France closes embassy in Sudan, US increases resources for evacuation operation

On April 24, the French Foreign Ministry said it had temporarily closed its embassy in Sudan's capital, Khartoum, until further notice.

Smoke rises after fighting in Khartoum, Sudan, April 19, 2023. (Photo: THX/TTXVN)

Earlier, on the afternoon of April 23, Bloomberg reported that the French Embassy in Khartoum was attacked, as fighting in Sudan escalated for the second consecutive week.

On the same day, White House spokesman John Kirby said the US is deploying additional naval forces in the Red Sea city of Port Sudan, about 850km from Khartoum, to assist in bringing US citizens in Sudan home, but the evacuation will not take place on a large scale.

Speaking to MSNBC, Mr. Kirby said that the country's authorities are considering directions to properly implement evacuation activities.

According to him, the US will mobilize some of its military resources in the neighboring area if necessary. However, now is not the time to carry out large-scale evacuation operations.

Earlier, the US Agency for International Development (USAID) announced that it had deployed a team of disaster response experts to the region to coordinate humanitarian response activities as fighting continued.

Regarding the evacuation campaign of citizens of other countries, Nigerian officials said that the country will carry out a plan to evacuate nearly 3,000 Nigerian citizens from Sudan, most of them students, by road to Egypt this week.

The plan targets evacuating between 2,650 and 2,800 people, including relatives of embassy staff, said Onimode Bandele, director of special duties at Nigeria's National Emergency Management Agency (NEMA).

According to the official, the first evacuation bus will depart on the morning of April 25. Officials said there are currently about 5,000 Nigerian citizens in Sudan seeking to leave the country.

Meanwhile, Kenya has stepped up efforts to evacuate its citizens from the capital Khartoum by air and road.

Kenyan Cabinet Secretary for Foreign Affairs and Diaspora Alfred Mutua has thanked the governments of South Sudan, Ethiopia, Egypt and Saudi Arabia for facilitating the passage of Kenyan aircraft through their airspace.

Among them, a group of students were granted permission to travel by road to Ethiopia, before boarding a military helicopter to return to Kenya's capital Nairobi.

Mutua said that after this evacuation, the Kenyan government will mobilize two planes to support another group of Kenyans to move from Port Sudan to Jeddah in Saudi Arabia, before boarding Kenya Airways flights back home. These flights are estimated to carry about 300-400 people.

In a similar move, Uganda said on April 24 it had evacuated more than 200 of its citizens from Sudan by road, with the route departing from the capital Khartoum to Gadabi, Ethiopia.

Meanwhile, the South Korean Presidential Office said that 28 of its citizens arrived at Port Sudan International Airport to prepare to return home by military helicopter.

Fighting between the Sudanese army and the RSF paramilitary group since April 15 has caused a humanitarian crisis, killing at least 424 people and injuring 3,730, while millions of Sudanese are stranded, without access to essential services. Many countries have launched operations to evacuate their citizens from Sudan.

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