As the violent episode of clashes continues in Sudan, the head of European diplomacy, Josep Borrell, has just announced on Monday that more than 1,000 European nationals have been evacuated from the country.
According to the High Representative of the European Union for Foreign Affairs and Security Policy, Josep Borrell, more than 1,000 EU nationals have been evacuated from Sudan. “It’s a complex operation but it was successful“, he declared on Monday, on the sidelines of a meeting of European foreign ministers in Luxembourg.
“I cannot give you exact figures, but it is certain that more than 1,000 people were evacuated, added the head of European diplomacy. He also specified that 21 diplomats from the EU mission in Khartoum had been evacuated, while thanking ” the combined efforts of many countries that evacuated their nationals, but also those of other countries“.
Indeed, several European countries, in particular France, Germany, Spain, Italy and the United Kingdom began, on Sunday, rapid evacuation operations of their nationals as well as their diplomatic personnel from Sudan, in a time when the escalation of violence between the army of General Abdel Fattah Al-Burhane and the paramilitaries of the Rapid Support Forces (FSR) of General Mohamed Hamdane Daglo.
The French army evacuated more than 300 people of different nationalities by plane to Djibouti. The German army announced that it had evacuated 101 people from the country by military aircraft.
“The first Airbus A400M is on its way to Jordan with its 101 evacuees”announced the German army on Twitter, specifying that two military planes will continue the evacuations.
Spain also indicated that it had evacuated, on the same day, around a hundred people by military plane, around thirty Spaniards and some 70 nationals of other countries. ” The Spanish military plane took off from Khartoum shortly before 11 p.m. (2100 GMT) with around 100 passengers“, announces the press release from the Spanish government.
The same goes for Italy, which was able to take charge of ” about 200 people, including Swiss citizens and members of the apostolic nunciature in Sudan, according to the Ministry of Foreign Affairs.
As a reminder, other countries have notably launched, on Saturday and Sunday, operations to evacuate their nationals. It is therefore the United States which carried out an operation on Saturday to extract government personnel and Saudi Arabia which managed to evacuate more than 150 people to the port of Jeddah, including 91 Saudi citizens and approximately 66 nationals from 12 other countries.
For its part, Egypt, which had also declared that a member of its mission in Sudan had been wounded by a bullet, evacuated “by land 436 nationals” this Saturday, as well as 177 soldiers last Wednesday.
Iraq, for its part, announced on Sunday the evacuation of 14 Iraqis from Khartoum ” to a secure site in Port Sudan“. The day before, Baghdad had specified that ” the Iraqi diplomatic team had been evacuated from the embassy.
In addition, South African Foreign Office spokesman Clayson Monyela said on Monday that ” Evacuation operations for South Africans in Sudan and South African embassy personnel are currently underway. They are taken to a neighboring country for safety“.