It was a risky and expensive rescue – but only for 30 people, including 24 British diplomats and their families. While France and Germany evacuated several hundred each from Sudan, the UK and the US chose to focus on staff at their embassies.
On Friday, rumours spread that elite British soldiers – from the SAS and the Parachute regiment – had been scrambled to RAF Akrotiri in Cyprus, in response to a sudden crisis in Sudan that nobody had anticipated.
A sudden rebellion by Sudan’s Rapid Strike Force a week earlier had led to millions being trapped in Khartoum, the epicentre of the conflict. James Heappey, a junior defence minister, conceded that “nobody in the UK government, nor really in the wider international community” had expected ferocious fighting to break out.
A series of options were hastily drawn up by defence officials in the UK and elsewhere, and rumours even swirled that a high-risk attempt could be made to seize Khartoum’s airport to hold it in the style of the chaotic evacuation from Kabul in the summer of 2001.
That would have been exceptionally dangerous. Instead, on the authorisation of President Joe Biden, three US chinook helicopters and a team of elite US Navy Seals flew via Ethiopia to Khartoum to pick up about 90 embassy staff and a few others shortly after midnight on Sunday morning.
With them onboard were a small number of elite British troops – almost certainly from the SAS – whose task was different. Acting on the orders of the prime minister, Rishi Sunak, they headed to where a group of British embassy staff and their families had gathered in the first step of a plan to get them to safety.
Meanwhile, the other British and dual nationals trapped in Sudan had been told to “stay indoors” for their own safety. It had been thought there were only a few hundred in the country, but the numbers reporting to British authorities was rising rapidly – and on Monday Heappey said the figure was 4,000.
Others made their own plans. A series of car convoys, including one organised by the UN, made the long and risky 35-hour journey to the relatively peaceful Port Sudan, about 500 miles to the north-east – although once again Britons were advised the UK was not involved in setting up the convoys and travel was “at their own risk”.
Two transport planes, an A400M Atlas and a C-130 Hercules (the latter part of a fleet due to be retired from the end of June) landed very early on Sunday morning, with the permission of the Sudanese government, at the Wadi Seidna airbase 14 miles north of Khartoum, ready to bring the diplomats to safety.
The evacuation party did not include Giles Lever, the UK’s ambassador to Sudan. He had previously taken a holiday and so was not in Sudan as the crisis emerged.
Once ready, the elite UK troops and their party were driven through multiple check points to the airbase and the waiting aircraft. It was a perilous mission, but despite occasional reports, foreigners do not appear to have been targeted in the fighting between RSF rebels and government forces in the capital.
“This was a very difficult evacuation in a country with which the British military is not familiar,” said Ben Barry, a military analyst with the International Institute for Strategic Studies. “It was possible that soldiers and evacuees could have been shot at or taken hostage – and if British forces had fought back, in becoming a party to the conflict.”
Those involved, and those who ordered it back in the UK, were relieved it went ahead without a significant hitch – and shortly after the British planes departed via RAF Akrotiri, France and Germany were using the same airbase to rescue 491 and 335 people respectively, including civilians other than diplomats.
On Sunday, Sunak praised the troops for carrying out “a complex and rapid” evacuation – but by Monday, with complaints from other Britons in the country mounting, it emerged the military was looking at a fresh set of options – whether to rescue people by air, land or sea. “The job isn’t done,” Heappey acknowledged.
An RAF plane landed at Port Sudan on Monday with a contingent of troops while the UK assesses its options, while a frigate, HMS Lancaster is nearby for a possible maritime rescue. But for those who followed the advice to stay at home in Khartoum, prospects for an air rescue look fraught at best.
The Wadi Seidna airfield is small, with only the capacity for two A400M planes, which can carry up to 200 people at a time. Getting out of the capital remains dangerous. Earlier on Monday, Andrew Mitchell, the international development secretary, warned that during a Turkish rescue, two out of three muster points had come under fire.
