The US military is preparing options to evacuate the US embassy in Sudan, the US Defense Secretary says, as the Biden Administration weighs whether to pull personnel out of the country’s increasingly unstable capital.
“We’ve deployed some forces into theatre to ensure that we provide as many options as possible if we are called on to do something – and we haven’t been called on to do anything yet,” US Defense Secretary Lloyd Austin told a news conference at Ramstein Air Base in Germany on Friday.
“No decision on anything has been made.”
Forces commanded by two previously allied leaders of Sudan’s ruling council began a violent power struggle last weekend.
Hundreds have died so far and a nation reliant on food aid has been tipped into what the United Nations calls a humanitarian catastrophe.
White House national security spokesman John Kirby said President Joe Biden approved a plan this week to move US forces nearby in case they are needed to help evacuate diplomats.
“We are simply pre-positioning some additional capabilities nearby in case that they’re needed,” Kirby told reporters.
Stranded diplomats
With the airport in Khartoum caught in the fighting and the skies unsafe, nations including the US, Japan, South Korea, Germany and Spain have been unable to evacuate embassy staff.
Cameron Hudson, a US Africa policy expert at the Center for Strategic and International Studies and former director for African affairs at the National Security Council, said the level of violence in Khartoum made the situation for an evacuation unpredictable.
“The major challenge is there’s a war going on across all corners of the city and the international airport in the middle of the city is not functional right now, so the challenge is moving people to a safe space to evacuate them,” Hudson said.
Washington has said private American citizens in Sudan should have no expectation of a US government co-ordinated evacuation from the country.
State Department deputy spokesman Vedant Patel said the US was in touch with several hundred American citizens in Sudan.
Earlier on Friday, the State Department confirmed the death of one US citizen in the country.
Other countries and the UN are also looking at how they can evacuate citizens and employees.
The UN has been trying to extract staff from “very dangerous” zones in Sudan to move them to safer locations, the top UN aid official in Sudan, Abdou Dieng, said on Thursday. Dieng said he was moved to a “safer area” on Wednesday.
The UN has about 4000 staff in Sudan, 800 of them international workers.
A UN source, speaking on condition of anonymity, said there were a further 6000 UN staff family members and associated personnel in Sudan.
Switzerland said on Friday it was examining ways to evacuate nationals from Sudan, and Sweden said it would evacuate embassy staff and families as soon as possible.
Spanish military aircraft are on standby to extract some 60 Spanish nationals and others from Khartoum, and South Korea sent a military aircraft to a US military base in Djibouti to evacuate its nationals when possible.
-AAP
