The Incomplete U.S. Evacuation in Sudan

Welcome back to Foreign Policy’s SitRep! Robbie and Jack here, informing you that if you haven’t seen South Korean President Yoon Suk-yeol’s rendition of Don McLean’s “American Pie” at the White House state dinner on Wednesday night, you should go watch that now.

Alright, here’s what’s on tap for the day: Biden faces pressure on the Sudan crisis, the Taliban kill a top Islamic State leader in Afghanistan, and South Korea gets nuclear promises from Washington.

The mission, dubbed Operation Eastern Exit, was considered at the time one of the riskiest evacuations in U.S. diplomatic history and a triumph in its own right of how U.S. military power could be wielded to protect not just its own government personnel but U.S. and foreign citizens alike in a crisis.

When past isn’t prologue. Flash forward to Sudan in 2023, where an eruption of fighting between two rival generals for control of the country transformed the capital city of Khartoum into a battle zone almost overnight and prompted the Biden administration to launch another embassy evacuation.

This time, the U.S. military evacuated all U.S. government personnel and a “small number” of allied diplomats in an operation on April 23. But that left some 16,000 Americans still in Sudan, and there are few clear means to escape for those who want to leave.

That new reality, a stark shift from the airlift operation in Somalia in 1991 and a larger evacuation from Lebanon in 2006, has sparked sharp recriminations and blowback in Washington as some officials and lawmakers push the administration to do more to help U.S. citizens.

Anger and backlash. The debate over what support to provide has stoked new questions on whether top Biden administration officials properly heeded widespread warnings that fighting could erupt in Sudan in the weeks and days leading up to the conflict.

It has led to a mood of anger and recrimination in Washington among officials who work on East Africa policy, even as they work around the clock to respond to the crisis in Sudan and try to lock in a cease-fire to aid Sudanese civilians. “The warning signs were all there, even if the people at the top didn’t appreciate it until after shit hit the fan,” one official said.

Meanwhile, Americans still trapped amid fighting in Sudan are openly criticizing the State Department for providing little to no assistance in getting out.

The State Department did not respond to a request for comment, but Secretary of State Antony Blinken said during a press conference on Thursday that the United States was “providing the best possible advice that we can to anyone asking for our assistance” and “providing important logistical support” to other evacuation efforts.

“What we need to do and what we’re working to establish is a sustained process for enabling people to leave,” he said.

Evacuations are easier said than done. The Biden administration has said it is positioning naval ships near the coast of Sudan to aid Americans leaving Sudan and is providing intelligence and surveillance over U.N. convoys leaving Khartoum to monitor their safety—but isn’t planning any massive evacuation. It’s also still unclear how many of the estimated 16,000 Americans still there are actively seeking to leave.

The intense fighting in the city makes such an evacuation plan unsafe and untenable, administration officials said. Furthermore, Khartoum is more than 500 miles from the coast, making an evacuation operation significantly more difficult than one from Lebanon along the Mediterranean Sea or Mogadishu on the Somali coast.

Lawmakers have urged Biden to avoid another Afghanistan situation, where a massive airlift in late 2021 evacuated tens of thousands but left many other Americans and Afghan allies behind as the Taliban took over the country.

Who’s still left? Many of the U.S. citizens still in Sudan have dual citizenship, but there is also a significant presence of Americans who were in Sudan to work on U.S.-funded humanitarian and aid work, according to officials in Washington and others who just left Khartoum who spoke to SitRep on condition of anonymity.

“We are communicating risks quite clearly and quite directly to people, as we have communicated risks over more than a decade to tell Americans not to travel to Sudan in the first place and to leave Sudan if they were there,” U.S. National Security Advisor Jake Sullivan told reporters on April 24.

“These weren’t hapless tourists—these were aid workers living in Khartoum to advance American interests and help the Sudanese,” one U.S. official told SitRep in response.

Grim prospects for Sudan’s future. The conflict between the two rival generals—Abdel Fattah Abdelrahman al-Burhan of the Sudanese Armed Forces and Mohamed Hamdan “Hemeti” Dagalo of the paramilitary Rapid Support Forces—has killed hundreds of people and wounded thousands. It also completely upended Sudan’s efforts to transition to democracy. Just days before fighting broke out, U.S. and British mediators were meeting with both leaders to clinch a political deal on a new government to put the country back on the path to a democratic transition.

Sudanese analysts, some of whom spoke to SitRep on condition of anonymity, said they predict the mass exodus of foreigners will lead to Burhan and Hemeti scaling up their fight for Khartoum with even less regard for civilian casualties than shown in the first days of the conflict.

U.S. officials said they have tried to broker cease-fires between Burhan’s and Hemeti’s forces at least five times. All cease-fires so far have failed to hold.

On Thursday afternoon, bowing to pressure from the United States and Western powers, Sudan’s military said it had agreed to uphold a cease-fire for 72 more hours. We’ll see how that one holds up.

