By the time Britain’s first civilian evacuation flight had taken off from a rough airfield north of Khartoum on Tuesday afternoon, other European nations were highlighting their successes in evacuating hundreds of their citizens from Sudan.
Britain’s military may have been the first to use the Wadi Seidna base on Sunday afternoon, with permission of Sudan’s embattled government, to evacuate two dozen diplomatic staff, but the UK then passed on control of the airport to Germany.
At that point, with fighting between the Sudanese government and RSF rebels still raging in and around Khartoum, Germany and France began their own evacuation process. Germany took over air traffic control and five flights had departed between late on Sunday and Tuesday lunchtime. A sixth and final German rescue flight, flying via Jordan, was due to leave on Tuesday evening.
The first five flights had evacuated 490 people from 30 countries, highlighted as a “huge achievement” by the country’s foreign secretary Annalena Baerbock.
“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,” Baerbock added, in an undiplomatic sideswipe at the policy pursued so far by the US and, until Tuesday morning, the UK.
Criticism in Britain had mounted on Monday following the rescue of 24 embassy staff in a risky operation that involved elite forces, probably from the SAS, picking them up in Khartoum and taking them to Wadi Seidna since no evacuation had been offered to the 2,000-plus other stranded Britons.
That changed shortly before 7am on Tuesday when James Cleverly, the foreign secretary, announced the UK was “coordinating an evacuation”. A Hercules transport, based at RAF Akrotiri in Cyprus, took off early in the morning with 130 Royal Marines and consular and immigration staff on board.
They arrived at the airport to set up and were ready around 11am, and with the ceasefire just about holding, a message went out from the Foreign Office telling people to travel “as soon as possible” to the airstrip, whose location was spelled out with GPS coordinates and the What Three Words mapping app.
People in Britain worrying about relatives in Sudan, though, remained concerned. Manal, a doctor in London, told the Guardian she had been lost contact with her 77-year-old mother, who had gone to attend a wedding in the country, because phone and internet connections were down.
“How is the government or Foreign Office or whatever going to contact people now?” the doctor said at lunchtime. Later on Tuesday, said she had finally reached her mother and brother, also in the country, but said they had not been personally by the Foreign Office told to head to the airbase.
By the evening, the family had taken matters into their own hands, and had decided to travel to the airbase regardless, worrying that otherwise it would not be possible to get there in the short window for the planned evacuation flights home.
The Hercules plane then headed back to Cyprus, prompting inaccurate speculation that it may have been carrying the first evacuated people on it. Instead, it was returning to base largely empty, and as Ben Wallace, the defence secretary, was to explain in a late lunchtime update, there was a slight complication.
Pressed by Tobias Ellwood, the chair of the defence select committee, as to when the first flights with passengers would take off, Wallace told MPs that RAF flights out would start “if and when the Germans leave”, explaining that Germany’s military was “running the airfield at the moment”.
It was a surprising answer, highlighting how the UK had fallen behind. Two hours later it emerged the first British evacuation flight had finally taken off, making the four to five hour trip back to Cyprus and safety – given permission to leave by the German-run air traffic control.
Other countries meanwhile were winding down. France’s defence ministry said its rescue Operation Sagittaire (British officials were declining to say on Tuesday what the UK equivalent was called) had conducted nine return flights, rescuing 500 people from 40 countries, and had laid on 10 convoys to the airbase.
But despite being behind France and Germany, the UK was notably ahead of the US. As night fell in Sudan, there was still no sign of a US airlift for its 16,000 civilians in country, even though it was the US secretary of state, Antony Blinken, who had helped broker the 72-hour ceasefire.
Two more British flights from north of Khartoum were expected overnight, expected to rescue several hundred and bring them back to the UK and elsewhere from Wednesday. And a contingent of Royal Marines remained in Port Sudan, where Wallace had directed the frigate HMS Lancaster to dock, in case the airstrip was suddenly shut down by a breach in the ceasefire.
