British forces were preparing on Wednesday to resume evacuation operations at the airfield near Khartoum which is used to repatriate foreign nationals from Sudan, as part of a closely coordinated international airlift with “very good throughput”.
Brigadier Dan Reeve, who is leading the UK operation, said Wadi Saeedna airfield was used to evacuate more than 230 British nationals on Tuesday and would be able to fly up to 500 a day amid an unstable ceasefire due to end within 30 hours.
The Foreign Commonwealth and Development Office said on Wednesday that as of 9pm UK time, six RAF flights had carried 536 people out of Sudan. The British effort transported non-citizens dependents of British passport holders, as well as citizens of other countries.
The first British passport holders arrived at London Stansted Airport from Sudan via Cyprus on Wednesday afternoon.
Speaking to reporters at the British Army base in Cyprus, Reeve said citizens of other countries were being repatriated from there and would continue to be after the UK took control of evacuations “in sweetness” from Germany.
Reeve said the airfield, 40km from the capital and which British nationals had to reach to join the rescue flights, was in a safe area controlled by the regular Sudanese army and its airstrip was in relatively good condition.
“We have very good throughput,” he said. “I absolutely have the [military] assets that I wish to make available to continue this operation, and I have many more pending that I can call on.
Reeve said there was “a queue of all nations” [citizens], possibly 300 men” during his last visit to Wadi Saeedna. He said the airfield had “a very good system” for handling arrivals, adding: “Everyone was calm [and] in a good mood.
Africa Minister Andrew Mitchell estimated on Monday that 2,000 of some 4,000 British and Sudanese nationals and 400 British nationals had told authorities they wanted help to leave.
Conditions in Sudan have become dire since the outbreak of violence on April 15. The country’s armed forces, led by General Abdel Fattah al-Burhan, the de facto president, are fighting a group led by Vice President Mohamed Hamdan Dagalo. Known as Hemeti, Dagalo leads the Rapid Support Forces, a paramilitary group.
Nearly 500 people have died in the violence and food, water, medical supplies and electricity are becoming increasingly scarce.
Reeve said Wadi Saeedna could handle up to 20 slots a day, but all of them were used depended on how many people came to the airfield. Britain is deploying both C-130 Hercules jets, which can carry around 100 people, and A400M Atlas jets, which can carry around 150.
“If you multiply those 20 slots by the [numbers] that you can put in different planes, that’s a very, very large capacity that we can move around. . . multinational,” he said. “But yesterday we just didn’t have that number of people showing up to use all those slots.”
Residents of Khartoum have stressed the dangerousness of traveling to the airfield due to continued fighting despite the ceasefire, with heavy fighting particularly in the north and west of the capital. Evacuees also struggled to get fuel to make the trip, while lack of internet access and electricity made it difficult to reach those in need of help.
Volker Perthes, the UN’s special envoy for Sudan, told the Security Council on Tuesday that neither side had shown a readiness to “seriously negotiate, suggesting that both believe it is possible to achieve a military victory over the other”.
Reeve said the fact that the two forces were entwined instead of facing each other on well-defined front lines meant that when the fighting started it “erupted extremely quickly”, with the soldiers now regularly “firing at n ‘anyone”.
Interior Minister Suella Braverman on Wednesday rejected suggestions by German foreign minister Annalena Baerbock that the UK had been too slow to launch its rescue effort, which began two days after some other countries .
“A decision was made based on good planning and a good assessment of the risks posed to Sudan,” Braverman said. Sky News.
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