KHARTOUM, Sudan (AP) — As foreign governments airlifted hundreds of their diplomats and other citizens to safety, Sudanese on Monday desperately sought ways to escape the chaos, fearing that the country’s two rival generals will escalate their all-out battle for power once evacuations are completed.
In dramatic evacuation operations, convoys of foreign diplomats, civilian teachers, students, workers and families from dozens of countries wound past combatants at tense front lines in the capital of Khartoum to reach extraction points. Others drove hundreds of miles to the country’s east coast. A stream of European, Mideast, African and Asian military aircraft flew in all day Sunday and Monday to ferry them out.
But for many Sudanese, the airlift was a terrifying sign that international powers, after failing repeatedly to broker cease-fires, only expect a worsening of the fighting that has already pushed the population into disaster. The latest nominal cease-fire, which brought almost no reduction in fighting, was due to run out Monday evening.
Sudanese face a harrowing search for safety in the constantly shifting battle of explosions, gunfire and armed fighters looting shops and homes. Many have been huddling in their homes for nine days. Food and fuel are leaping in price and harder to find, electricity and internet are cut off in much of the country, and hospitals are near collapse.
Those who can afford it were making the 15-hour long drive to the Egyptian border or to Port Sudan on the east coast. Those without means to get abroad streamed out to relatively calmer provinces along the Nile north and south of Khartoum. Many more were trapped, with cash in short supply and transport costs spiraling.
“Traveling out of Khartoum has become a luxury,” said Shahin al-Sherif, a high school teacher. The 27-year-old al-Sherif was frantically trying to arrange transport out of Khartoum for himself, his younger sister, mother, aunt and grandmother. They had been trapped for days in their home in Khartoum’s Amarat neighborhood while fighting raged outside. Finally, they moved to a safer district farther out.
But al-Sherif expects things to get worse and worries his sister, aunt and grandmother, all diabetic, won’t be able to get the supplies they need. The problem is, bus ticket prices have more than quadrupled. Renting a bus for 50 people to get to the Egyptian border has reached the equivalent of $14,000, he said.
Amani el-Taweel, an Egyptian expert on Africa, warned of “horrific suffering” for Sudanese unable to leave.
