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NAIROBI, Kenya – It started with a helicopter evacuation of American diplomats from the besieged Sudanese capital just after midnight Sunday, then turned into a full exodus of foreign officials and citizens as fighting raged around them.
At the United States Embassy in Khartoum, an elite team of Navy SEALs put up to 90 people on a plane before flying to Djibouti, 800 miles away.
A few hours later, a United Nations convoy began to leave the city, beginning the 525-mile drive to Port Sudan on the Red Sea, while British and French diplomats were escorted to an airfield outside the city where military cargo planes were waiting. Another group headed for Qadarif, a small town near the border with Ethiopia, and a boat chartered by Saudi Arabia was carrying diplomats fleeing across the Red Sea.
After days of futile diplomatic efforts to get two warring Sudanese generals to lay down their weapons, foreign governments took another tactic this weekend: fleeing a country, long considered strategically important, that has been at war. hate more than a week.
Emotions were raw.
Some Sudanese, feeling angry and abandoned, lashed out at the Western negotiators to blame for the disastrous collapse of the political speech that was supposed to lead to civil rule – but instead became a flashpoint for the two generals now battling for power.
Foreign officials, some say, go too far to please the generals, treating them almost as statesmen when in fact the two men seized power in a coup and have a long record of abuse and fraud. Some Sudanese fear that now, the exit of foreign diplomats could lead to more brutal changes in the country’s affairs.
“You made us this mess and now you will take your (important) relatives and leave these two murderous psychopaths,” Dallia Mohamed Abdelmoniem, a former Sudanese journalist and commentator, said on Twitter.
At least 400 people have been killed in the clashes and 3,500 injured, according to the United Nations, and two-thirds of hospitals have been closed. As prices soar, food rare and still will be rare; over the weekend, the country’s largest flour mill was destroyed by the war. Even the cash supply has run out.
With no end in sight to the war, concerns are growing that the war that has transformed Sudan at an extraordinary pace could destabilize other countries in the region.
On Sunday, the sounds of gunfire and bombs that have trapped thousands in their homes in the Sudanese capital stopped for a moment, allow America to withdraw. But the clashes continued after they left, endangering refugees from other countries.
A French national was hit by gunfire when a French convoy came under fire and had to be treated at the airfield as evacuees waited to depart, Western officials said. Egypt said embassy members were also shot, without elaborating.
Some of the foreigners who left said they had mixed feelings: relief at escaping Khartoum after a terrifying eight-day ordeal, and regret at leaving their Sudanese friends behind. “Very good,” Norway’s Ambassador to Sudan, Endre Stiansen, wrote in a text message as he prepared to leave.
“I’m safe and can’t stop thinking about what I left behind,” she wrote. “Staff, friends, etc.”
The diplomatic defeat is a page in Sudan’s history that they do not want to change. The violence engulfing Khartoum has broken a century of peace in the capital, which last experienced a violent clash of that scale in the colonial era, when it was attacked by the British.
Now Sudan’s capital is collapsing, threatening to bring the entire country – Africa’s third largest – down. And as such, foreign powers, which have long staked their claim on the mineral-rich country of geopolitical value, are quick to reassess their position.
The most complicated extraction is done by the Americans. They have wanted to move since Friday, when President Biden ordered an evacuation as soon as it was safe and feasible.
As the hope for a ceasefire between Sudan’s warring factions, it became clear that the US Embassy, located in the Soba district south of Khartoum, cannot count on constant access to food, fuel, and power, and Secretary of State Antony J. Blinken concluded that there is no choice but to evacuate the embassy and temporarily close it.
But the embassy workers must first gather there. As American diplomats arrive at the embassy, fleeing their homes during the war, American officials at the Pentagon weigh their options.
The city’s main airport, hit by gunfire during fierce fighting, was deemed unusable. The route to Port Sudan, 525 miles away, carries the risk of not having reliable access to fuel, food and water along the way.
That left the option open: airlift using MH-47 Chinook helicopters. The military also has V-22 Ospreys — special planes that can take off and land vertically, without the need for a runway — available for the operation, according to three officials, but it remains unclear what role they play.
On Saturday afternoon, Sudan time, three of the Chinooks departed from the US base in Djibouti, in the Horn of Africa, carrying more than four dozen of the elite SEAL team of the Navy 6 commando, famous for the mission that killed Obama bin Laden in Pakistan in 2011. The giant twin rotors were piloted by the 160th Special Operations Aviation Regiment, known as the Night Stalkers.
