Second UK evacuation flight arrives in Cyprus – report
We now have confirmation that Two Royal Air Force planes have landed at Larnaca Airport in Cyprus as of 6.30am on Wednesday, with the first charter flight back to London set to depart later in the day, PA repors.
Families with young children were among those on the first flights that landed in Cyprus with a British man telling the BBC that his sister, who left Sudan overnight, felt an overwhelming sense of relief.
Three planes were due to have left conflict-torn Khartoum for Cyprus by Wednesday morning, with prime minister Rishi Sunak pledging “many more” would follow as he warned of a “critical” 24 hours.
Defence Secretary Ben Wallace said the UK would take charge of the Wadi Saeedna airstrip near the capital from German forces, after Berlin said its final evacuation flight would leave on Tuesday night.
He said 120 British troops have already been supporting the operation there.
About 260 people were expected to be flown out overnight on three flights, the first landing on Tuesday evening with about 40 people on board.
British nationals have been told to make their own way to the site with some fearing they will not make it due to a petrol shortage, PA reports.
Key events
Braverman: 200 to 300 people evacuated from Sudan so far in British airlift
The UK home secretary, Suella Braverman, has said 200 to 300 people have been evacuated from Sudan so far as part of the airlift.
PA Media reports she told Sky News: “We commenced an evacuation mission in the last 24-48 hours and we expect there to be approximately 200 to 300 people who have been relocated from Sudan in the last few flights.
“We are now commencing an extensive operation, working with over 1,000 personnel from the RAF and the armed forces.”
She defended the UK’s response, saying the government had to cope with a “larger cohort of British nationals in Sudan compared to many other countries”.
It is worth noting as well that in this morning’s First Edition newsletter about Sudan, my colleague Archie Bland has this to say about some useful background explainers if you are trying to get up to speed with the situation in the country:
To understand the basis of the burgeoning civil war in Sudan, start with this explainer from the beginning of the conflict and this visual guide to the violence, which is most severe in Khartoum and the Darfur region. Nesrine Malik’s long read about the rise of Hemedti is a superb overview of his rivalry with Burhan, and what that has meant for the country.
You can sign up for First Edition here.
Helena Smith reports for the Guardian from Cyprus:
Despite British prime minister Rishi Sunak announcing that “many more” aircraft will be bringing in evacuees to Cyprus on Wednesday the evident empty seats on the first flight to land in Larnaka has raised questions.
The A400 M transport planes famously delivers “heavier and larger loads” than other tactical airlifter,s and yet only 39 people were on board when it arrived on the Eastern Mediterranean island.
UK nationals have been urged to make their own way to an airstrip in Khartoum – a journey that requires passing through countless checkpoints under “their own steam”, in sharp contrast to civilians from other nations who have been evacuated from the beseiged capital with the help of special forces.
Sunak said everyone who appeared and was “eligible” was allowed to board the plane. A second flight carrying over 100 UK passport holders and dependents arrived in Cyprus about 6.30am
The main story in the Times of London today has a little on British politicians being defensive about criticism of their evacuation operation. The paper writes:
Rishi Sunak defended the decision to prioritise the removal of British diplomats after Germany appeared to accuse the UK of abandoning its people in a war zone. Annalena Baerbock, the German foreign minister, said that Berlin would not leave civilians “to their own devices” and that “unlike in other countries” its evacuation had included all citizens. “It was important to us that, unlike in other countries, an evacuation not only applies to our embassy staff, but to all local Germans and our partners,” she said.
Sunak argued that diplomats and their families had been “targeted”. He said: “The security situation on the ground in Sudan is complicated, it is volatile, and we wanted to make sure we could put in place processes that are going to work for people, that are going to be safe and effective.”
One defence source dismissed suggestions that Britain had abandoned its citizens. “With the benefit of hindsight it’s easy to say that we could have got more people out sooner, but by going first we paved the way for others to follow our lead,” the source said.
The son of a British citizen trying to escape Sudan has said his family have had “very limited” contact from the Home Office.
