U.S. Military Evacuates Embassy Personnel in
Embattled Sudan
President Biden announced that diplomatic personnel,
who had been stuck in the midst of a brutal war for more than a week, were
evacuated from the capital, Khartoum.
Charlie
Savage Michael D. Shear Elian PeltierDeclan Walsh
By Charlie
Savage, Michael D. Shear, Elian Peltier and Declan Walsh
Charlie
Savage and Michael D. Shear reported from Washington; Elian Peltier from Dakar,
Senegal; and Declan Walsh from Nairobi, Kenya.
https://www.nytimes.com/2023/04/22/world/africa/sudan-fighting.html
Published
April 22, 2023
Updated
April 23, 2023, 1:33 a.m. ET
The United
States military airlifted embassy officials out of Khartoum, the capital of
Sudan, amid continuing violence as rival military leaders battled for control
of Africa’s third-largest country, President Biden said late on Saturday.
“Today, on
my orders, the United States military conducted an operation to extract U.S.
government personnel from Khartoum,” Mr. Biden said in a statement released by
the White House.
In a
briefing for reporters, officials said that just over 100 special operations
troops were involved in evacuating under 100 people — mostly U.S. Embassy
employees — using helicopters that flew in from the nation of Djibouti, about
800 miles away.
“The
operation was fast and clean, with service members spending less than an hour
on the ground in Khartoum,” said Lt. Gen. Douglas A. Sims II, the director for
operations at the Joint Staff. “As we speak, the evacuees are safe and secure.”
The move
came on the eighth day of brutal fighting in the capital and other parts of the
country between the army and a paramilitary group called the Rapid Support
Forces, whose leaders are vying for supremacy in Sudan.
At least
400 people have been killed in the ensuing clashes and 3,500 injured, according
to the United Nations. They include at least 256 civilians who died and 1,454
who were wounded, according to a doctors union.
The
fighting has left many people stranded at home without electricity, food or
water, and doctors and hospitals say they are struggling to cope.
As the
situation deteriorated, Antony J. Blinken, the secretary of state, and Molly
Phee, the assistant secretary of state for African affairs, had been in close
contact with the U.S. ambassador to Sudan, John T. Godfrey, officials said.
(Mr. Godfrey — the first U.S. ambassador to Sudan in a quarter-century —
arrived in the country about eight months ago.)
The first
step, said John Bass, the under secretary of state for management, was to get
various embassy personnel who were “pinned down in apartments scattered around
the city” consolidated in a small number of safer places.
As officials
were working on that, he said, they began to assess that as the conflict
continued, they could not reliably predict and depend on there being food,
fuel, power and other critical supplies to keep the embassy operating safely.
“It was
only at that point that we reluctantly concluded that the only really feasible
option for us in this case was to temporarily suspend operations, move those
operations — our diplomacy — offshore, and continue to work from there,” Mr.
Bass said. “But always with the intention of finding a path back to having our
flag up and our presence in Khartoum as quickly as we could.”
The
Pentagon had positioned more troops in recent days in Djibouti, where the U.S.
military has a base, to prepare for a rescue.
But with
the airport in the capital badly damaged by shelling and the land corridor to
Port Sudan — more than 500 miles away — seen as too risky, a limited evacuation
by airlift was seen as the best option, officials said.
While the
briefing for reporters was vaguer, two U.S. officials familiar with the
operation, who spoke on condition of anonymity, said the military airlifted
about 70 U.S. Embassy employees using both helicopters and V-22 Ospreys — a
plane that can take off and land vertically — from a site near the embassy after
sundown. The Navy’s SEAL Team 6 special force was involved, one of those
officials also said.
The airlift
additionally included a small number of diplomatic professionals from other
countries, Mr. Bass said. They had lived in the same apartment buildings as
some American diplomatic staff and arrived together at the embassy, he said.
“Essentially,
they were working together to get themselves from where they were in harm’s way
to the embassy, in some cases with a fair amount of creativity and ingenuity,”
he said, and once they were at the embassy “we felt the prudent thing to do was
to bring them out with us.”
In his
statement, Mr. Biden thanked Djibouti, Ethiopia and Saudi Arabia, saying they
were critical to the success of the operation.
“I am proud
of the extraordinary commitment of our embassy staff, who performed their
duties with courage and professionalism and embodied America’s friendship and
connection with the people of Sudan,” Mr. Biden said. “I am grateful for the
unmatched skill of our service members who successfully brought them to
safety.”
In part
because the airport is not operational, the government does not plan to carry
out a large-scale operation to evacuate American citizens who live in Sudan and
may want to leave, officials said. But Chris Maier, the assistant secretary of
defense for special operations and low-intensity conflict, said the government
would be working to try to help them.
While
officials are not advising or recommending that people try to drive to Port
Sudan, if some choose to undertake that journey, Mr. Maier said the government
was thinking about how to “make the overland route out of Sudan potentially
more viable.”
That could
include using reconnaissance to detect threats to convoys driving toward Port
Sudan, and to deploy naval assets outside the port to help those who arrive
there.
There are
believed to be about 16,000 Americans in Sudan. But one U.S. official said that
the government thinks only a small number — about 60 — of American citizens who
are not government officials intend to leave.
In a
statement addressing his decision to suspend operations at the embassy and
calling on both sides to extend a cease-fire, Mr. Blinken also said the
government “will continue to assist Americans in Sudan in planning for their
own safety and provide regular updates to U.S. citizens in the area.”
