In September 2024, officials reported that the National Museum of Sudan in the country’s capital city, Khartoum, had been subjected to looting by members of the Sudanese Rapid Support Forces (RSF) during Sudan’s ongoing civil war. Now, museum officials have made public the extent of that looting.
“More than 60% of the museum’s holdings were looted,” said Ghalia Jar Al-Nabi, the Sudanese director of the General Authority for Antiquities and Museums, according to a report by NBC News. “For months of the war, no one could know what became of these museums.” Several of the museum’s display cases are currently empty, Al-Nabi added, confirming that gold and jewelry from Sudan’s ancient kingdoms had been stolen.
The RSF occupied the museum from April 2023 to early 2024.
Prior to the conflict, the museum contained more than 150,000 artifacts in its holdings. The National Museum said that some 8,000 pieces were taken from the exhibition halls alone. So far only 570 pieces have been recovered, Graham Abdel Qader, a culture undersecretary, told NBC News.
Sudan’s culture minister Khalid Ali Aleisir estimated the losses related to culture and antiquities, as well as tourism, to be around $110 million, per NBC News. That figure also includes around 20 other cultural institutions in Sudan that have been looted, such as the Republican Palace and the Sultan Ali Dinar Museum.
The Sultan Ali Dinar Museum is one of four institutions that have been looted and completely destroyed, according to officials. The other three are the Gezira Museum in the country’s Gezira state and the Nyala Museum and the Al-Geneina Museum, both in the Darfur region, where the Dinar Museum is also located.
A 2024 report by national broadcaster SBC said that “satellite images have confirmed that trucks loaded with items left the museum early this year.” At the time, it was unclear which objects from the museum’s collection had been taken.
Weeks later, UNESCO issued a statement warning against importing or exporting looted objects from Sudan, stating that the “illegal sale or displacement of these cultural items would result in the disappearance of part of the Sudanese cultural identity and jeopardize the country’s recovery.”
Estimates of the number dead in the civil war range between 20,000 up to 150,000, according to a report published last month in the journal Science. “We can’t responsibly give a number,” Nathaniel Raymond, executive director of the Humanitarian Research Lab, told Science. A UN fact-finding mission stated in 2024 that both the RSF and the Sudanese Armed Forces (SAF) have both committed an “appalling range of harrowing human rights violations and international crimes.”
