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Cease-Fire Is Extended in Sudan, but Bombardments and Gunfire Ensue U.S. Begins Overland Evacuation of American Civilians From Sudan
(about 5 hours later)
Civilians continued to flee renewed clashes in Sudan on Friday, as a three-day extension of an already-tenuous truce got off to a fitful start, and foreign countries ramped up evacuations after warning of an escalation of violence in the coming days. NAIROBI, Kenya — A convoy of buses carrying about 300 Americans left the war-torn capital of Sudan on Friday, starting a 525-mile journey to the Red Sea that was the United States’ first organized effort to evacuate its citizens from the country.
Gunfire and loud explosions rocked at least two neighborhoods in the capital, Khartoum, residents said, as the battle between Sudan’s army, led by Gen. Abdel Fattah al-Burhan, and the paramilitary Rapid Support Forces, led by Lt. Gen. Mohamed Hamdan, entered its 14th day. The convoy was being tracked by armed American drones that hovered high overhead, watching for threats. The United Nations and many nations have also evacuated their citizens overland, after receiving security assurances from the warring sides.
Clashes also continued in the western region of Darfur, aid workers said, even as the African Union, the United Nations and countries including the United States welcomed the decision to extend a fragile cease-fire for an additional 72 hours. It renewed questions about why the United States had taken so long to organize a civilian evacuation from Sudan, home to an estimated 16,000 American citizens, many of them dual nationals, when Western and Persian Gulf allies have moved faster and evacuated far more people.
“What I am seeing is thick smoke. What I am hearing is shelling and gunshots,” said Ahmad Mahmoud, a Sudanese resident of Khartoum who witnessed a massive bombardment of the Burri neighborhood in the capital. Britain has evacuated 1,573 people since Tuesday from an airfield north of Khartoum, most of them British nationals. Germany and France have evacuated another 1,700 people by air. At least 3,000 more from various countries have been evacuated by sea from Port Sudan to Jeddah in Saudi Arabia, Saudi authorities said.
Mr. Mahmoud, a filmmaker, said in a text message that he was packing to leave the capital on Friday, giving up on getting his passport back from the Swedish embassy where he had submitted it for a visa. “Khartoum is becoming extremely unsafe,” he said. As the U.S. ramps up its evacuation effort, other countries are already winding down: Britain announced Friday it would cease its airlift at 6 p.m. Saturday, citing a “significant decline” in demand for seats.
Taking advantage of the shaky truce, the United Kingdom late on Thursday evening also ordered its remaining citizens to immediately travel to the Wadi Saeedna airfield near the capital Khartoum for evacuation. The difference might reflect a more cautious American approach to evacuating civilians by air from a chaotic and unpredictable war zone with no defined front lines — a caution that appeared to be partly justified on Friday when Turkey reported that one of its military aircraft had come under fire as it landed at the airfield on the edge of Khartoum.
About 900 British nationals had been evacuated so far on eight different flights as of Thursday afternoon. But after the truce extension ends at midnight this coming Sunday, ​​“violence could escalate,” the Foreign Office warned in a statement. The United States has helped American citizens get a seat on flights out of Khartoum organized by allied nations and occasionally on convoys going through Khartoum to the airfield. Other Americans have made it over a border on their own by road, crossing into Egypt and Ethiopia, joining tens of thousands of Sudanese who have made the same journey.
“We cannot guarantee how many further flights will depart,” the statement said, adding, “Flights may stop at very short notice.” Asked at a news conference on Friday why the U.S. government had not run evacuation transportation in the same manner as other countries, Vedant Patel, a State Department spokesman, said it was working closely with partner countries on the efforts. “This is a collective and collaborative effort,” he said. (At the time, news of the U.S.-run convoy had not become public.)
Turkey also continued removing its nationals who were stuck in Sudan. But in a sign of the rapidly deteriorating situation, one of its evacuation flights was shot at on Friday morning. Mr. Patel said several hundred American citizens have left Sudan since the conflict began.
