In view of the heavy fighting in Sudan, the USA has withdrawn its government employees from the country and closed the US embassy in the capital Khartoum indefinitely. All US diplomats and their families were successfully brought to safety, the White House and the US State Department said on Sunday night. US President Joe Biden issued a statement calling on the warring parties to call for an immediate and unconditional ceasefire. He also urged them not to obstruct humanitarian aid and to respect the will of the Sudanese people.
For days, the US military had been preparing with other Western countries for the evacuation of their own citizens. Additional armed forces had been relocated to Djibouti, among other places. The country is located almost 1200 kilometers south-east of the Sudanese capital Khartoum on the Horn of Africa. The mission started from there, a government representative explained after the mission. Around 100 US soldiers were involved in the evacuation. The helicopter operation at the US embassy itself took less than an hour. There were no injuries or fatalities. The number of people saved is less than 100, including a few colleagues from other missions.
About a week ago, fighting broke out in Sudan between the country’s two most powerful generals and their units. Both had led the country of around 46 million people since a joint military coup in 2021. Now de facto President Abdel Fattah al-Burhan, who is also the supreme commander of the army, is fighting with the military against his deputy Mohammed Hamdan Daglo, the leader of the powerful paramilitary group Rapid Support Forces (RSF). Actually, Daglo’s group should have been subordinate to the army and power in the country should have been returned to a civilian government.
The airport in Khartoum has been at the center of hostilities in recent days. Foreign diplomats kept trying to establish a stable ceasefire for the evacuation. A first attempt to take Germans out of the country with Luftwaffe aircraft was canceled on Wednesday because the security situation in the embattled capital was deemed too dangerous for such an operation. A crisis team meets daily in Berlin. A few days ago, the Bundeswehr made preparations for a new attempt to evacuate German citizens and other people to be protected.
A Saudi Arabian delegation was evacuated from the eastern city of Port Sudan on Saturday. A Jordanian delegation was also to be flown out of Port Sudan. There are almost 850 kilometers between Khartoum and Port Sudan. According to the Saudi television channel Al-Arabia, five Saudi ships also brought more than 150 people from Sudan to Saudi Arabia. According to the Saudi Foreign Ministry, diplomats and citizens from Saudi Arabia, Bulgaria, Canada, Qatar, Kuwait, Egypt, Tunisia, the United Arab Emirates, India, Pakistan, Burkina Faso and the Philippines were on board the ships.
Temporarily closing an embassy abroad is always a difficult decision, but the safety of staff is the top priority, US Secretary of State Antony Blinken said. We will continue to support the US citizens who remain in the country and will also coordinate with allies and partners to ensure the safety of their employees. The USA also wanted to continue to work for an end to the fighting in Sudan and for the transition to a civilian government. Biden and US Secretary of Defense Lloyd Austin thanked Djibouti, Ethiopia and Saudi Arabia for their help with the mission.
The US government had made it clear that Americans who were not in Sudan as diplomats or embassy staff could not expect to be taken out of the country. US citizens have been strongly advised not to travel to Sudan for a long time, the statement said. The US media recently reported that several thousand Americans could still be in Sudan. There was no official information on this. On Thursday, the US State Department confirmed the death of an American man in Sudan in connection with the fighting.
Sudanese are also trying to flee the fighting. According to the UN Refugee Agency (UNHCR), up to 20,000 people have already fled to neighboring Chad in the past few days. Thousands more people have been displaced from heavily contested areas within the country.
