Echoes of Kabul as Britons scramble to flee Khartoum

British troops have landed in Port Sudan on a reconnaissance mission as officials scramble to work out an evacuation plan for the 4,000 UK citizens trapped in Sudan, where violence is raging in the capital, Khartoum.

Rishi Sunak is considering how to best extract UK nationals from Sudan. One option is to increase Royal Air Force flights from a British airbase in Cyprus to a Sudanese military airfield outside the capital.

Whitehall sources told Sky News that a British warship – HMS Lancaster – is in the area, and could help with evacuations.

The emergency COBRA committee is meeting for the seventh time to discuss the crisis. It comes after Tobias Ellwood, chair of Parliament’s defence committee, said that unless the government comes up with a “clear-cut plan today”, British citizens might attempt risky escape missions themselves.

Andrew Mitchell, the UK development minister, said that while the government is “exploring every single possible way” to get citizens out, he could not give any assurances that they will be helped to escape.

Questions are being asked about why the British embassy was not prepared for a mass evacuation of civilians. British diplomats were rescued at the weekend in a military operation led by elite forces. But this angered some of those left behind who accused the UK government of abandoning them.

One British businessman who was airlifted out of the Sudanese capital by a French military plane called his treatment by British officials “appalling”, while other European nationals are being evacuated on emergency flights.

Gun battles, air strikes and shelling have rocked Khartoum since fighting broke out on 15 April between the Sudanese army and the paramilitary Rapid Support Forces (RSF).

The RSF has embedded itself in several neighbourhoods in the capital, while the army has used air strikes and heavy artillery to try to force its rivals back. The city’s airport has been a key target, complicating extraction efforts.

Tim Marshall explains the intricacies of the conflict here.

The violence has triggered a humanitarian crisis and killed 420 people. António Guterres, the UN secretary general, has called for a ceasefire and warned the conflict risks causing a “catastrophic conflagration within Sudan that could engulf the whole region and beyond”.

Like Britain, governments around the world are racing to extract their citizens. These foreign nationals find themselves in the same situation as millions of Sudanese, trapped in their homes without water or power, which have been cut off by the fighting.

Downing Street has denied that it had failed to “learn lessons” from the botched evacuation of Afghanistan in August 2021.

While comparisons with Kabul are perhaps inevitable, several factors make the operation in Sudan more difficult. Chief among them is that Britain has no military presence or infrastructure in Khartoum, as it did in Kabul.

As Sunak and his officials weigh the options, time is running out to avert a major foreign policy disaster. 

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