PA Media reports Saleh El-Khalifa, whose mother is attempting to flee Sudan with her elderly father, said the Home Office advice to stay indoors had not been a “viable option”.
His mother was forced to make a journey to Port Sudan with her 86-year-old father, who suffers from a terminal illness, and is trying to cross the border into Saudi Arabia, he said.
Khalifa told BBC Breakfast the journey was “beyond challenging” and that information from the Home Office had been “very limited”, adding: “It could be points that I’m not able to speak to her for a day or two.
“The first few days me and my sister tried to contact (the Home Office). The advice was the same, to stay in doors and not move. That wasn’t a viable option as there was no guarantee of their safety by staying in one location.
“That is why the majority of people have had to move to ensure their own life and safety, which is a situation no one should have to be put in.”
This morning, our First Edition newsletter has its focus on Sudan, and my colleagues Archie Bland and Nesrene Malik, whose family home is on the outskirts of Khartoum, have spoken about the difficulty Sudanese people face in fleeing the fighting:
The key routes out of the capital go north-east to Port Sudan, a city made relatively safe by its lack of strategic significance and status as an evacuation hub for westerners leaving the country, and north to the Egyptian border, where refugees must travel onward to Cairo. Even if the ceasefire were impeccably observed, there are plenty of other impediments to taking them. In this piece for Middle East Eye, Oscar Rickett and Rayhan Uddin report that ticket prices for buses out of Khartoum have at least doubled. The price for a ticket on one route from the capital to the Egyptian border has risen from $66 to $400.
The requisitioning of fuel by the two armies has meant prices have likewise soared for anyone considering travelling by car. “And you don’t just need money for that,” Nesrine said. “You need more for unforeseen costs, Egyptian currency to pay for a visa if you’re going to the border, more for onward travel to Cairo. Banks are closed, there are no ATMs or currency exchanges open, and the main money transfer app isn’t working on people’s phones. So you have to find the money before you leave in a country with no working financial network.” Meanwhile, the unreliability of phone and internet signal makes planning exit routes and checking on loved ones far more difficult.
While there are stories of remarkable generosity on the road to Port Sudan – like this one, where Twitter user @dalliasd said that in “every village and town we passed through, people would come out with hibiscus juice and cold water for the ‘Khartoum travellers’” – the journey is fraught with danger. There are fears of attacks from RSF forces who hail from poorer marginalised regions of the country and “view people from Khartoum as part of an elite that has excluded them and looked down on them,” Nesrine said. The same applies to the road north, which “runs through harsh desert territory with no shops, no towns, in 40 or 45 degree heat.”
Reuters has a little more here about the possible whereabouts of Omar al-Bashir, Sudan’s former leader. Two sources at a hospital have told the news agency that he had been moved from Kober prison to a military hospital in the Sudanese capital before heavy fighting broke out there on 15 April.
The whereabouts of Bashir came into question after a former minister in his government, Ali Haroun, announced on Tuesday he had left the prison with other ex-officials. Both Bashir and Haroun are wanted by the international criminal court over alleged atrocities in Darfur.
Helen Sullivan
Eibhlin Priestley was two months into a research trip to Sudan when the fighting broke out in Khartoum. The PhD candidate was preparing to leave her apartment for an interview when her partner, who was visiting from Germany, heard loud noises outside, which they soon realised were gunshots and explosions.
They covered the windows with mattresses and furniture and stayed in the apartment for four days. The temperature reached 40 degrees in the daytime, and they had no electricity or running water and limited drinking water.
At night it was pitch dark and they could hear heavy fighting very nearby. After a bullet was fired through their kitchen window, they moved in with their downstairs neighbours and another family.
Priestley, 30, and her partner stayed with the families downstairs for several days until they decided to leave, offering to take both of them with them. She decided to stay – they were expecting a pickup organised by her insurance company. But the driver was not allowed through, so the couple moved in with her landlord’s family. When they offered to take the couple with them to a safer part of the city in south Khartoum, they decided to go: they had heard reports that RSF soldiers had started entering civilian homes.