The
announcement of the evacuation capped a day of confusion, after Sudan’s
military chief vowed to help relocate nationals of several countries including
the United States, but the embassy said at the time that it was too dangerous.
Countless
residents of Khartoum have fled the city, where bodies line the streets, to
find refuge in safer suburbs and states. More than 15,000 people from the
western region of Darfur have fled into neighboring Chad, and humanitarian
organizations have reported being unable to work amid the incessant fighting.
Aid workers
and diplomats, who were often able to stay out of the fray in the past, have
this time found themselves targets. The World Food Program said that three of
its workers were killed. An American convoy was attacked this past week, and
the European Union ambassador to Sudan was assaulted in his home.
The army
chief, Gen. Abdel Fattah al-Burhan, who is Sudan’s de facto leader, said in a
statement on Saturday morning that his troops would facilitate the evacuation
of diplomats and citizens from Britain, China, France and the United States “in
the coming hours.”
Soon after,
however, the American Embassy said in a security alert that “due to the
uncertain security situation in Khartoum and closure of the airport, it is not
currently safe to undertake a U.S. government-coordinated evacuation of private
U.S. citizens.”
But hours
later, a Twitter account purportedly run by the paramilitary Rapid Support
Forces, led by General Burhan’s rival, Lt. Gen. Mohamed Hamdan, announced in a
statement that they had assisted American forces in evacuating all embassy
personnel and their families.
“The Rapid
Support Forces Command has coordinated with the U.S. Forces Mission consisting
of 6 aircraft, for evacuating diplomats and their families on Sunday morning,”
the statement said. (Twitter removed authentication last week, but the account
had a significant number of followers and appeared to be legitimate.
American
officials said that Gen. Michael E. Langley, the head of the military’s Africa
Command, had been in contact with the leaders of both factions ahead of the
operation. But Mr. Bass noted the claim on social media that the Rapid Security
Forces had “somehow coordinated with us and supported this operation” and
rejected it.
“That was
not the case,” he said. “They cooperated to the extent that they did not fire
on our service members in the course of the operation. And I would submit that
as much in their self-interest as anything else.”
U.S.
officials have said that about 16,000 American citizens were living in Sudan,
many of them dual nationals.
Several
countries have positioned planes in neighboring countries, ready to fly when
the airport is clear. By one estimate, the planes will be able to carry up to
4,000 people in total.
But any
flights in and out of Khartoum are risky. The area around the airport,
including the military headquarters, has been the site of some of the most
intense fighting over the past week. And residents said that gun battles
continued to rage in several parts of the city on Saturday morning, including
near the airport.
With the
flights most likely to be limited to diplomatic staff, at least initially,
other groups are making plans to leave the city by road. The United Nations is
preparing a large convoy to leave as early as Sunday, having negotiated safe
passage with the warring parties. It was unclear whether non-United Nations
personnel would be allowed to join the convoy.
Road travel
also involves considerable risk. Khartoum is 600 miles from the border with
Egypt and 525 miles from Port Sudan on the Red Sea — about the same distance
from New York City to Columbus, Ohio, but through areas contested by the two
sides.
Foreigners
and wealthy Sudanese have turned to private security companies to help escape
Khartoum, but risks remain. The security official said that one convoy carrying
17 people had made a 14-hour journey from the city on Friday, only to arrive in
a heavily contested area where gun battles continued on Saturday.
Earlier,
General al-Burhan said that diplomats from Saudi Arabia had been evacuated by
land to Port Sudan, in the country’s east, and taken to Saudi Arabia, with a
similar operation expected to take place for Jordanian citizens. Hungary’s
foreign minister said on Saturday that 14 Hungarian citizens and 48 foreign
nationals, most of them American and Italian citizens, had been evacuated by
sea and were headed to Egypt.
As the
clashes continued, Sudan’s health care system was teetering, and there were few
signs that the two warring factions would stop fighting. Out of 78 major
hospitals in the country, only 55 are operational, according to the physicians
association.
“The health
care system is about to collapse,” Mohamed Eisa, the secretary general of the
Sudanese American Physicians Association, a United States-based nonprofit, said
in a telephone interview from Khartoum. “We must secure a safe passage for the
injured.”
Gunfire had
stopped on Friday evening, leaving Khartoum residents hopeful that a break was
in sight. Dr. Eisa said that for the first time, he had been able to get some
sleep at his home in southern Khartoum, where the fighting has been continuous.
It did not
last long.
He woke up
on Saturday morning to the sound of gunfire and heavy machinery. “It was as if
nothing had happened,” he said of the dashed hopes for some respite.
Constant
Méheut contributed reporting from Paris and Eric Schmitt contributed reporting
from Washington state.
Charlie
Savage is a Washington-based national security and legal policy correspondent.
A recipient of the Pulitzer Prize, he previously worked at The Boston Globe and
The Miami Herald. His most recent book is “Power Wars: The Relentless Rise of
Presidential Authority and Secrecy.” @charlie_savage • Facebook
Michael D.
Shear is a veteran White House correspondent and two-time Pulitzer Prize winner
who was a member of team that won the Public Service Medal for Covid coverage
in 2020. He is the co-author of “Border Wars: Inside Trump's Assault on
Immigration.” @shearm
Elian
Peltier is the West Africa correspondent. He joined The Times in 2017 and was
previously based in Paris and London. He now lives in Dakar, Senegal.
@ElianPeltier
Declan
Walsh is the chief Africa correspondent for The Times. He was previously based
in Egypt, covering the Middle East, and in Pakistan. He previously worked at
The Guardian and is the author of “The Nine Lives of Pakistan.” @declanwalsh
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