As of early Thursday afternoon, around 900 British people had been evacuated from the conflict-torn country of Sudan through Cyprus, and the British government recommended anybody who remained in the country to leave while they could.
Hundreds of people have been killed in Khartoum over the previous two weeks as a consequence of a power struggle between the army and a rival paramilitary group, the Rapid Support Forces (RSF).
The airlift of British people began on Tuesday.
According to airport sources in Larnaca, Cyprus, about 900 people had arrived on British Royal Air Force planes by early afternoon. More than half of them have been returned to the United Kingdom.
Two more aircraft will leave Sudan on Thursday evening.
Razan Wahbi, 44, and her 7-year-old twins joined the trip. Her spouse Ghassan and other family members were unable to accompany her because they lacked a British passport, she alleged.
But since I had a British passport, I just left them there. “They don’t have (one), so there was no way to get out,” she told Reuters as she waited to board a jet leased by the British government to transport her to London.
Another person remarked that he, too, had to forsake loved ones. “It’s very difficult to get water, electric, and you can’t go anywhere,” Hamid said. “It’s inexcusable and extremely dangerous.” That is unlike any problem I have ever experienced.
“Sudan has been at war for a long time, but this time is different.”
The Sudanese refugees who escaped to Larnaca met the season’s first tourists.
Many more were forced to leave with nothing except the clothes they were wearing. Tarek, 52, had crammed all of his belongings in a little green garbage bag that was starting to tear.
The 52-year-old Oxford man had come to Khartoum to see his ailing father, who was hospitalized there after suffering a heart attack.
There is a serious scenario there. The occupants are little more than apparitions, shadows of their former selves. “I never thought I’d get out,” he said.