“Then we drove through [Khartoum 2, a neighbourhood close to some of the fiercest fighting] and it was just full of RSF, they were down every single street, lining the roads,” she says. The RSF stopped the car.
“And then one of the soldiers said he didn’t like the look of my partner and pulled him out of the car”. The man ordered her partner behind a wall, “making it clear he was about to shoot him,” she told the Guardian:
Most Chinese nationals have been safely evacuated in groups from Sudan to border ports of neighbouring countries, China’s foreign ministry said on Tuesday.
Spokesperson Mao Ming told a regular press briefing that it has not received any casualty reports of Chinese citizens in Sudan so far.
The Chinese consulate-general in Jeddah issued a statement early on Wednesday advising citizens who planned to evacuate to Saudi Arabia to enter through the Jeddah Islamic Port, where the consulate had sent a working group to assist evacuees.
The statement said Chinese citizens have been evacuating on their own to Saudi Arabia, but did not specify how many have arrived there.
The British government is considering a possible seaborne evacuation from Port Sudan, 500 miles from the capital, PA Media reports.
HMS Lancaster and the RFA Cardigan Bay have been sent to the region.
The UK military could be ready to use force if needed to protect the airbase in the event it comes under attack during the airlift, although the troops are there primarily to help with logistics, the i paper reports.
The defence secretary, Ben Wallace, told LBC Radio: “The Germans are leaving tomorrow, and we will take over the facilitation at the airfield. And the reason the Germans are leaving is people have stopped coming in large numbers.”
He said only one nation can facilitate the airfield at a time, adding: “If the Spanish or the Italians or anyone else wants to fly, we’ll be the ones giving permissions effectively.”
There is “some risk that some of the planes are not full”, he said, as there are “not thousands at the gate” as in the evacuation from Afghanistan.
Second UK evacuation flight arrives in Cyprus – report
We now have confirmation that Two Royal Air Force planes have landed at Larnaca Airport in Cyprus as of 6.30am on Wednesday, with the first charter flight back to London set to depart later in the day, PA repors.
Families with young children were among those on the first flights that landed in Cyprus with a British man telling the BBC that his sister, who left Sudan overnight, felt an overwhelming sense of relief.
Three planes were due to have left conflict-torn Khartoum for Cyprus by Wednesday morning, with prime minister Rishi Sunak pledging “many more” would follow as he warned of a “critical” 24 hours.
Defence Secretary Ben Wallace said the UK would take charge of the Wadi Saeedna airstrip near the capital from German forces, after Berlin said its final evacuation flight would leave on Tuesday night.
He said 120 British troops have already been supporting the operation there.
About 260 people were expected to be flown out overnight on three flights, the first landing on Tuesday evening with about 40 people on board.
British nationals have been told to make their own way to the site with some fearing they will not make it due to a petrol shortage, PA reports.
Omar al-Bashir missing amid prison attack
An attack on the prison holding deposed Sudanese president Omar al-Bashir has raised questions about his whereabouts, with one of the warring sides saying he is being held in a secure location and the other alleging he has been released.
Bashir, who ruled Sudan for three decades was overthrown during a popular uprising in 2019. He is wanted by the international criminal court (ICC) for genocide and other crimes committed during the conflict in Sudan’s western Darfur region in the 2000s.
The Sudanese military and the paramilitary Rapid Support Forces, which together had removed Bashir from power during mass protests, are now battling one another across the capital. The fighting reached the prison over the weekend, with conflicting reports about what transpired.
Military officials told the Associated Press that Bashir, as well as Abdel-Rahim Muhammad Hussein and Ahmed Haroun – who both held senior security positions during the Darfur crisis – had been moved to a military-run medical facility in Khartoum under tight security for their own safety.
