A presidential phone call and a secret C-130 landing helped build a corridor out of chaos by Sophie Pedder, Paris bureau chief of The Economist.
At 3am on April 24th, nine days into the street warfare that had rocked the Sudanese capital, Elizabeth Boughey was woken up by a colleague. A British schoolteacher at the American School of Khartoum, she had been forced to flee to a hotel in the centre of the city after civil war broke out on April 15th. “Bullets came through the walls of our apartment, through the glass,” Boughey told me later.
She and her fellow teachers were looking in desperation for a way out of the country. The British and American governments had airlifted out diplomats the day before, leaving others to fend for themselves. Now, her colleague told her, the French were offering the teachers what seemed like a last chance of a safe passage out. But they would need to make a dangerous dash to the French embassy.
Boughey drove a carload of teachers down little-used side roads, avoiding the main drag of Africa Street. They hung a white T-shirt from the window and hoped not to encounter snipers. “You’re just driving across glass and bullet shells and huge power cables on the ground,” she said. Several times they were stopped by militiamen manning roadblocks. Usually the drive would have taken them ten minutes; this time it took a nerve-racking three-quarters of an hour. After nightfall the teachers boarded a convoy of buses which French military vehicles escorted to an airstrip. In the early hours of Tuesday, Boughey made it onto a French military plane bound for Djibouti.
She told me about her escape a few days later, while sitting in a friend’s house in the north-east of England: “The French did everything.”
The French were offering the teachers what seemed like a last chance at safe passage out. But they would need to make a dangerous dash to the French embassy
Boughey’s escape from Sudan was the culmination of a week of plotting by the French government to get foreigners out of the country – regardless of their nationality. Rwandans, Ugandans, Ethiopians and citizens of many other African countries, as well as Europeans and Americans, escaped with France’s help.
The crucial early steps that France took – including taking control of the airstrip – enabled allies, including the British, Germans, Spanish and Turks, to conduct their own airlifts. The French led an extraordinarily effective evacuation effort at a time when other countries seemed to be scrambling. French officials spoke to The Economist’s 1843 magazine about the high-risk, secret operation, revealing the hour-by-hour details of how they did it.
The war began on April 15th when fighting broke out between two armies in Khartoum: government forces under Abdel Fattah al-Burhan and the paramilitary Rapid Support Forces (RSF) loyal to Muhammad Hamdan Dagalo (a warlord who is also known as Hemedti). By lunchtime that day, diplomats at the Quai d’Orsay, which houses the French foreign service on the left bank of the Seine, were meeting at the Crisis and Support Centre, a unit that deals with emergencies.
Conditions in Khartoum were deteriorating rapidly. Water and food supplies were running short. Power was down. The sound of gunfire and shelling echoed throughout the city; Hemedti’s paramilitary forces had burst into homes and hospitals and turned them into fortresses. By Monday April 17th President Emmanuel Macron started planning for a possible evacuation. The next day the French embassy began contacting French civilians in the city, urging them to head for one of three designated meeting points as soon as possible.
Late in the night on Tuesday April 18th, four military transport aircraft – three A400Ms and one C-130 – left France for Djibouti, where the French keep a permanent military base. Among those on board were French special forces, who would be first on the ground in the event of an evacuation. Once on the base, pilots and commandos pored over maps and satellite images of Khartoum, as well as intelligence reports.
In Paris, French military planners were working on two evacuation options to put to the president. One was an overland route to Port Sudan on the Red Sea, 800km (500 miles) away. That would require driving through treacherous territory held either by the RSF or the Sudanese armed forces. A Saudi convoy had made it out by road, but the planners favoured the other option: an airlift. Wadi Seidna military air base lies in the desert west of the river Nile, 25km north of central Khartoum, and is under Burhan’s control. Flying military transport aircraft into an airstrip so close to heavy fighting would entail plenty of risk. But if successful, it would be over quickly.
French officials were in constant contact with allies, who were also mulling evacuation options. At one stage they considered “inserting French special forces into an American operation”, says a diplomatic source. But the Americans decided to evacuate their diplomatic staff directly from their embassy in Khartoum, by Chinook helicopter. If the French were going to pursue an airlift, they were going to have to do it alone. They would need assurances from both warring parties in Sudan’s raging conflict.
At midday on Friday April 21st, Macron was at his desk in the ornate first-floor salon doré at the Elysée Palace. He and a team of advisers were examining the political guarantees needed to secure the airstrip and the escape route.
Burhan was proving difficult to reach. The general was “very careful about his communications”, says a diplomatic source. “And his location”. Macron had hosted Burhan in Paris in 2021, at a donor conference for Sudan, so the French were confident that he would pick up if they could track him down. They reached him at 6pm that evening. Macron stressed that a French evacuation would be carried out in strict neutrality. (France has a history of taking sides in Africa, and Macron needed the general to know he wasn’t doing that.) Burhan agreed that the French could use the Wadi Seidna base and fly through airspace controlled by his forces.
