the value of this remote place.

“The importance of this victory stems from the strategic location of Almuthallath ‘Triangle’ area, which serves as a crucial economic and border crossing point between the three countries,” the RSF said.

“It functions as a vital hub for trade and transportation between North and East Africa. It is also rich in natural resources, including oil, gas, and minerals.”

Prior to the RSF capture of the Sudanese component of the triangle, the journey from Sudan to Libya through it cost about 250,000 Sudanese pounds (around $100) and took close to a day. Before the RSF seized the area in June, bus drivers and smugglers openly advertised the trips. Now they do not.

In Gaddafi's wake

In March 2011, just months before Libyan leader Muammar Gaddafi was assassinated, Libya announced that it had gold reserves then worth more than $6bn.

After the fall of the Libyan strongman and with instability across the region, including in Chad, the Central African Republic and Sudan’s Darfur, which has witnessed fighting for most of the 21st century, a battle for control ensued.

One artisanal gold miner, who spent a decade in the triangle region, described it as a place to make money, not to settle. The only loyalty found there, he said, was to money.

'Both the RSF and the SAF have sought to control the lucrative and essential illicit fuel trade from southern Libya'

- Chatham House report

From 2012, gold mining flourished in the area, with thousands of small-time miners from across the Sahel region going to the triangle to do business.

At the same time, other illegal trades were thriving, including the smuggling of stolen goods like cars and drugs, as well as the trafficking of people to Europe from African countries through the Mediterranean.

For Suliman Baldo, an expert on Sudan and the economic and political dynamics of the region, the economy of the triangle region must be seen as part of a Sahel economy that depends on the militarisation and extraction of gold and other metals.

“Two serious factors have intersected with the above to create the current chaos in the triangle area, one is the fall of Gaddafi and the second is the Sudanese war that badly affected Darfur, Chad and other regional countries,” Baldo, who is the executive director of the Sudan Transparency and Policy Tracker, told Middle East Eye.

A Chatham House report titled “Gold and the war in Sudan” found smuggling via Libya, conversely, has reflected the relatively stable - if criminal - political, economic and security conditions established by eastern Libyan commander Khalifa Haftar's Libyan Arab Armed Forces (LAAF).

This stands in contrast to the situation in Sudan. “Both the RSF and the SAF have sought to control the lucrative and essential illicit fuel trade from southern Libya, which has scaled up dramatically since 2022 as a result of elite capture of Libya’s oil sector,” the report said.

“Demand and the cost of fuel increased during the war in Sudan as a result of scarcity. The LAAF and its local Subul al-Salam allies likely supplied the RSF with fuel before the war and shortly after it began, as part of regular trading and security assistance, and at the same time, small amounts of gold from al-Muthaleth were smuggled via Libya,” it said.

Subul al-Salam, a Libyan militia allied to Haftar, was part of the RSF’s recent success in the triangle.

Opportunity for the RSF

The Sudanese army, RSF, Libyan and Chadian armed groups have exchanged control of the triangle region ever since Gaddafi’s fall.

Military sources said the SAF’s presence in the region was weak and that it depended on the RSF, which was formed from the government-backed Janjaweed militias that terrorised Darfur and brought into the Sudanese state under Omar al-Bashir in 2013, from 2016 onwards in the wild northwestern desert.

Having previously been part of the same military, the SAF and RSF went to war and shifted their alliances in the region, with the army joining with rebels from Darfur and the RSF working separately with Haftar.

'The RSF profited the most from the triangle as they extracted gold from the region and got involved in other trades there'

- Sudanese researcher

“Darfur rebel movements, namely the Justice and Equality Movement (JEM) and Sudan Liberation movement (SLM), have had a presence in southern Libya since the regime of Gaddafi and after the eruption of the war in Sudan, the RSF got a foothold in southern Libya and created a wide network of interests with Libyan armed groups, including human trafficking, the smuggling of weapons, fuel and other criminal activities,” Islam Alhaj, a Libyan political analyst, told MEE.

The RSF flourished in the desert, rewarded by Bashir’s government and the European Union (EU), which was interested in stopping the flow of refugees and migrants from Africa through the region to the Mediterranean.

Military sources and miners living in the triangle told MEE that the RSF opened three military bases at Chevrolet, Albarly and Alshasy in the same area. Here, they claimed to be stopping human trafficking and the flow of people north to Europe.

“The RSF profited the most from the triangle as they extracted gold from the region and got involved in other trades there,” one Sudanese researcher said.

War in Sudan

At the beginning of Sudan’s war in April 2023, the army took control of Chevrolet and the other RSF bases in the triangle region as the paramilitary withdrew fighters to focus on capturing the capital Khartoum.

“During this period, Darfur groups engaged in widespread gold mining and trade in weapons, fuel and other logistics, which led to confrontations between these forces and the Libyan militias in southern Libya,” a military source and a miner in the region said.

Though it had withdrawn from the triangle, the RSF maintained a presence there through its alliance with Libyan militias connected to Haftar, who were able to facilitate the flow of weapons from the UAE, the miners told MEE.

UAE and Haftar behind RSF capture of Sudan's triangle border region

Ismail Hassan, a miner in the region, said that after the Darfur rebel groups joined the SAF in November 2023, the cooperation they had previously had with the RSF ended.

There were many confrontations between the SAF-allied Joint Forces and the RSF as the former sought to cut supplies coming in from Libya and the two sides fought for control.

The Joint Forces were able to cut some of the RSF’s supplies coming into Darfur, while the paramilitary began its siege of el-Fasher, the capital of North Darfur, over 15 months ago.

The city is the last army-controlled area in the vast western region of Sudan.

“The tension has been transferred to the triangle area and clashes have erupted between the Joint Forces and the Libyan militias that allied with Haftar and provided the support to the RSF, including the opening of the camps inside the Libyan territories,” Hassan said.

In one ambush operation, Joint Forces arrested Colombian mercenaries who came to fight with the RSF, with the support of the UAE, in Darfur.

What next?

Sources on both sides of the Sudanese war see this as a crucial moment, with fighting raging across the strategically vital Kordofan region and the army plotting an invasion of Darfur, which is almost entirely held by the RSF.

A Libyan source said that the battle for the triangle region would also intensify, as external actors, including the UAE, seek to secure control of the area for their preferred force.

Egypt hosts secret talks between Sudan's Burhan and Libya's Haftar in bid to mend ties, sources say

“The battle to control the desert is expected to increase in the coming times as the two sides are massing troops and preparing for a massive round of war,” the source, who cannot be named for security reasons, said.

“These are porous borders, and for decades, there has been instability across this region related to the movement of irregular forces. I do not see this changing as long as both Sudan and Libya remain divided and contested spaces,” Cameron Hudson, a former US diplomat and expert on the region, said.

“I think it's impossible to separate the financial and the political reasons for the conflict. They both drive each other.”

Alhaj, the Libyan analyst, pointed to the impact the triangle has on the whole region. “The triangle region would threaten the security in Libya and Sudan and the Sahel region at large,” he said.

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