The images of hasty departures testify as much to the serious deterioration of the situation in Sudan as to the little hope of seeing it improve quickly. Diplomats and foreign nationals who could left Khartoum during a weekend of chaos, under evacuation plans that continued on Monday April 24, leaving behind a Sudanese capital in the grip of a war of leaders, unleashed nine days earlier. An exodus by air or by road, while the promise of a three-day truce made Friday for the end of Ramadan by General Abdel Fattah Abdelrahman Al-Bourhane, head of the army and the country, and his deputy who had become his enemy, General Mohammed Hamdan Daglo, known as “Hemetti”, was only very partially respected.
After meetings between emissaries of the two camps in Abu Dhabi, calls from around the world and strong advice from Saudi diplomacy and the presidency of South Sudan, the two rivals left a brief space, in the midst of their clashes, to allow the various evacuation plans to be put in place.
For France, this took the name of Operation “Sagittaire”. About 150 soldiers, according to the army staff, were mobilized to evacuate from the Sudanese capital French nationals, but also of other nationalities. Sunday evening, nearly 200 people had arrived at the French base in Djibouti. Monday morning, with new rotations of military planes, the number of evacuees reached 388, according to the Ministry of Foreign Affairs in Paris, including, alongside the French, nationals of thirteen European countries, ten African countries and three Asian nations.
To secure the exfiltration, Emmanuel Macron and the Minister of Foreign Affairs, Catherine Colonna, had previously contacted Generals Al-Bourhane and “Hemetti”.. The deployment of French soldiers in Khartoum began on Saturday evening, “in agreement” with both parties and “in complete neutrality”explained, Sunday, the staff. “The operation we are conducting is extremely complex and requires close military-diplomatic integration”explained, a little earlier, a source at the Quai d’Orsay.
A “complex and rapid” military operation
The consular services of the French Embassy in Khartoum initially had to organize regroupings at predefined points, while the Sudanese capital, a huge city of more than 1,000 square kilometers, is a battlefield between the army and the Rapid Support Forces (FSR), the powerful militia led by “Hemetti”. A real headache: the clashes between the two camps, but also the looting in which certain elements engaged in the conflict are engaged, have forced the design of several scenarios in order to be able to regroup the evacuees on an airstrip in acceptable security conditions. . The last part of the operation now aims to recover people who have indicated their wish to leave Sudan but who find themselves blocked at home by the fighting, often unable to communicate, due to lack of telephone network, or to move around, due to lack of fuel.
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