The plane landed safely and no one was injured, Turkey’s Ministry of Defense said in a post on Twitter. Sudan’s army was quick to blame the Rapid Support Forces for the attack, saying the shooting was a “failed attempt” to “obstruct evacuation efforts” — an allegation the R.S.F. denied. Even so, the line of hired buses that left Khartoum on Friday evening, departing from a luxury golf course near the now-deserted United States Embassy, came a full five days after 72 American diplomats were flown directly from Sudan by helicopter. The delay between that evacuation, a complex nighttime mission led by SEAL team 6 commandos, and the move to facilitate the exit of American citizens has led to numerous negative comparisons with the efforts of other countries.
But even as other foreign nations sent planes to evacuate their nationals, the United States had still not done so. The White House on Thursday urged American citizens to leave within the next 48 hours. There are believed to be about 16,000 Americans in Sudan, many of them dual nationals. The United States initially said it wouldn’t evacuate American civilians or their families, citing a demand that fell significantly below that of other Western nations. Secretary of State Antony J. Blinken said Monday that only “dozens” of U.S. citizens had expressed a desire to leave.
“We are working continuously to create options for American citizens to leave Sudan promptly because the situation could deteriorate at any moment,” said Karine Jean-Pierre, the White House press secretary. Since then, other American officials have said they do not have a good estimate of the number of U.S. citizens who want to leave at any given time because that shifts as the circumstances of the conflict change.
Brig. Gen. Patrick S. Ryder, a Pentagon spokesman, said late on Tuesday that there were a “relatively small” number of Americans who wanted to leave the country and that American officials were identifying any available seats on international flights that would help those citizens leave the country. The war between Sudan’s army, led by Gen. Abdel Fattah al-Burhan, and the paramilitary Rapid Support Forces, led by Lt. Gen. Mohamed Hamdan, entered its 14th day on Friday. At least 512 people have been killed and 4,200 others wounded, the World Health Organization estimates, although the true toll is expected to be much higher.
The U.S. was helping secure land routes, he said, and had positioned naval ships off the coast of Sudan along the Red Sea to evacuate those fleeing the violence. The scale of fighting declined somewhat in recent days as both sides partially respected a cease-fire, allowing evacuations to take place. The two sides agreed to extend the cease-fire by 72 hours from early Friday, though many worried that a return to widespread combat was imminent.
The clashes, which began on April 15, have killed at least 512 people and wounded close to 4,200 others, according to the World Health Organization. Children, health workers and humanitarian operatives have been killed in the conflict, with observers saying the death toll is likely much higher than currently being reported. In some places, the cease-fire was ineffective. On Friday gunfire and loud explosions rocked at least two neighborhoods in the capital, Khartoum, residents said. Clashes also continued in the western region of Darfur, especially in the city of el-Geneina, aid groups said.
The conflict has also decimated the country’s nascent health sector. In Khartoum, where the violence has been the most intense, more than 60 percent of health facilities are closed, the W.H.O. said, and only 16 percent are operating as normal. The U.N. agency also believes that many more lives will be lost because of outbreaks of diseases, lack of food and water, and access to vaccination. “What I am seeing is thick smoke. What I am hearing is shelling and gunshots,” said Ahmad Mahmoud, a Sudanese resident of Khartoum who witnessed a massive bombardment of the Burri neighborhood in the capital on Friday. “Khartoum is becoming extremely unsafe.”
Thousands of people continue to flee the country, getting on buses, taxis and private cars toward smaller towns and neighboring countries. Some 20,000 refugees have already crossed over to Chad, the U.N. said, while 16,000 others have arrived in neighboring Egypt, according to the Egyptian Ministry of Foreign Affairs. One explanation for the difference between demand among American citizens and other nations may lie in the different systems employed to communicate with those seeking to evacuate.
With the security and power vacuum in Khartoum, the U.N. said that violence was escalating in Darfur, a region plagued by two decades of genocidal violence. Over the past few days, the U.N. has reported renewed inter-communal clashes, the looting of aid agencies and the burning of homes and markets, particularly in El Geneina town in West Darfur. In an effort to track U.S. citizens in Sudan, the State Department has set up a “crisis intake” website on which anyone in the world can register to get information, though it is intended for U.S. citizens and family members in Sudan.
The region was already experiencing the resurgence of violent attacks by Arab gunmen against ethnic African communities, leading to widespread hardship and displacement. A person registering on the site gets taken to a page where they can tell U.S. officials what they plan to do: stay in Sudan, leave on their own or try to leave but possibly with assistance. They can also tell the U.S. government they have already left Sudan. As of Friday morning, fewer than 5,000 people had registered on the site.
