British nationals stranded in Sudan have spoken of their fears after their relatives were killed and wounded in the conflict.
As Britain’s first civilian evacuation flight took off from a rough airfield north of Khartoum on Tuesday afternoon, some UK citizens said they remained trapped in the country.
A British doctor based in London told how her 67-year-old father, a retired doctor who worked for the NHS for more than 30 years, remains in Sudan after being shot in the thigh.
The woman, who gave her name as Dr A to protect her family, said her father had been visiting his 87-year-old mother for Ramadan when gunfire, shelling and airstrikes raged across Khartoum in a fierce fight for power between the army and paramilitary Rapid Support Forces (RSF).
Dr A said her father drove across the city at dawn to pick up his mother to move her to a safer part of the city when his car came under fire and he was shot by the RSF.
The 35-year-old said her father has now made the difficult decision to stay in Sudan because he has been told that his mother, who is not a British citizen, is not allowed on an evacuation flight.
Only British passport holders and their immediate family with existing UK entry clearance are eligible, the government has said.
Dr A told the Guardian: “My grandmother has health problems and had no water or electricity for days when the fighting started. So my father decided to go and take her and bring her to his own home.
“On his way there his car started to get gunshots fired at it. He kept driving and then he decided to stop because the intensity and frequency of the gunshots increased. At this point, it was about two three hours just before sunset so he was still fasting, and someone from the RSF pulled him out of the car.
“He can remember everything that happened. He said he was very faint, because it was very hot and he was scared. He did feel intense heat in his thigh, but he didn’t look because of everything else that was going on.”
She said the RSF were convinced her father was from the military but they let him go after he insisted he was a doctor who was trying to help his elderly and sick mother.
Dr A said: “When he arrived at the house, my sister opened the door and she noticed there was blood on his clothes. He noticed the blood as well. They brought them inside and my uncle, who’s a medic, tried to clean the wound and wrap it up.”
Dr A said she is devastated that her grandmother cannot join her father on the evacuation, adding: “I’m trying to put pressure on the government and the Home Office because my dad cannot leave without my grandmother. She’s an elderly lady, she’s dependent and she’s sick. Who’s going to look after her when he leaves? And so it’s a very difficult situation.”
Muhammed Elahi, a 27-year-old car dealer and former restaurant owner from Birmingham, said he is also unable to leave Sudan because he has been told his wife, Ghaliya, who is five months pregnant, cannot be evacuated because she is not a British citizen.
He told how he has repeatedly tried to get information from the British embassy about whether she could travel with him, saying: “Obviously, if my wife’s not allowed to leave with me, I’d have to stay here because no man is going to leave his pregnant wife in this situation.”
The couple, who have lived in Sudan since they married in August, woke up to the sound of explosions as the fighting broke out near their apartment in Khartoum’s Al-Riyadh district.
“We could see thick black smoke from where bombs had been dropped and hear non-stop gunfire. There were fighter jets flying over our house. I was looking out the window and I think I could see the RSF firing anti-aircraft weapons in the air at the jets. The bullets were literally landing on my neighbour’s roof,” he said.
Elahi, who had aspirations of opening a cafe in the capital, said he and his wife remained trapped in their apartment for days before deciding to flee just before Eid.
“The electricity cut out and then the water cut out. So for three, four days we had no water or electricity and it was touching 40 degrees. It was unbearable. There was no shops open to get food from and we were fasting. We had little to no food so we basically began rationing, and then it just got so unbearable and we made a decision to leave,” he said.
The couple travelled to a family friend’s home on the outskirts of the city.
Elahi said his situation is complicated by the fact that he has a five-year-old son from a previous relationship in Birmingham. “That’s been the hardest for me because I came here to make a better future for him. In a sense I feel like I kind of abandoned him.”
Soha Khattab, a dual national who worked at the University of Reading, said she is trapped in Gezira with her husband, Mazin Mohamed, 28, who is Sudanese.
The 24-year-old, who travelled to Khartoum for her wedding in January, said her situation is “tricky” because her husband’s passport is in the British Embassy in Sudan.
“He sent his passport off to get a visa way before any of this conflict happened because we planned to travel to the UK. But it’s now stuck.”
Khattab said they have not slept since the fighting broke out, which forced them to flee south to Gezira state.
She said: “Unfortunately we’re stuck and we are not sure where to go. We’ve been given very conflicting information and we are not willing to risk our lives once again to travel elsewhere. Our journey here to Gezira was not a safe journey at all and we’ve been stranded in the middle of nowhere. It took us 12 hours, there was no water and we’d already been struggling for the past eight days so it’s been really really disappointing that we’ve been given no help or information from the British government.”
