International governments are racing against time to evacuate thousands of diplomatic staff trapped in Sudan’s capital Khartoum, where fighting continued on Friday despite a proposed truce to coincide with the start of Eid.
“Everyone has been caught off guard and it’s complete crisis,” said a western official working to evacuate European diplomats. “There are no good options and we don’t have confidence that any of them are safe.”
Fierce fighting between the Sudanese armed forces and a powerful paramilitary group that erupted last weekend has made Khartoum’s international airport unusable, with a number of civilian aircraft at the facility reduced to smouldering ruins.
Other airports are deemed non-operational while overland travelling — considering the long distances as fighting spreads across Africa’s third-largest country — is not safe, especially for so many officials, western diplomats say. Attempts at ceasefires have so far faltered with residents reporting heavy gunfire and air raids across the city of 9mn people.
The fighting is a power struggle between the army, headed by de facto president Abdel Fattah al-Burhan, and Mohamed Hamdan Dagalo, better known as Hemeti, Sudan’s vice-president and commander of the Rapid Support Forces.
More than 400 people have been killed, including at least four UN aid workers, and more than 3,500 injured. The US state department confirmed an American citizen was killed in the fighting but declined to provide further details. Up to 20,000 refugees have also crossed into Chad, with much of Sudan’s healthcare system out of order.
Crossing into Chad is not a viable option for the diplomats, while Libya and South Sudan are deemed too dangerous, prompting some Gulf governments to ponder using boats to evacuate their citizens from Port Sudan on the Red Sea. “It’s total chaos, nobody really knows what to do,” said a non-western diplomat in Khartoum.
Two senior EU officials say that the EU and member states are discussing an evacuation plan for their diplomats, who are sheltering at home but running out of food and supplies. “There’s a total breakdown of law and order,” said one of the officials.
Three employees with the World Food Programme and one from the International Organization for Migration have been killed in the fighting, a US diplomatic convoy has been attacked and the Norwegian residence was hit by a missile.
The US state department said that “due to the uncertain security situation in Khartoum and closure of the airport, it is not currently safe to undertake a US government-co-ordinated evacuation”. Lt Col Phil Ventura, a Pentagon spokesman, said the US was deploying “additional capabilities nearby in the region for contingency purposes related to securing and potentially facilitating the departure of US Embassy personnel from Sudan”, referring to a US military base in Djibouti.
Japan on Friday dispatched a military plane to Djibouti, where Tokyo also has a military presence to combat Somali pirates, to prepare for the evacuation of about 60 Japanese citizens in Sudan.
“Each country is starting preparations to rescue its citizens but we understand no country has been able to enter yet,” said Yoshihide Yoshida, chief of staff of Japan’s Self-Defence Forces. He added that a mix of air and land transportation was an option, but warned that the conditions on the ground were too unpredictable to decide the exact method of evacuation.
“The security condition is extremely harsh and fluid so we will carefully assess the situation by gathering intelligence,” Yoshida added.
Additional reporting by Samer Al-Atrush in Ryadh
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