“The suffering is getting from bad to worse,” said Adam Regal, a spokesman for the General Coordination for Refugees and Displaced in Darfur, an aid agency. For those seeking assistance in leaving, U.S. officials then try to link them to a method of transit and a seat if that is viable. The two main routes out at the moment are British-run airlifts from an airfield in the Khartoum area, and overland convoys to Port Sudan, where ships then take people out via the Red Sea.
But even as families and foreigners flee the violence, some Sudanese are staying home. That system, however, means that options for evacuation are largely restricted to citizens with access to electricity and an internet connection — something that’s far from guaranteed. Many residents say they have no power, and Sudan’s telecommunications networks, remarkably resilient in the first week of fighting, have begun to break down.
Those include Tagreed Abdin, who has been sheltering in her apartment with her three sons and husband, barely eating in order to conserve dwindling food and water supplies amid rising temperatures. The overland route to Port Sudan is slow and tiring, especially for evacuees exhausted by two weeks of intense violence in densely populated urban areas that threaten to plunge Sudan, Africa’s third-largest country, into a full-blown civil war.
“We are trying to stay hopeful,” Ms. Abdin, 49, said in a telephone interview on Friday from her home in Al-Diyum, a neighborhood close to Khartoum’s international airport, which has been the scene of some of the fiercest fighting. “But we are feeling increasingly desperate as there’s no end in sight,” she said. But U.S. officials say they prefer the land route to the airfield at Wadi Saeedna, just outside Khartoum, which they view as more risky. British commandos currently control that site, but dangers lurk nearby: Turkey said Friday that a C-130 plane flying there for an evacuation had been fired upon with light weapons.
Ms. Abdin finally left her apartment yesterday, for the first time since the fighting began, on a mission to find medicine for her mother, who is in her 80s and has hypertension. The plane landed safely and no one was injured, Turkey’s Ministry of Defense said in a post on Twitter. The Sudanese military later released a photo purporting to show bullet holes in the fuselage of the Turkish airframe, blaming it on the Rapid Support Forces — a charge the R.S.F. denied.
“It was totally surreal,” she said, describing the trash and debris piled on the corners of streets, deserted and blackened by shelling. On the road route to Port Sudan, the U.S. military is able to monitor convoys with drones.
Al Deim Street, a main drag in her neighborhood that on an ordinary day would take an hour to drive through, was deserted, she said. A local gas station was overcrowded with hundreds of vehicles because of the depleted fuel supply across the city. A long line of people wrapped around a block nearby, waiting for fresh bread outside a bakery. The evacuations sometimes also involve fraught personal conflicts, some worsened by bureaucratic requirements, that can leave families with wrenching decisions.
“It’s very grim,” she said, referring to the situation for those who remain in the city. “It’s an unseen tragedy.” When Sukaina Kamal got an email from the U.S. government notifying her that the overland convoy was leaving Friday, it presented a dilemma. Although Ms. Kamal’s three children are American citizens, she and her husband are not — and neither is her elderly mother whom she is caring for. Only U.S. citizens and permanent residents were being permitted on the convoy.
Moreover, Ms. Kamal and her family are far from the area where the American convoy was departing: Since last week, when fierce fighting spread across Khartoum, they have been living in Wad Madani, a city about 100 miles to the southeast.
Mr. Patel said many U.S. citizens in Sudan have dual American-Sudanese citizenship and have built their lives in the country, making it tough to leave. “This is a very personal and difficult decision,” he said.
American officials report that some people say they want to leave, only to change their minds. Others feel it is too unsafe to get to a pickup point for transportation to the airfield or a convoy departure area. Still, others tell U.S. officials they will only leave under certain circumstances.
The majority of people fleeing the war zone, though, are Sudanese civilians, who continue to pour out of Sudan in every direction. Some 20,000 refugees have already crossed over the western border to Chad, the U.N. said, while 16,000 others have traveled over Sudan’s northern border to Egypt, according to the Egyptian Ministry of Foreign Affairs.
Declan Walsh reported from Nairobi, Kenya, Eric Schmitt from Seattle, Edward Wong from Washington and Abdi Latif Dahir from Amsterdam. Cora Engelbrecht contributed reporting from London, and Adam Entous from Washington.