Canada has military forces on the ground in Port Sudan, says foreign affairs minister

People fleeing fighting between rival generals in Sudan’s capital Khartoum flooded the already overwhelmed city on the Red Sea and Sudan’s northern border with Egypt.

Scores of weary Sudanese and foreigners have arrived at Port Sudan, the country’s main port, joining thousands who have been waiting for days to be evacuated from the chaotic country. Others have crammed into overcrowded buses and trucks, seeking refuge in Egypt, Sudan’s northern neighbor.

Port Sudan has also become a hub for foreign governments to evacuate their citizens by air and sea.

Hundreds of Canadians

Foreign Affairs Minister Mélanie Joly confirmed on Tuesday that Canadian soldiers are in Port Sudan, helping Canadians who entered the city by boat.

“We have armed forces in Port Sudan as we speak,” Joly told CBC News during an interview in Nairobi, Kenya. “Our goal is to make sure we can give Canadians a choice.”

More than 200 Canadians who asked for help to get out of Sudan did not leave before the airlift ended over the weekend.

“Most of the capital is empty,” said Abdalla al-Fatih, a resident of Khartoum. “Entire [residents of] our way is running away from the war.”

The fighting, now in its third week, has turned Khartoum and the neighboring city of Omdurman into a battlefield. The violent clashes took place in a residential neighborhood that had become a “ghost area,” residents said. Explosions and gunfire erupted Tuesday in Khartoum.

The conflict, which has fueled growing tensions, pits the military, led by General Abdel Fattah al-Burhan, against a rival paramilitary group called the Rapid Support Forces (RSF), led by General Mohamed Hamdan Dagalo.

Trapped in his house

Al-Fatih’s family managed to get out of Khartoum over the weekend after being trapped in their home in the Kafouri neighborhood for the past two weeks, the main flashpoint since the war broke out on April 15.

He arrived in Port Sudan late on Monday, after an exhausting 20-hour journey, he said. There, he found thousands, including many women and children, camped outside the harbor area. Many have been there for more than a week, without food and other services, he said.

At the busy crossing point with Egypt, thousands of families have spent days inside buses or sought temporary shelter in the border town of Wadi Halfa to complete paperwork to be allowed into Egypt.

Yusuf Abdel-Rahman is a Sudanese university student who crossed into Egypt, along with his family, through the Ashkit crossing point on Monday. He spent the night in a community hostel in the southern Egyptian city of Aswan and planned to board a train to Cairo later Tuesday, he said.

Abdel-Rahman’s family went first to the Arqin crossing point at the weekend. It was really crowded and it was impossible to reach the customs area, he said. He then decided to move to the Ashkit crossing after hearing from the people there that the crossing would be easier.

“The situation is chaotic [in Arqin]”he said by phone. “Women, children and patients are stranded in the desert without food, without water.”

Abdel-Rahman reported widespread destruction and looting. Neighbors told them by phone that armed men in RSF uniforms stormed the home in the Khartoum neighborhood of Amarat on Friday, the day after they fled the capital. Many Sudanese have taken to social media to complain that their homes have been attacked and looted by gunmen.

He said the family felt lucky to have left before the home was raided. “You are the same [have] dead bodies at last.”

Mass displacement

The fighting has displaced at least 334,000 people in Sudan, and sent tens of thousands more to neighboring countries, including Egypt, Chad, South Sudan, the Central African Republic and Ethiopia, according to UN agencies.

“We are now seeing some very urgent situations at the border,” Paul Dillon, a spokesman for the International Organization for Migration, told a news briefing Tuesday in Geneva.

On Sudan’s border with Ethiopia, between 900 and 1,000 arrive every day, he said, “there is a lack of washing services, food, shelter, water, medical assistance.”

At least 20,000 people have crossed into Chad, which borders the Darfur town of Genena, where clashes last week killed dozens and wounded hundreds.

Aleksandra Roulet-Cimpric, Chad country director with the International Rescue Committee, described the dire situation for those in attendance, especially women and children, many of whom took refuge under trees in “extremely hot” weather.

“This puts them at risk of exploitation and abuse,” he warned.