France, Germany, the United States, the United Kingdom and other countries began on Sunday to evacuate their nationals or their diplomatic personnel from Sudan where the deadly fighting between army and paramilitaries has been raging for more than a week. .
Two French military planes carrying 200 people of different nationalities landed in Djibouti.
The German army announced that it had evacuated 101 people from Sudan by military aircraft. “The first Airbus A400M is on its way to Jordan with its 101 evacuees,” the army said on Twitter, adding that two other planes had been dispatched to Sudan to help with the evacuations.
The Spanish government also explained that it evacuated around 100 people on Sunday by military plane, with around 30 Spaniards and some 70 nationals of other countries on board.
Italy evacuated “about 200 people” on the same day, according to Foreign Affairs, with Prime Minister Giorgia Meloni later stating that all Italians “who had asked to leave were evacuated” from Italy. Sudan, with “foreign citizens”.
Egypt, a large northern neighbor, announced the evacuation “by land of 436 nationals” as gunfire and explosions shook the Sudanese capital Khartoum again on Sunday, according to witnesses.
Pope Francis called for “dialogue” in the face of the “serious” situation in the country, where, since April 15, the two generals in power since their 2021 putsch have embarked on a merciless war.
The violence, mainly in Khartoum and Darfur, in the west, left more than 420 dead and 3,700 injured, according to the World Health Organization (WHO).
They have displaced tens of thousands of people to other states in Sudan, or to Chad and Egypt.
The United Kingdom and the United States announced the evacuation of their diplomats, with their families, when Turkey and other countries indicated that they would try to evacuate their nationals.
A “very complex operation”, according to Dutch Foreign Minister Wopke Hoekstra who announced the evacuation of two groups of Dutch people: the first on board a French plane and the other left Khartoum by road in a convoy of ONU.
“International actors will have less influence when they leave the country,” said Hamid Khalafallah, a researcher specializing in Sudan. “Don’t leave the Sudanese behind unprotected,” he pleaded.
In Khartoum, the five million inhabitants fear an intensification of violence after the departure of foreigners, in their city deprived of running water and electricity, with often faulty telephone and internet networks.
Army airstrikes and paramilitary cannon fire have already destroyed or forced the closure of “72% of hospitals” in combat zones, according to the doctors’ union.
In the streets, lampposts are lying on the ground, burnt shops are still smoking. Here, a bank was gutted. There, despite everything, a mechanic tries to keep his shop open in case one of the very few passers-by needs his services.
The conflict erupted on April 15 between the army of General Abdel Fattah al-Burhane, Sudan’s de facto ruler, and his deputy-turned-rival, General Mohamed Hamdane Daglo, who commands the much-feared paramilitary Rapid Support Forces (RSF). ).
The two generals had taken power with a putsch in 2021 which brutally interrupted the democratic transition launched at the fall of dictator Omar al-Bashir in 2019.
But they are divided on the question of the integration of the FSR into the regular troops, after months of political negotiations under international auspices.
While the two sides are also engaged in an information war, it is impossible to know who controls the country’s institutions or the airports and what state they are in after being the scene of heavy fighting.
Prisoners have been released from at least one prison, lawyers said, while other sources report, without anyone being able to verify it, attacks on two other prisons, in particular that of Kober which hosts the whole political detainees including Bashir.
This week, Eid al-Fitr, which marks the end of Ramadan, has had a bitter taste for the people of Khartoum.
“We live in the dark: first, we were cut off from running water, then we had no more electricity”, laments one of them, Awad Ahmed Chérif.
Living conditions are probably worse in Darfur, the scene of a terrible conflict in the 2000s, where no one can go immediately. On site, a doctor from Médecins sans frontières (MSF) evokes a “catastrophic situation”.
In Sudan, Africa’s third-largest gold producer yet one of the world’s poorest countries, health services have been on their knees for decades and a third of its 45 million people go hungry.
The cessation of operations by most humanitarian organizations will aggravate the situation. And the conflict now threatens to gain ground beyond Sudan’s borders, experts say.
04/24/2023 01:22:03 – Khartoum (AFP) – © 2023 AFP