Susan Rice has stepped down as the Biden administration’s domestic policy advisor. The shortlist to replace the former U.S. national security advisor includes former Labor Secretary Tom Perez, think tanker Tara McGuinness, and prominent White House staffer Neera Tanden, the Intercept reports.

Republican Sen. Tommy Tuberville again blocked an effort to advance 184 military promotions on the Senate floor on Tuesday in protest of a U.S. Defense Department policy to allow service members leave to receive abortions.

Evan Laksmana has joined the International Institute for Strategic Studies in Singapore from the Lee Kuan Yew School of Public Policy.

What should be high on your radar, if it isn’t already.

Bad blood. The Taliban in a recent raid killed a leader of the Islamic State-Khorosan group responsible for the bombing at Kabul’s airport in August 2021 that killed 13 U.S. troops and 170 Afghans, John Kirby, the coordinator for strategic communications at the White House National Security Council, said on Tuesday. The death of the man, whom U.S. officials have declined to identify, is the latest in a string of gunfights and targeted assassinations in a building tit-for-tat fight between the Taliban and the Islamic State satellite in Afghanistan.

But Republicans in Congress called out the Biden administration for relying on the Taliban to fight U.S. counterterrorism battles by proxy. “It is an abdication of leadership for this administration to rely on a terrorist group to execute other terrorists, especially as Afghanistan once again becomes a hotbed for international extremism,” Sen. Roger Wicker said in a statement after the announcement. “The U.S. has to rebuild its capability to strike at will within the region, or we are potentially putting American lives at risk.”

In on the plan. South Korea has again reupped its pledge to the United States not to build a nuclear bomb of its own to head off a conflict with its nuclear-armed neighbor, but in exchange the Biden administration will give Seoul unprecedented insight into U.S. military planning.

At a joint press conference on Wednesday, U.S. President Joe Biden announced that the Pentagon would get South Korea briefed on nuclear plans for a conflict with North Korea, under the new Washington Declaration. The United States is also set to deploy a ballistic missile submarine in a show of force, after North Korea conducted three intercontinental ballistic missile tests in February.

Single point of failure. The only U.S. factory that makes the original form of gunpowder that’s used for bullets, mortars, artillery, and Tomahawk missiles has been out of commission since an accident nearly two years ago, and that’s becoming a big problem for the Pentagon, particularly as the Ukrainian military is running out of ammunition to fight off the Russian invasion.

That’s according to the Wall Street Journal, which went to the World War II-era facility in Minden, Louisiana, and put together a fascinating deep dive into the dire state of the lower end of the defense industrial base. Though the facility is expected to be back online by summer, U.S. military contractors are currently sourcing gunpowder out of stockpiles.

Relatives, friends, and others visit the monument for Chernobyl victims in Kyiv on April 26. On April 26, 1986, a reactor at the Chernobyl nuclear power plant, northwest of Kyiv, exploded after a safety test went wrong, spreading radiation over thousands of square miles. Last year’s invasion of Ukraine by Russia, which seized Chernobyl early in its campaign before retreating from the area, has created new hazards for the country’s nuclear facilities.Roman Pilipey/Getty Images

Massachusetts Air National Guardsman Jack Teixeira, who is accused of posting hundreds of classified documents on his Discord server that leaked online, was confident he wouldn’t get caught. Maybe too confident, according to the U.S. government’s motion in support of pretrial detention of the suspected leaker, which includes this exchange from Teixeira on his Discord server:

User: Isnt that shit classified

User: ?

TEIXEIRA: everything that ive been telling u guys up to this point has been lol

TEIXEIRA: this isnt different

User: Well

User: You rly trust everyone here then

TEIXEIRA: i have plausible deniability and non of them know anything incriminating about me

Friday, April 28: South Korean President Yoon Suk-yeol continues his U.S. tour with a speech at the Harvard Kennedy School. Pope Francis is also set to begin a two-day visit to Hungary.

Monday, May 1: U.S. President Joe Biden is set to host Philippine President Ferdinand Marcos Jr. at the White House.

“I can’t even say— I guess how old I am. I can’t even say the number. It doesn’t register with me.”

—U.S. President Joe Biden fends off questions about his age at a joint White House press conference with South Korean President Yoon Suk-yeol on Wednesday, just one day after declaring his reelection bid. 

What’s one rocket explosion between friends? Sweden this week launched a research rocket that was supposed to go into space but malfunctioned and exploded in neighboring Norway instead. Luckily, it looks as if Norway won’t be triggering NATO’s Article 5 collective defense clause over this mishap—good news for Sweden as it tries to join the alliance.

Bad romance. Here’s a love story made for Washington but that wasn’t made to last. A departing young intern in a crowded Senate elevator told her boyfriend, also a Senate intern, that they would have to break up because it was her last week, according to an eyewitness account from an onlooker. The rest of the crowded lift had to listen to the drawn-out ordeal as the elevator stopped on every floor on the way to the basement.