Tracking looted antiquities in Sudan’s war

Just two months after civil war erupted in Sudan, in June 2023, a video circulated on social media showing paramilitary fighters inside a laboratory at the National Museum of Sudan, located in the heart of the country’s capital, Khartoum. While fierce fighting with the army continued outside the compound, the footage showed a group of men claiming that the corpses around them were victims of the regime.

The scene caused immediate shock among viewers who quickly noted that those bodies actually belonged to the museum’s mummy collection, which included some of the oldest in the world, spanning roughly 4,500 years. It was also one of the earliest warnings that the conflict posed a threat to Sudan’s vast cultural heritage, which suddenly became exposed to irreparable damage and widespread looting.

Nearly two years later, those warnings began to be borne out. In March 2025, after paramilitaries from the Rapid Support Forces were expelled from Khartoum, videos from inside the museum, founded in the 1970s, showed piles of rubble, broken display cases, and empty galleries that appeared to have been looted. Only some of the largest statues remained standing, including a seven-ton statue of the powerful pharaoh Taharqo.

However, as soon as the war began, a group of Sudanese experts started working in secret to try to keep track of all those objects. Fortunately, in 2019 the country had created the Cultural Property Trafficking Unit after several of its members trained in the United Kingdom with the British Museum, auction houses, and Scotland Yard, London’s metropolitan police.

“When the war began, our work against illicit trafficking [of antiquities] and to trace collections being looted started through this very unit, in collaboration with other institutions similar to ours,” Ikhlas Abdel Latif, director of the Sudanese Museums Sector and head of the team, explains by phone.

So far, Abdel Latif says they have records of about 6,000 items stolen across the country. In addition to the National Museum, other museums in Khartoum have also been looted, including the Presidential Palace Museum and the Khalifa House Museum, built on the site of the short-lived first independent national government of Sudan. In Darfur, museum collections in major cities such as Nyala and El Geneina have suffered the same fate.

For Abdel Latif, one of the most valuable treasures looted from the National Museum of Khartoum was the collection of more than 2,000 gold objects from the Kingdom of Kush — the so-called “black pharaohs” — which flourished across what are now Sudan and Egypt more than 2,500 years ago. This priceless hoard, which included solid gold royal jewelry, was kept in the high-security Gold Chamber, but it was forced open and emptied.

The expert laments that, because of the war, her institution also lost the database with all of its collections, so much of her team’s effort has focused so far on gathering information about looted objects and compiling a kind of inventory. With this documentation, she says, they work with the country’s police and judicial authorities, as well as international bodies like Interpol and UNESCO, to track the pieces.

The effort has begun to produce results. In January, Sudanese authorities announced the recovery of more than 550 antiquities from the National Museum, including scarab-shaped amulets and decorated jars, and Culture Minister Khalid Al-Eisir took the opportunity to offer a financial reward to anyone who returns objects. “We are expecting more,” Abdel Latif now admits, “because what was looted is a large, enormous amount.”

However, EL PAÍS has learned that the objects exhibited in January were recovered within Sudan in the preceding months, and that the success of the operation was kept secret for a time to avoid drawing attention to a similar mission. Most of the looted pieces, by contrast, are already outside the country — in the United Arab Emirates, Chad, Ethiopia, and the Congo. Sudanese media have also placed objects in South Sudan.

Some outlets have speculated that the Rapid Support Forces sold antiquities on the international illicit art market to finance the war, but there is no evidence of that or of centralized looting by the paramilitary group; rather, it appears to be the work of individual fighters and private looters. Abdel Latif says they do not know how or whether items are being sold and that they have not been able to locate pieces on the market or at auction houses.

Thus, the expert does not rule out that, for now, some objects may be being sold in very restricted smuggling circles. She explains that some antiquities that surfaced for sale on online platforms were not from collections looted during the war but from earlier periods. It is also unclear whether the reward offer the government launched in January could be extended to paramilitary fighters.

In this context, UNESCO in 2024 urged the specialized art market to refrain from acquiring or participating in the transfer of Sudanese cultural property. As part of its actions against this trafficking, the agency has also organized training for security and judicial forces in Sudan and neighboring countries, a spokeswoman for the agency says.

Abdel Latif, for her part, is confident that the efforts will continue to bear fruit. “I am sure we will recover the majority of the collections,” she predicts. “When they looted the heritage, they wanted to hide history,” she adds, “but it is our identity and we must recover it.”

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