America’s Evacuation Efforts in Sudan Stall Out

An international rescue group is trying to evacuate more than 300 U.S. citizens and permanent residents who remain stranded in Sudan, despite continuing fighting between the country’s top two warring generals, according to the organization’s co-founder.

Project Dynamo, a Florida-based nonprofit that has already evacuated 140 American citizens and green card holders, is trying to continue rescue efforts, even as the Biden administration has opted not to evacuate American passport bearers from Sudan despite bloody fighting ravaging the country—and especially the capital, Khartoum. Bryan Stern, a co-founder of Project Dynamo, said that the figure his group is tracking is likely an underestimate, given the lack of U.S. and international footprint on the ground.

“One hundred percent there’s more,” Stern said. “We just don’t know about them.” He has been able to evacuate American citizens and legal permanent residents in more than a dozen air and ground operations.

The numbers needing evacuation are constantly in flux, Stern added, as people who are trapped are looking for escape routes of their own. But he is telling people fleeing not to wait. “We tell everyone: If you have a safe way out, go.” Project Dynamo has mostly organized ground convoys to get people out of Sudan and has staged one air evacuation away from the capital.

Private groups are not the only ones frustrated by the U.S. response. Congressional staffers tracking the issue have complained that even during the effort to evacuate U.S. diplomats and their families from Khartoum, the ad hoc Sudan task force set up by the State Department didn’t have enough people working the phones to field requests for evacuation. ​​And congressional oversight committees have not been able to get specific numbers on Americans who have evacuated or contacted the embassy for help.

In an emailed statement, a State Department spokesperson said that U.S. Secretary of State Antony Blinken’s efforts to secure a cease-fire extension were key to allowing evacuations. “Any attempt to have U.S. citizens depart Khartoum or meet at a rally point at this phase of the conflict could have resulted in casualties,” the spokesperson said. The spokesperson said that the U.S. government has facilitated the departure of more than 2,000 people from Sudan—including 1,300 American citizens—and transported 700 people on multiple convoys to Port Sudan. Dozens of U.S. government officials stationed in Jeddah, Saudi Arabia, where cease-fire talks are taking place, also facilitated onward travel. Overall, 5,000 people responded to the State Department’s outreach to U.S. citizens in Sudan for assistance, and 1,500 of those were “seeking and ready to depart” Sudan, the spokesperson said.

In late May, the Sudanese Armed Forces and the breakaway Rapid Support Forces paramilitary group agreed to a cease-fire brokered by Saudi Arabia and the United States, the latest such negotiated truce since fighting broke out in Khartoum in mid-April with airstrikes, artillery, and block-to-block firefights paralyzing the country of 46 million people, Africa’s ninth largest.

But even as the cease-fire appears to be holding for now, the ongoing evacuation effort has been complicated by a lack of resources, a U.S. administration that has sidelined itself after evacuating about 70 U.S. diplomats and their families, and poor lines of communication to troops commanded by Sudanese military chief Abdel Fattah al-Burhan and his rival, Mohamed Hamdan Dagalo, better known as Hemeti.

Burhan, the top Sudanese general, has called for the United Nations to replace Sudan point man Volker Perthes. Burhan told the United Nations in a letter that Perthes had brought “negative repercussions” to Sudan but did not elaborate.

Perthes is currently assisting with evacuation efforts on the ground in Port Sudan, where Saudi Arabia and other countries are conducting maritime evacuations, and a flight route has reopened between the area and Jeddah.

The Biden administration’s handling of the Sudan evacuation has also come under increasing fire from Congress, even though Capitol Hill sources have described the Biden administration’s mood as self-congratulatory over the evacuation effort. At least two American citizens have been killed in Sudan so far since the outbreak of fighting, and about 16,000 Americans remained in the country after the United States evacuated diplomats and their families.

Last week, House Foreign Affairs Committee Chairman Michael McCaul and the top Republican on the Senate Foreign Relations Committee, Jim Risch, wrote to Blinken asking for responses about internal dissent over the handling of U.S.-Sudan policy since the fall of dictator Omar al-Bashir in 2019, opposition within the agency to put sanctions on Burhan and Hemeti amid the back-and-forth violence, and details about when the U.S. administration began preparations for the evacuation.

Experts believe that the United States could have done more to call for a halt to the fighting to evacuate thousands of citizens.

“We never had that conversation with the Sudanese army,” said Cameron Hudson, a senior associate in the Africa program at the Center for Strategic and International Studies and a former chief of staff to the U.S. special envoy to Sudan. “We never imposed our will to get our people out. I think that was a mistake.”

Despite rumblings in Western intelligence of the Rapid Support Forces beginning to deploy troops around the capital before the outbreak of fighting, U.S. Ambassador to Sudan John Godfrey returned to the country just as the violence started. McCaul and Risch are also asking the Biden administration to appoint a U.S. envoy to Sudan in hopes of elevating the profile of the issue.

“Ultimately, what we did is we put thousands of people at risk, requiring them to make a very perilous 16-hour overland journey across the country through checkpoints, through conflict zones,” Hudson added. “We put our people at enormous risk. They took their lives in their own hands to get to Port Sudan.”

And the demand for convoys out of the capital, bus tickets, and hotels in Port Sudan have skyrocketed. “The dirty secret of the evacuation is that only people who can afford it can evacuate themselves,” Hudson said.

Stern said that since the initial evacuation of Americans, public interest and donations have dried up. “If you gave me 400 grand, I could rescue 300 Americans by Tuesday,” Stern said.

More than 20 countries evacuated their citizens from war-torn Sudan, including tiny Guatemala, which landed a U.S.-made C-130 transport aircraft in the country to get its people out. Leaders of the evacuation effort are stunned that the United States couldn’t do the same.

“How do you explain that?” Stern said. “The United States of America can’t figure out how to land a plane, when Guatemala can.”