The army later accused the RSF of donning military uniforms and attacking the prison, saying they released inmates and looted the facility. The RSF, led by Mohamed Hamdan Dagalo, known as Hemedti, denied the allegations and claimed that the military “forcibly evacuated” the facility as part of a plan to restore Bashir to power.
Turkish civilians arrive home
The first Turkish civilians evacuated from Sudan returned to Turkey on Wednesday, with more than 100 people arriving by plane at Istanbul Airport, Reuters footage showed.
The Turks came from the Ethiopian capital Addis Ababa, where they had arrived overland from Sudanese capital Khartoum.
Several more flights were expected later on Wednesday to evacuate the remaining Turkish citizens crossing to Ethiopia from Sudan.
Fighting flared anew in Sudan late on Tuesday despite a ceasefire declaration by the warring factions as more people fled Khartoum and former officials, including one facing international war crimes charges, left prison.
Turkey’s President Tayyip Erdogan has called on both sides in Sudan to end conflict and return to negotiations.
Boat carrying 1,687 civilians reportedly reaches Saudi Arabia
A boat with 1,687 civilians from more than 50 countries fleeing violence in Sudan arrived in Saudi Arabia on Wednesday, the foreign ministry said, the largest rescue effort by the Gulf kingdom to date.
The group was “transported by one of the Kingdom’s ships, and the Kingdom was keen to provide all the basic needs of foreign nationals in preparation for their departure,” the ministry said in a statement.
Saudi Arabia has received several rounds of evacuees by air and sea, starting with boats that arrived in Jeddah on Saturday carrying 150 people including foreign diplomats and officials.
Thirteen of the civilians who arrived on Wednesday were Saudi, while the rest came from countries across the Middle East, Africa, Europe, Asia and North and Central America, the foreign ministry statement said.
All told, 2,148 people have been evacuated to the kingdom from Sudan so far, including more than 2,000 foreigners, the statement said.
Sudanese scramble to flee their homeland
Kaamil Ahmed
Long queues are building on Sudan’s borders, where people fleeing intense fighting are facing daylong waits and demands for visas in order to cross to safety.
On Tuesday, the UN’s refugee agency (UNHCR) said it was expecting 270,000 refugees to cross into Chad and South Sudan, including South Sudanese returning home. It did not have projections for Egypt or Ethiopia, where many fleeing from the capital, Khartoum, have headed, or for other neighbouring countries. The UNHCR estimated that, so far, up to 20,000 refugees have crossed into Chad from Darfur, and 4,000 into South Sudan.
The intense fighting in Khartoum, which has killed 459 civilians and left many short of supplies, medicine and cash, has caused a scramble for buses heading to the borders or to Port Sudan, where ferries to Saudi Arabia operate.
WhatsApp groups set up to help people get out of Khartoum have been circulating numbers of bus services that promise to reach the borders. Many have headed for Kandahar bus station on Khartoum’s outskirts – some on foot despite the danger of being caught in the fighting – but have found it increasingly crowded, with prices rapidly rising. Tickets reportedly cost more than $500 (£403):
UN chief warns fighting could cause ‘immense suffering for years’
Sudanese and foreigners streamed out of the capital of Khartoum and other battle zones, as fighting Tuesday shook a new three-day truce brokered by the United States and Saudi Arabia. Aid agencies raised increasing alarm over the crumbling humanitarian situation in a country reliant on outside help.
Calls for negotiations to end the crisis in Africa’s third-largest nation have been ignored. For many Sudanese, the departure of diplomats, aid workers and other foreigners and the closure of embassies are terrifying signs that international powers expect the mayhem to only worsen.
UN Secretary-General António Guterres warned that the power struggle between rival generals and their military forces is not only putting Sudan’s future at risk, “it is lighting a fuse that could detonate across borders, causing immense suffering for years, and setting development back by decades.”
The UN chief urged Sudanese military, commanded by Gen. Abdel Fattah Burhan, and the rival Rapid Support Forces, a paramilitary group led by Gen. Mohamed Hamdan Dagalo, “to silence the guns” immediately.
