OP-ED: How the Sudden US Evacuation of its Khartoum Embassy Compares to Other Evacuations in the Middle East
French civilians are airlifted to Djibouti from a French military base in Khartoum, a similar route to that taken by US diplomatic personnel on April 23. Photo: État Major des Armées handout, via ABC.
Under 100 US diplomatic personnel and dependents remained in Khartoum when conflict broke out on April 16 between the Sudanese armed forces, under the leadership of General Abdel Fattah al-Burhan, and the Rapid Support Forces (RSF) of General Mohamed Hamdan Dagalo, better known in Sudan as “Hemeti.” Two years after a military coup dashed hopes of a widespread civilian opposition movement, and four years after mass protests ousted long-time dictator Omar Hassan Al-Bashir, Sudan was again plunged into violent conflict.
The abiding view in the US and most of the West was that, despite insecurity elsewhere in the Horn of Africa, Russian influence via the Wagner group, and ongoing conflict in Darfur, Sudan would maintain a status quo of relative stability. As such, the remaining US Embassy staff were essentially caught off guard by the sudden firefights and missile launches in the streets of Khartoum; they were ordered to congregate at safer locations throughout the city. An initial effort to evacuate Americans via a convoy of armored vehicles (with clearly posted American flags and diplomatic plates) was called off when the vehicles were fired on. On Sunday, April 23, the remaining diplomatic personnel, alongside some other foreign diplomats, were airlifted by US Marines and special operations forces to a US military base 800 miles away, in Djibouti. The US Embassy in Khartoum is closed for the foreseeable future.
The most recent high-profile evacuation of a US embassy, before Khartoum, was probably the disastrous evacuation from Kabul, in Aug. 2021. Marines and special operations forces ferried embassy staff and some local employees via helicopter from the roof of the embassy compound to the airport, where alongside thousands of desperate civilians they took the last chaotic flights out of Hamid Karzai airport before the Taliban takeover. That evacuation was politically and logistically an outright failure, abandoning tens of thousands of civilians associated with the US mission to be targeted in Taliban reprisals.
At the other end of the spectrum, because US intelligence warned of imminent conflict several weeks in advance, the evacuation of US diplomatic personnel (and most citizens) from Ukraine in the winter of 2022 was fairly orderly. Most staff were moved to the consulate in Lviv ten days before the full-scale Russian invasion began; some evacuated to Poland in the early days of the invasion, but over the ensuing months returned to Lviv and Kyiv to provide essential services.
Nevertheless, the US evacuation and closure of its embassy in Khartoum is best compared to the three other US embassy closures that occurred in the last twelve years in the Middle East and North Africa: in Syria, Libya, and Yemen.
US Embassy Damascus: Feb. 2012
The US Embassy in Damascus was formally closed on Feb. 6, 2012, when the embassy’s remaining staff left the country amid the escalating civil war. The embassy had been attacked by supporters of Syrian President Bashar Assad the previous July (along with the French embassy), with protestors scaling the fences and breaking windows. In the embassy’s final months, it had only 17 American staff in the entire country. In that case, despite the horrific violence of the Syrian civil war, Assad had left the Damascus airport functioning, so some Americans left through the airport. Several diplomats were reportedly denied exit visas by Syrian authorities, and most left by traveling a land route through Jordan. Canada, the UK, and France followed suit within a month. Some American diplomatic personnel returned to the country or continued operating alongside US military forces until Dec. 2018, when the State Department gave them 24 hours to evacuate. However, the Syrian situation differed from that in Khartoum in recent weeks – because the civil war there was in many ways the direct result of government attacks on opposition-held civilian areas, being offered safe passage by the Syrian government could ensure relative safety. In Sudan, however, where neither the RSF nor the army has gripped outright power in the capital, the situation is much more fluid and thus more dangerous.
MV-22 Ospreys prepare to take off to track the progress of a US convoy from Tripoli to the Tunisian border, on July 26, 2014. (Photo: Lt. Maida Kalic, via MarineCorpsTimes).
US Embassy Tripoli: July 2014
American civilians were evacuated from Libya in 2011 by ferry, alongside non-essential diplomatic personnel. Muammar Gaddafi’s supporters won an initial conflict to keep power, but three years later, he was overthrown and the country descended into civil war. Remaining US diplomatic personnel were evacuated on July 26, 2014. The US had moved an amphibious ship with 1,000 US Marines on it to a spot in the eastern Mediterranean near Libyan waters in May of that year, to aid American civilians if instability increased. At the time, however, CBS reported that diplomatic personnel were planning on evacuating via the airport if necessary. When the US Embassy in Tripoli was finally evacuated, 158 Americans, including 80 US Marines, had to drive overland to Tunisia. Marine leadership had apparently urged an air evacuation from Tripoli, but State Department officials (and the US Ambassador to Libya) were concerned about military firefights in the capital. Instead, they drove in a convoy of armored vehicles some 250 miles to the Tunisian border, with at least one drone flying above the convoy and four aircrafts monitoring the situation in the immediate area. Americans later involved with UN-led peace negotiations had to be evacuated from Tripoli again in 2019 when General Khalifa Haftar’s army approached the city; US Navy hovercrafts picked up the diplomats from a beach in a Tripoli suburb.
US Embassy Sana’a: Feb. 2015
The US Embassy in Sana’a was closed for several weeks due to instability in May 2014, but staff returned and reopened the embassy until its final evacuation in 2015 when the Houthi rebel group occupied the Yemeni capital. Diplomatic personnel were evacuated in six hours, along with 100 US Marines who had been responsible for embassy security, by taking a private Omani-owned jet to Muscat. They convoyed by truck to the airport in Sana’a, where the Americans were allowed to depart, but their vehicles were seized by the Houthis. The British embassy was evacuated about the same time — as a general rule, the UK, US, French, Canadian, and EU embassies tend to look to each other to decide when to evacuate or scale down operations in unstable security situations. Houthi rebels later occupied the US embassy compound and detained local employees, such as security guards, who had worked in the embassy.
US Embassy Khartoum: April 2023
Many Sudanese activists are rightly concerned that the focus on evacuating foreign nationals from Sudan does little to help Sudanese civilians left behind. It is worth noting, however, that the evacuation of diplomatic personnel and the closing of the US embassy is particularly concerning because it leaves the United States with drastically fewer resources– less intelligence, less negotiating power, and less logistical support– to help resolve the conflict. There are some reports on social media of people that when European embassies closed, some Sudanese civilians who had been applying for visas were stranded without their passports, which had been in the (now shuttered) consular offices for processing. A 72-hour ceasefire declared Monday which appears to be intermittently successful will allow more civilians to escape the most dangerous areas of the conflict. But if the US military struggled for nearly a week to safely evacuate even a few dozen diplomatic personnel (for whom various security precautions and emergency plans were already in place), there should be great concerns about the dearth of routes to safety for civilians, especially those without the protection of a foreign passport. The US Department of State has said that it has no plans at this time to evacuate American citizens or dual nationals from Sudan. The State Department is offering logistical support to stranded civilians remotely, but intermittent internet outages have been reported across the country, further hampering communications. At least 459 people, nearly all Sudanese, have been killed.