Flying over central Ethiopia, Army helicopters landed to refuel and conduct final inspections while awaiting final approval, according to people familiar with the operation. Then they flew back to their target: Khartoum. Moving quickly and descending into the night, the plane crossed the desert without lights, hoping to get close to the US Embassy.
Even with assurances from both sides in the fighting – the Sudanese military, led by General Abdel Fattah al-Burhan, and the paramilitary Rapid Support Force, led by Lieutenant General Mohamed Hamdan – that their forces will stop during the American evacuation, it is risky.
In the field, CIA paramilitary officers and specialists gathered intelligence to support the operation, specifically looking for any threats to the evacuating forces, including surface-to-air missiles that could shoot down helicopters. In the air, the Air Force AC-130 gunships, bristling with 105-millimeter cannons, flew above to provide firepower, if necessary, to protect the helicopter, which flew around 115 miles per hour.
“Anytime you’re flying at 100 knots very close to the ground in pitch black, there’s always some risk,” Lt. Gen. Douglas A. Sims II, director of operations for the military’s Joint Staff in Washington, told reporters. on a conference call Friday night.
While the operation was underway, Mr. Biden’s national security team monitored events and coordinated interagency support from Camp David and the White House, among other places, and Mr. Biden periodically checked in with the national security adviser, Jake Sullivan, according to the National Security Council.
The three helicopters landed in an open area near the embassy half an hour after midnight in Sudan. As a security cordon protected the plane, nearly 90 people were on board: 72 American Embassy personnel, as well as six Canadian diplomats and several officials from Western and United Nations embassies, two American officials said.
About 30 minutes later, the plane climbed into the night sky, encountering no small arms fire from either faction as it left Sudan, General Sims said. They landed in Ethiopia where the evacuees transferred to a C-17 transport plane that flew to Camp Lemonnier, an American military base in Djibouti.
The evacuees are a small fraction of the estimated 16,000 Americans still in Sudan, most of whom are dual citizens. Leaving may not be so easy for him. Given the challenging environment, the US government does not expect to evacuate private citizens “in the coming days,” State Department official John Bass told reporters.
Still, as early as Sunday, other countries and organizations began to do so.
The largest convoy was organized by the United Nations, with a long train of vehicles leaving from UN headquarters in Khartoum early in the morning.
Space is at a premium. One bus chartered by the United Nations has yet to show up, because the embassy has offered the operator more money, Western officials said. But then the aid agencies involved in the convoy also did not get the buses they wanted, as they had been overrun by the UN, the official said.
The exodus from Sudan also continues, mostly those who have the funds to leave. Some took buses to the Egyptian border, 600 miles to the north. Others went to Port Sudan, where they hoped to find a plane or boat to Saudi Arabia.
Kholood Khair, a political analyst, jumped at the chance offered by a short window of relative calm on Sunday morning to begin his long journey to the east. He was afraid that he would never get another chance. “Staying becomes impossible,” said Ms. Khair.
On WhatsApp and social media sites, Sudanese would-be refugees exchange information about ticket prices, border crossings and security conditions. But even this flow of information is threatened with extinction, because the internet is growing weak, or cut out entirely, in the country.
In Washington, even after the evacuation, American officials still held out hope that they could end the war and put Sudan back on the road to civilian rule.
“The Sudanese people are not giving up, and neither will we,” Assistant Secretary of State Molly Phee told reporters. “The goal is to end this fighting and start a civilian government.”
But the civilians who fled on Sunday do not hold out hope that a democratic future – which was in sight just 10 days ago – can be realized anytime soon.
At this point, 34-year-old Ali Abdallah said while he was packing his bags to save Khartoum, he might have avoided civil war. “I want this done before tomorrow,” he said by phone. “But I think it’s going to get worse.”
Mr Abdallah, who in 2019 joined the euphoric protests that toppled Sudan’s autocratic ruler of three decades, Omar Hassan al-Bashir, said he could hardly believe it had happened.
Some attribute the chaos to years of intervention in Sudan by foreign powers, including Russia, Egypt and the United Arab Emirates.
Even some Western officials blamed themselves.
Anna Saleem Högberg, a Swedish diplomat who lived in Sudan for five years, said Western efforts to hold Sudan’s war generals to account for past abuses were too slow.
“We should be screaming from the rooftops, I am now,” he wrote on Twitter with the honest admission of a diplomat. “We danced around, in the dance that brought the country to the abyss. And now, God help them, the people and the country have fallen from the abyss.”
Declan Walsh reported from Nairobi, and Charlie Savage and Eric Schmitt from Seattle. This reporting was 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 Egg from London; and Lynsey Chutel from Johannesburg, South Africa.
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