Leila Oulkebous’ research for her doctorate from one of France’s top universities was going well when the explosions started.
Oulkebous had stopped researching Ethiopia because of that country’s civil war and her research in Sudan was going to be more straightforward, she thought.
Then Sudan exploded into violence. The chiefs of the country’s army and its rival Rapid Support Forces rose to power after a popular uprising in 2019 prompted them to remove longtime autocratic former Sudanese president Omar al-Bashir. They started fighting this month amid tensions over a new plan to reintroduce civilian rule.
Photo: EPA-EFE
The bombing shook the house where Oulkebous was living in the capital, Khartoum, investigating the effects of dams on rivers that cross borders.
“We were hiding all the time under the bed,” she said on Wednesday at Charles de Gaulle Airport in Paris as hundreds of people arrived in harrowing evacuations.
World powers were rescuing people from Sudan on planes and warships in operations prompted by the eruption of fighting that sent thousands of foreigners and many more Sudanese people fleeing for safety.
A French frigate carrying hundreds of evacuees on Wednesday morning docked in Jeddah, Saudi Arabia, as part of broader efforts involving several warships, in addition to airlifts.
French military spokesman Colonel Pierre Gaudilliere said France evacuated more than 500 civilians from 40 nations by plane over the weekend after securing the airbase north of Khartoum on Saturday, using its airbase in neighboring Djibouti for the airlift.
Gaudilliere said the French military was the first to land, and organized the flow of its own and other nations’ planes.
“You still had airstrikes as the operation was going on, crossfire in the streets, artillery fire, so it was and still is very intense fighting,” Gaudilliere said.
The French military had personnel on the ground to assess the situation during the operation, he said.
Japan and several other nations thanked France for rescuing their citizens.
Some other countries quickly joined evacuation efforts.
Czech Minister of Foreign Affairs Jan Lipavsky on Wednesday said three nationals were evacuated with help from Germany, and his country is now working with Turkey to help evacuate two other citizens.
Greek national Christos Dedes, who was in Sudan for work, said he and his colleagues managed to leave their Khartoum hotel on Tuesday via the Portuguese embassy, which sent a vehicle to drive them to the airbase where there were Italian, French and German soldiers.
“We just happened to leave with the Italians, on a transport plane,” he said on Greek television channel Mega after he arrived in Athens on Wednesday.
From their Khartoum hotel, they could see that “every day the battles were heavier,” Dedes said. “Both [sides] were using heavy weapons.”
He said they heard explosions at night and saw bodies in the street.
More than 1,000 people from 58 countries were to arrive on Wednesday by ship to the port of Jeddah in Saudi Arabia, including many on a French warship.
Saudi Arabia on Saturday organized the first evacuation convoy by land bringing people to Port Sudan, where a navy ship took them to Jeddah.
The French Ministry of Foreign Affairs said a flight carrying 184 French nationals and their families and about 20 other nationals returned from Djibouti and landed in Paris on Wednesday morning.
Among them was Oulkebous, a Moroccan doctoral student at Bordeaux Montaigne University.
“The feeling I had since the first day of fighting was I felt really paralyzed, I didn’t know what to do, I didn’t know how to get out, the airport was closed, we could not leave,” she said, adding that through “the explosions, the smoke, so really, I didn’t have the time to fully realize what was going on.”
A Royal Air Maroc plane arrived at Casablanca’s Mohammed V Airport on Wednesday, carrying 136 Moroccan nationals evacuated from Sudan.
In contrast with France and some other nations, the US and the UK did not evacuate non-diplomats at first.
The British government has come under growing criticism for its failure to airlift civilians.
British Prime Minister Rishi Sunak on Tuesday said diplomats had been evacuated first “because they were being targeted.”
The British government since said that 301 people have been evacuated on four flights from Sudan over the previous 24 hours, and four more were scheduled for Wednesday.
The UK intends to keep running the flights for as long as possible. In addition, “rapid deployment teams” of British officials are in Port Sudan assessing potential for a seaborne evacuation.
The British Foreign, Commonwealth and Development Office said that British passport-holders are eligible, “and priority is given to family groups with children and/or the elderly or individuals with medical conditions.”
Officials have said there are as many as 4,000 British citizens in Sudan, 2,000 of whom have registered for potential evacuation.
The White House on Monday said the US is helping from afar as thousands of US citizens left behind in Sudan seek to escape fighting in the east African nation, after the US embassy evacuated all of its diplomatic personnel over the weekend and shut down.
Washington is considering several options for assisting it citizens in getting out of Sudan.
Two US officials said one option being considered would be to send US Navy vessels that are in or on their way to the Red Sea to dock at Port Sudan and take Americans to Jeddah or another location.
The officials said this would depend on the security situation and whether it was deemed safe for the ships to dock.
A US official said the military has developed other options for evacuating US citizens, including using an airfield that some European countries have used to fly out citizens. To date, it has not been told to do that, the official said.
The officials spoke on the condition of anonymity.
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