NAIROBI, Kenya — It began with a helicopter evacuation of American diplomats from Sudan’s besieged capital city shortly after midnight on Sunday, then turned into an official exodus of officials. foreign dignitaries and citizens of other nations as battle rages around them.
At the US Embassy in Khartoum, an elite team of Navy SEALs loaded 90 people onto the plane before taking off for Djibouti, 800 miles away.
Hours later, a United Nations convoy began to zigzag out of the city, beginning its 525-mile journey to Port Sudan on the Red Sea, while British and French diplomats were escorted to an airport outside outside the city, where military transport planes are waiting. Other groups headed to Qadarif, a small town near the border with Ethiopia, and a boat chartered by Saudi Arabia carried their fugitive diplomats across the Red Sea.
After days of fruitless diplomatic efforts to get Sudan’s two warring generals to lay down their arms, foreign governments adopted another tactic this weekend: fleeing a country, from long considered strategically important, has been in Capture intense combat for more than a week.
Emotions are raw.
Some Sudanese, feeling angry and left out, lashed out at Western negotiators on Sunday which they blamed for the disastrous collapse of supposed political talks. lead to civil rule — but instead became a hotbed for two generals currently vying for power.
Some argue that foreign officials have gone too far in appeasing the generals, treating them almost like politicians when in fact the two have come to power in a coup and have many records of abuse and deception. Some Sudanese fear that the departure of foreign diplomats could now spell an even more brutal turn in the nation’s affairs.
Dallia Mohamed Abdelmoniem, a former Sudanese journalist and commentator, wrote on Twitter: “You put us in this mess and now you are rushing in to rob your loved ones (important people) and leave them alone. We give these two psychopaths to murder.”
According to the United Nations, at least 400 people have been killed in the clashes and 3,500 injured, and two-thirds of hospitals have been closed. As prices rise, food is scarce and likely to become even more scarce; over the weekend, the largest flour mill in the country was destroyed in the fighting. Even the cash supply is dwindling.
With a war with no end in sight, there is growing concern that a battle that has transformed Sudan with extraordinary speed could drag on other nations in this volatile region.
On Sunday, gunfire and bombs that had trapped thousands of people in their homes in the Sudanese capital were briefly halted, allow the Americans to withdraw. But clashes continued after they left, putting evacuees from other countries at risk.
A Western official said a French citizen was hit by a bullet when a French convoy was shot and had to be treated at an airport as evacuees waited to depart. Egypt said that a member of its embassy was also shot, but did not elaborate.
Some of the expats leaving said they were experiencing mixed emotions: relief at escaping from Khartoum after eight days of terrifying ordeals, and regret at leaving their Sudanese colleagues behind. “It’s terrible,” Norway’s ambassador to Sudan, Endre Stiansen, wrote in a text message as he prepared to leave.
“I’m safe and I can’t stop thinking about the people we leave behind,” he wrote. “Staff, friends, and everyone else.”
Habit diplomacy is a page in Sudan’s history that it never wants to turn back. The violence that engulfed Khartoum disrupted a century of peace in the capital, which last experienced violent clashes of such a scale during colonial times, when it was attacked by the British.
Now, Sudan’s capital is collapsing, threatening to bring the entire country – Africa’s third largest – to the ground. And so, the foreign powers, long ago tried to claim shares in a country rich in minerals of geopolitical value, is in a hurry to reassess its position.
The most complex mining was performed by the Americans. They have been trying to move since Friday, when President Biden ordered an evacuation as soon as it was safe and feasible.
As hopes of a ceasefire between the warring factions in Sudan dissipated, it became clear that the US Embassy, located in the Soba district, south of Khartoum, could no longer count on real stable access. supplies, fuel and electricity, and Secretary of State Antony J. Blinken concluded that there was no choice but to evacuate the embassy and temporarily close it.
But the first embassy staff had to gather there. As American diplomats arrived at the embassy, rushing out of their homes during a lull in fighting, American officials at the Pentagon weighed their options.
The city’s main airport, hit by bullets during days of heavy fighting, was deemed inoperable. The route to Port Sudan, 525 miles away, carries many risks because there is no source of fuel, food and drinking water along the way.
That left them with a choice: an airlift by helicopter MH-47 Chinook. The military also has V-22 Ospreys — a special type of aircraft that can take off and land vertically, without the need for a runway — ready for the operation, according to three officials, but it’s still unclear what role they play. .
On Saturday afternoon, Sudan time, three Chinooks took off from a US base in Djibouti, Horn of Africa, carrying more than forty elite commandos from Navy SEAL Team 6, known for their mission. mission to kill Osama bin Laden in Pakistan in 2011. The giant twin-rotor aircraft was flown by the 160th Special Operations Aviation Regiment, known as the Night Stalkers.
