Sudan conflict: US, Japan, South Korea deploy military assets for possible rescue missions

The United States, Japan and South Korea were making preparations to evacuate their citizens from Sudan as security in the country’s capital Khartoum deteriorated amid heavy fighting between two rival military groups.

More than 350 people have been killed since the fighting erupted Saturday between forces loyal to Sudan’s army chief Abdel Fattah al-Burhan and his deputy, Mohamed Hamdan Daglo, who commands the paramilitary Rapid Support Forces (RSF).

The fighting, the culmination of a long-simmering power struggle between the army and the RSF, derailed an internationally backed plan for a transition to a civilian democracy four years after the fall of Islamist autocrat Omar al-Bashir to mass protests and two years after a military coup.

International efforts to broker a ceasefire this week have stalled. Some of the fiercest battles have taken place in Khartoum, a city home to five million people, most of whom have been cloistered in their homes without electricity, food and water. The healthcare system has essentially collapsed.

International powers have been struggling to evacuate citizens after the capital’s airport and several districts housing embassies were caught up in the violence.

There were also reports of heavy fighting in the city of Obeid, some 400km (250 miles) southwest of Khartoum.

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The US said it was deploying military resources “for contingency purposes related to securing and potentially facilitating the departure of US embassy personnel from Sudan, if circumstances require it,” Lieutenant Colonel Phil Ventura, a US Defence Department spokesman, said in a statement on Thursday.

US officials have told lawmakers concerned about the situation that there are roughly 70 American staffers at the Khartoum embassy, according to congressional aides.

At the moment, the Biden administration believes it’s too unsafe to evacuate embassy personnel because Khartoum’s airport and Sudan’s border with Chad remain closed, according to the State Department.

Ventura didn’t say where the US was positioning its forces. Politico reported earlier Thursday that Deputy Secretary of State Wendy Sherman had told lawmakers on Wednesday that troops were deploying to Djibouti, where the US has a large base, Camp Lemonnier.

The Chinese embassy said this week it could be forced to evacuate citizens from Sudan if the security situation worsened. China has one military base on the continent, also located in Djibouti.

An embassy statement on Monday urged Chinese citizens and Chinese institutions in Sudan to “stay on high alert, strictly avoid going out and strengthen security precautions”.

The Egyptian and Sudanese militaries said that Egypt succeeded in repatriating dozens of its military personnel who had been detained by the RSF when it attacked Merowe airport, north of the capital, early in the fighting. Egypt said its personnel were there for training and joint exercises.

Other nations were struggling to evacuate their citizens from Sudan.

Germany halted a mission on Wednesday to fly out about 150 citizens on three Luftwaffe A400M transport planes, Der Spiegel magazine reported, citing unnamed sources.

On Friday, Japan and South Korea each announced plans to send military transport aircraft to Djibouti, a remote country at the Horn of Africa, about 1,200km southeast of Khartoum, where they will remain on standby.

South Korea plans to send a C-130 transport aircraft, as well as some 50 military personnel, including security and medical staff, Yonhap news agency said.

“While our transport aircraft and troops plan to be on standby in a US military base in Djibouti and watch the situation, they will prioritise supporting the evacuation,” South Korea’s defence ministry said

Twenty-five South Korean citizens live in Sudan and are known to be safe, media have said. There are 63 Japanese citizens in Sudan, most of whom are in the capital.

Japan’s Defence Minister Yasukazu Hamada said Japan would send a Self-Defence Forces C-130 transport plane to Djibouti on Friday, followed by a C-2 transport aircraft and a KC-767 aerial refuelling plane.

Japan was also forming a task force consisting of around 370 personnel from the Ground and Air Self-Defence Forces.

Japan’s Self-Defence Forces set up a base in Djibouti in 2011, as part of an anti-piracy mission in the Gulf of Aden off Somalia.

Hamada indicated the government may also try to evacuate Japanese citizens by land, something the Americans would also likely be considering.

If a secure landing zone in or near Khartoum cannot be found, one option would be to drive evacuees to Port Sudan on the Red Sea. But that is a 12-hour trip and the roads over the 840km route are treacherous.

Another might be to drive to neighbouring Eritrea, however that would also be problematic given that Eritrea’s leader, Isaias Afewerki, is not a friend of the US or the West in general.

The last time the US evacuated embassy personnel overland was from Libya in July 2014, when a large convoy of US military vehicles drove staff from the Tripoli embassy to Tunisia. There have been more recent evacuations, most notably in Afghanistan and Yemen, but those have been conducted largely by air.

Bloomberg, Reuters, Kyodo and Associated Press