Conditions in Khartoum were deteriorating rapidly. Water and food supplies were running short. Power was down. The sound of gunfire and shelling echoed throughout the city
That still left the tricky question of how civilians would reach the airstrip from Khartoum. Burhan had promised that his soldiers would not pose a threat. But any convoy would have to pass through blocks of the city that had fallen under the control of Hemedti’s paramilitary units, who “were just firing randomly”, said Boughey, the British schoolteacher. A presidential source told me, “We were walking a tightrope in a situation of war, of urban guerrilla warfare.” The French needed to speak to Hemedti.
At dawn on Saturday morning Catherine Colonna, the French foreign minister and a career diplomat, was already at her desk at the Quai d’Orsay. She knew her diplomats in Khartoum had their own contacts with Hemedti. But she put in the call to the warlord herself, requesting “security guarantees that the combat would stop during the passage of the convoys”, says a diplomat. Assured of French neutrality, Hemedti agreed to instruct his men to let the vehicles pass. Macron then made one final call, to Abiy Ahmed, the Ethiopian prime minister, to secure permission to fly over Ethiopian airspace. The political agreements were now in place.
On the evening of Saturday April 22nd Admiral Jean-Philippe Rolland, Macron’s military adviser, put a call through to the president on the secure line he uses at his weekend residence outside Paris. Admiral Rolland had just finished a video briefing with the heads of the country’s military, intelligence and diplomatic services. They were requesting that the president now give the green light to a full-scale immediate air evacuation of civilians out of war-battered Khartoum. It was a dangerous mission; despite the security guarantees, soldiers on either side could decide to open fire at any point. But time was running out. “On y va,” said Macron: let’s do it.
In the hours that followed, “Operation Sagittarius” went into action. Two military transport aircraft, carrying French special forces and other military personnel and vehicles, took off from Djibouti for Wadi Seidna. On approach the pilot of the first plane, Commander Nessim (French military practice is not to identify soldiers by their surnames) found the base deserted and eerily quiet. He struggled to make radio contact with the control tower. There were no lights on the runway or markings to guide the aircraft. The pilot used his night-vision goggles to land, amid what he describes as “the flash of explosions in the distance”. The Sudanese personnel on the base, Nessim said, were “evidently surprised to see aircraft of this size”. The instructions from Burhan did not seem to have yet fully reached the ground.
In the pitch black, the French soldiers disembarked onto the runway, uncertain as to how they would be greeted. “It was dark, there was nothing around,” says one of the landing party, 22-year-old Sergeant Pablo. “Nobody knew for sure what the situation was.” Sudanese vehicles quickly pulled up beside the aircraft: it took French officers half an hour to defuse the situation. By the early hours of the next morning, the first French airlifts from the military base began. The British Royal Air Force and the German and Spanish air forces also started making their own evacuation flights.
It was a dangerous mission; despite the security guarantees, soldiers on either side could decide to open fire at any point. But time was running out. “On y va,” said Macron: let’s do it
French armed forces still considered the environment “semi-permissive” – neither fully hostile nor fully secure. French troops might come under attack by fighters who didn’t know who they were, whether by ambush, artillery fire or ground-to-air missiles. Sudanese soldiers at checkpoints might be unaware of, or feel unconstrained by, instructions to let the French go in peace. These concerns were borne out on Sunday evening, when a convoy of buses from the French embassy did come under fire. One bullet hit and critically wounded a French special-forces commando, who was travelling in an unarmoured vehicle as part of the convoy. (Nobody else was hit and the buses made it to the airstrip.) The commando was operated on by a French surgical team and then flown to Djibouti; days later he was in a stable condition.
In total, ten convoys of buses made the perilous journey from central Khartoum to Wadi Seidna between the early hours of Sunday morning and Tuesday April 25th. At the airstrip, where the heat reached a searing 40°C, Sergeant Pablo was one of those tasked with carrying out a security search of the evacuees and their bags and suitcases, and ensuring that they got food and water. The French army’s 24-hour combat ration, containing such items as pâté, cassoulet and biscuits, went down particularly well. Pablo greeted Germans, Irish, Italians, Australians and citizens of several different African countries at the airstrip. Many of them had contacted the embassy when they heard that French citizens were heading to meeting points for evacuation.
On Tuesday April 25th, Macron reviewed the rescue operation at a national defence and security-council meeting in the underground bunker at the Elysée. It was an indisputable success. In 48 hours the French had airlifted 538 people from Khartoum (only 209 of whom were French nationals). The British would go on to evacuate more civilians. But France’s intervention in those early days opened the way for everybody else.
Most Sudanese residents of Khartoum remain trapped in the city, caught between fleeting hopes of a truce and the brutal reality of heavy gunfire and shelling. Hundreds have been killed, and a humanitarian crisis is gathering pace. The French airlift may be over, but the battle for Sudan is just beginning. ■
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Sophie Pedder is the Paris bureau chief of The Economist
Image/s: Etat-major des Armées
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