Flying over central Ethiopia, Army helicopters landed to refuel and perform final checks pending final approval, according to a person familiar with the operation. Then they took off again towards their goal: Khartoum. Moving fast and low in the night, the plane crossed the desert with no lights, hoping to land as close to the US Embassy as possible.
Even with assurances from both sides in the fighting — the Sudanese army, led by General Abdel Fattah al-Burhan, and the paramilitary Rapid Support Force, led by Lieutenant General Mohamed Hamdan — that the force their numbers will stand the American evacuation, that is the risk.
On the ground, CIA officers and paramilitary specialists are gathering intelligence to support the operation, specifically looking for any threat to the evacuated force, including shoulder-fired surface-to-air missiles that can shoot down helicopters. In the air, Air Force AC-130 helicopters, with 105 mm cannons, flew overhead to provide fire, if needed, to protect helicopters flying at approx. 115 miles per hour.
“Anytime you’re flying at 100 knots very close to the ground in pitch-black conditions, there’s bound to be some risk there,” said Lt Gen Douglas A. Sims II, director of operations. of the Army General Staff in Washington, told reporters. on a conference call on Saturday night.
As the campaign was underway, Biden’s national security team monitored events and coordinated interagency assistance from Camp David and the White House, among other places, and Biden periodically checked with his national security adviser, Jake Sullivan, according to the National Security Council.
Three helicopters landed on an empty lot near the embassy half an hour after midnight in Sudan. When the security fence protected the plane, nearly 90 people were on board: 72 US Embassy employees, as well as 6 Canadian diplomats and several Western and UN embassy officials, two officials US officials said.
General Sims said about 30 minutes later, the plane took off into the night sky without encountering small arms fire from both sides as they left Sudan. They landed in Ethiopia, where the evacuees were loaded onto a C-17 transport plane to take them to Camp Lemonnier, the US military base in Djibouti.
The evacuees make up a small fraction of the estimated 16,000 Americans still in Sudan, mostly dual nationals. Leaving may not be so easy for them. “Given the challenging environment, the US government is not expected to evacuate private citizens “in the coming days,” John Bass, a State Department official, told reporters.
However, in the early hours of Sunday, other countries and organizations began to do just that.
The largest convoy is organized by the United Nations, with a long convoy departing from UN headquarters in Khartoum shortly after dawn.
Space is at a premium. A Western official said a bus chartered by the United Nations did not show up because the embassy had offered to pay the operator more. But later, an aid agency that joined the convoy also failed to receive the expected bus, because it was paid a higher price by the United Nations, the official said.
An exodus of Sudanese also continued, most of whom had money to leave. Some take buses to the Egyptian border, 600 miles north. Others head to Port Sudan, where they hope to find a flight or a boat to Saudi Arabia.
Kholood Khair, a political analyst, took the opportunity given a brief period of relative calm on Sunday morning to begin a long journey east. She was afraid she wouldn’t have such an opportunity again. “It has become unacceptable to stay,” Ms. Khair said.
On WhatsApp and social media sites, displaced Sudanese exchanged information on ticket prices, border crossings and security conditions. But even the flow of information is threatened as the internet grows weaker or is cut off altogether in the country.
In Washington, even after the evacuation, American officials held out hope that they could stop the war and return Sudan to civilian rule.
“The people of Sudan are not going to give up, and neither are we,” Assistant Secretary of State Molly Phee told reporters. “The goal is to end this fighting and start forming a civilian government.”
But residents who fled on Sunday had little hope that a democratic future – which seemed within reach just 10 days ago – could soon materialize.
At this point, Ali Abdallah, 34, said that as he packed up to leave Khartoum, he could choose to avoid a civil war. “I want this to be over by tomorrow,” he said over the phone. “But I think things will get worse.”
Mr. Abdallah, who in 2019 joined the euphoric protests that overthrow the autocratic ruler of Sudan of three decades, Omar Hassan al-Bashir, said he could hardly believe it had come this far.
Some attribute this mayhem to years of intervention in Sudan by foreign powers, including Russia, Egypt and the United Arab Emirates.
Even some Western officials blame themselves.
Anna Saleem Högberg, a Swedish diplomat who has lived in Sudan for five years, says Western efforts to hold Sudan’s war generals accountable for their past abuses is too meek.
“We should have been screaming from the rooftops, I think now,” she wrote on Twitter in an unusually frank admission from a diplomat. “We danced around it, in a dance that brought the country to the edge of the abyss. And now, God help them, the people and the country that have fallen off the cliff.”
Declan Walsh reports from Nairobi, and Charlie is brutal from Washington and Eric Schmitt from Seattle. Report contributed by Abdi Latif Dahir from Florence, Italy; Elian Peltier from Dakar, Senegal; Catherine Porter from Paris;Matina Stevis-Gridneff from Brussels; Christopher F. Schuetze from Berlin; Cassandra Vinograd And Isabella Kwai from London; And Lynsey chutel from Johannesburg, South Africa.