“The conflict will not, and must not, be resolved on the battlefield,” Guterres told an emergency meeting of the UN security council late Tuesday.
A second evacuation flight carrying UK nationals has arrived in Cyprus, the BBC reports.
The British Foreign Office has not yet publicly confirmed the arrival of the flight or how many people were on board.
BBC reporter Nicholas Garnett posted a video of what appeared to be the plane taking off again this morning from Larnaca airport for a third run to Sudan. A total of three rescue flights are planned.
An RAF C130 leaves Larnaca Airport in Cyprus heading back to Sudan to pick up more British families wanting to escape the fighting. pic.twitter.com/LHQTSYwCST
— Nick Garnett (@NicholasGarnett) April 26, 2023
Opening summary
Welcome back to the Guardian’s live coverage of the conflict in Sudan.
As evacuations continue and fighting erodes a planned three-day ceasefire, UN Secretary-General António Guterres has warned that the power struggle between rival generals and their military forces is not only putting Sudan’s future at risk, “it is lighting a fuse that could detonate across borders, causing immense suffering for years, and setting development back by decades.”
The UN chief urged Sudanese military, commanded by Gen. Abdel Fattah Burhan, and the rival Rapid Support Forces, a paramilitary group led by Gen. Mohamed Hamdan Dagalo, “to silence the guns” immediately.
“The conflict will not, and must not, be resolved on the battlefield,” Guterres told an emergency meeting of the UN security council late Tuesday.
We’ll have more on this story shortly. In the meantime, here are the key recent developments:
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Plans are in hand for Sudan’s army commander and de facto leader of the country, Abdel Fattah al-Burhan, to meet the head of the Rapid Support Forces (RSF), Mohamed Hamadan Dagalo, known as Hemedti, according to a newspaper in Egypt.
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The RSF has claimed that the Sudanese army has breached the 72-hour ceasefire. Gunfire and airstrikes were heard in Khartoum and Omdurman, according to news agencies on Tuesday. The RSF’s claims have not been independently verified.
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Britain’s first evacuation flight landed in Cyprus on Tuesday evening after Sudan’s army and the RSF backed a ceasefire. Two more flights carrying about 220 people in total are expected later.
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Rishi Sunak said there will be “many more” flights evacuating British nationals from Sudan on Wednesday. The prime minister added more than 1,000 people had been contacted.
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The UK defence secretary, Ben Wallace, said evacuations on C130 Hercules and A400M planes would take place for as long as is possible. Germany was expected to fly its sixth extraction service on Tuesday, rescuing a total of almost 500 people.
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There is a “high risk” of a biological hazard incident, according to the World Health Organization, because one of the warring factions has taken control of the national public laboratory in Sudan, which holds samples of diseases including polio and measles. “There is a huge biological risk associated with the occupation of the central public health lab,” said the WHO’s Nima Saeed Abid.
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The UN refugee agency has said there could be further displacement of people, as thousands have already streamed into neighbouring Chad and South Sudan. Since the outbreak of the fighting on 15 April, at least 20,000 Sudanese have fled into Chad and about 4,000 South Sudanese refugees who had been living in Sudan have returned to their home country. One projected refugee total from the UN is as high as 270,000.
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The International Rescue Committee has raised concerns about 3,000 people who have arrived at the Tunaydbah refugee camp in east Sudan, adding to the 28,000 refugees who already live there. An official has said the organisers believe more people will arrive at the camp, which has grown by more than 10% since fighting broke out.
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Ukraine said it had evacuated 138 people, including 87 of its own citizens, from Sudan to Egypt during the ongoing ceasefire.
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Two buses evacuating South African nationals from Sudan have arrived safely at the border with Egypt, a spokesperson for South Africa’s Department of International Relations and cooperation has said.
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France has helped to airlift Irish citizens out of Sudan, according to the country’s ambassador to Dublin. Vincent Guérend said 36 Irish people were among the 500 flown from Khartoum to Djibouti on three French flights in recent days, PA Media reports.