Hundreds of US citizens left Sudan by land, sea and air, the State Department said late Friday as fighting continued despite the extension of a fragile truce between the country’s two top generals.
“We are actively helping US citizens seeking to leave Sudan to move overland to a place where they can more easily leave the country,” Vedant Patel, a spokesman for the State Department, said at a news conference.
Patel said fewer than 5,000 citizens had requested additional information from the US and of those, only a fraction had actively sought help to get out of Sudan. “Several hundred American citizens” have already left Sudan, whether by land, sea or plane,” he added.
Saudi Arabia’s foreign ministry said in a statement on Saturday that US citizens were among nearly 1,900 foreign evacuees who arrived at the port of Jeddah by boat on Saturday. He did not say how many Americans were on board.
While several countries have evacuated their citizens by air, some have done so via Port Sudan on the Red Sea, some 500 miles by road from Khartoum.
About 16,000 US citizens were in the country before the violence broke out just over two weeks ago.
While US personnel were evacuated from the US embassy last week, some have criticized the length of time it has taken to organize civilian evacuations.
Denise Bowers and her husband Chris told NBC News on Thursday that they arrived in the Egyptian capital, Cairo, after an arduous journey that involved traveling by bus and ferry.
Chris, 53, said they watched the evacuation of the US embassy from their apartment in the Sudanese capital Khartoum, but had to make their own way out of the great African nation.
Denise, 52, who had been working as a teacher, added that the US government had «absolutely nothing to do with us getting out safely» even though the embassy knew they were in Sudan. She said they had been advised to join a convoy traveling from the Turkish embassy.
Chris, 53, added that he was glad they had escaped but «felt bad» for those left behind. “The fact that we got on a bus and half our friends couldn’t come with us made us feel horrible,” he said.
The couple returned from Egypt to Bluffton, South Carolina on Friday night.
Along with thousands of others, they were forced to leave after the army and its partner-turned-rival, the Rapid Security Forces, began fighting for control of the great African nation’s top institutions earlier this month.