Foreign nationals being evacuated from Sudan as clashes rage

The Sudanese army says it will facilitate the evacuation of diplomats and nationals of the United Kingdom, the United States, France, and China on board military transport planes from the capital, Khartoum, as heavy fighting between the forces of rival generals entered a second week.

In a statement on Saturday, the army announced that General Fattah al-Burhan agreed to facilitate and secure the foreign nationals' evacuation "in the coming hours.”

Previous plans to evacuate foreign nationals have not been implemented due to safety issues, as Khartoum's international airport has been closed since the fighting erupted last weekend between the troops loyal to Burhan and the leader of a rival paramilitary faction — the Rapid Support Forces (RSF) —Mohammed Hamdan Daglo.

More than 400 people have been killed and thousands wounded since last week.

British Prime Minister Rishi Sunak chaired a Cobra meeting - an emergency response committee - on Saturday morning about the situation in Sudan.

His government said it was "doing everything possible to support British nationals and diplomatic staff in Khartoum.”

Citing a British citizen in Khartoum, the BBC said she felt "completely abandoned" by the UK government.

She said she had not been provided "much information at all" about possible plans to be evacuated.

"It remains very depressing, worrying, and confusing to be a Brit on the ground here," she said. "We're still very much in the dark.”

In the meantime, the European Union (EU) said it was planning for a possible evacuation of its citizens from Khartoum when security allows.

"We are trying to coordinate an operation to get our civilians out of the city which is now in a high-risk situation. We are working on different possibilities for taking people out," a senior EU official said. 

"For the time being, the assessment of those on the ground, including the EU embassy, is that the security conditions are not in place for going ahead with an operation of this kind" the official added.

Some 1,500 EU nationals are currently trapped in Khartoum; including nationals from France, Germany, and Italy.

US military prepares options for possible Sudan evacuation

The US military is preparing options to evacuate the US Embassy in Sudan, Defense Secretary Lloyd Austin said on Friday as the Biden administration weighed whether to pull personnel out of the country

In the latest development, Saudi Arabia announced the first evacuation of its citizens and other nationals on Saturday.

"The first evacuation vessel from Sudan has arrived, carrying 50 (Saudi) citizens and a number of nationals from friendly countries," the state-run Al-Ekhbariya television said.

Al-Burhan also confirmed that diplomats from Saudi Arabia had already been evacuated from Port Sudan and airlifted back to the kingdom.

He said Jordan’s diplomats would soon be evacuated in the same way.

Daglo said in a statement he had "discussed the current crisis" with Guterres, and was "focused on the humanitarian truce, safe passages, and protecting humanitarian workers".

The evacuation has gotten underway as heavy gunfire, loud explosions, and fighter jets roared in many parts of the capital since Saturday morning, according to witnesses.

A temporary truce saw fighting momentarily stop on the first day of Eid al-Fitr which marked the end of the Muslim holy month of Ramadan on Friday.

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