The US is preparing to send a large number of additional troops to its base in Djibouti in case of an eventual evacuation from Sudan, US officials said on Thursday, as fresh gunfire erupted and the latest of several ceasefires broke down.
Planning for the deployments to Camp Lemmonier in Djibouti got under way in earnest on Monday after a US embassy convoy was attacked in Khartoum.
Fighting between rival military factions erupted last weekend, with violence that has so far killed more than 330 people, tipping a nation reliant on food aid into what the United Nations calls a humanitarian catastrophe.
“We are deploying additional capabilities nearby in the region for contingency purposes related to securing and potentially facilitating the departure of U.S. Embassy personnel from Sudan, if circumstances require it,” the Pentagon said in a statement, without providing more details.
The state department has previously told US citizens in Sudan to remain sheltered in place indoors, and said the uncertain security situation in Khartoum and closure of the airport made it unsafe to undertake a US government-coordinated evacuation.
The fiercest battles between the army and the Rapid Support Forces (RSF) paramilitary group have been around Khartoum, one of Africa’s largest urban areas, and in Darfur, which is still scarred by a brutal conflict that ended three years ago.
Since hostilities between the two factions erupted last weekend, the US has been contemplating the evacuation of government employees and has been transporting them from their homes to a secure, centralized location to prepare for such an eventuality.
Other countries have also started to make plans to evacuate thousands of foreigners, but their efforts have been put on hold by the ongoing violence. Many international humanitarian staff members have sought shelter at the 300-bed Rotana hotel in Khartoum, where more than 1,000 people are now staying.
US officials said Djibouti, sandwiched between Ethiopia, Eritrea and Somalia on the Gulf of Aden, will be the staging point for any evacuation operation.
Any evacuation in the current circumstances is fraught with difficulty and security risks as Khartoum’s airport remains nonfunctional and overland routes from the capital out of the country are long and hazardous even without the current hostilities.
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 523-mile (841km) route are treacherous.
Another option might be to drive to neighboring Eritrea; however, that would also be problematic given that Eritrea’s leader, Isaias Afwerki, 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.
