A year ago
Foreign governments evacuated diplomats, staff and citizens from Sudan on Sunday as rival generals battled for a ninth day.
Khartoum
to Djibouti, carrying some 200 people from various countries, and more were planned for Monday.
An Italian air force C-130 that left Khartoum with evacuees landed Sunday night at an air base in Djibouti, the country's Defence Ministry said. Another plane, carrying Italy's ambassador and military personnel involved in the evacuation, was expected in Djibouti later at night.
Spain has evacuated some thirty nations and 70 others from European or Latin American countries to Djibouti following an operation coordinated by the Spanish Ministries of Foreign Affairs and the European Union.
The EU's foreign policy chief on Monday told reporters in Luxemburg that more than one thousand European citizens have been evacuated from Sudan, and that 21 people have already arrived in Europe.
"It has been a long weekend, a long and intense weekend trying to take our people out of Sudan. It has been a complex operation and it has been a successful operation, first the staff of the European Union, 21 people are already in Europe and many more European Union citizens are already out of Sudan, I can't give you the concrete figure, it's more than 1,000 people for sure," he said.
“We have to continue pushing for a political settlement. We cannot afford that Sudan, which is a very populated country, implodes because it will be sending shockwaves around the whole [of] Africa”, he added.
Officials in Jordan said four planes landed at Amman military airport carrying 343 Jordanian evacuees from Port Sudan.
20,000 people left for neighbouring Chad. War is not new to Darfur, where ethnically motivated violence has killed up to 300,000 people since 2003. But Sudan is not used to such heavy fighting in its capital, which "has become a ghost city,” said Atiya Abdalla Atiya from the Doctors’ Syndicate.
Total Comments: 0