Last flights to evacuate Sudan for UK leave today

The final flights from war-torn Sudan will leave for the UK today, Foreign Secretary James Cleverly has announced.

A total 2,341 people, including a mother and her 13-year-old disabled son, have been evacuated across 28 flights since bloody clashes began, claiming 447 lives.

Mr Cleverly tweeted on Tuesday evening: "After the successful evacuation of 2341 people on 28 flights, the last UK flight is expected to leave Port Sudan tomorrow."

"I urge British Nationals still wishing to leave the country to go to the Coral Hotel in Port Sudan and continue to follow our Travel Advice."

Through the Foreign Office's official Twitter account, they confirmed the last flights will leave and urged British nationals to be at the Coral Hotel in Port Sudan by 10 am local time, Wednesday.

"No further flights will leave from Port Sudan," the travel alert said.

It marks the end of the UK's aerial evacuation operation after a fragile three-day ceasefire held together despite opposing troops clashing in Khartoum on Monday.

Officials said the UK’s focus would turn to the diplomatic and humanitarian response to the bloody conflict caused by a violent rivalry between two generals.

The British government had agreed to include NHS doctors without UK passports on its final journeys amid criticism over the scope of its eligibility criteria for evacuation.

Defence Secretary Ben Wallace said: “Yet again the men and women of our armed forces have led the way.

“In one week, the RAF have flown more than 20 flights, deployed over a thousand personnel, evacuated over 2,000 civilians and helped citizens from more than 20 countries to get home.

“HMS Lancaster will remain at Port Sudan and her crew will continue to help provide support.”

In addition to British nationals, the UK helped evacuate 1,087 people from other nations, including the US, Ireland, the Netherlands, Canada, Germany and Australia.

The FCDO also said a UK team will continue to be based at Port Sudan to provide consular assistance, including to British nationals leaving by commercial routes.

British forces have handed over the co-ordination of evacuations at Wadi Seidna airfield to the north of Khartoum Sudanese authorities.

Members of the Royal Engineers carried out urgent repairs to the runway between flights, the first time an operational airfield has been repaired by British forces since the Falklands conflict in 1982.

There is hope in the West that an internationally-brokered ceasefire could be reached to quell the fighting.

The United Nations said the rival generals, Sudanese army chief General Abdel Fattah Burhan and General Mohammed Hamdan Dagalo, the head of a paramilitary group known as the Rapid Support Forces (RSF), have agreed to send representatives to the negotiation table in a bid to establish a more stable truce.

Generals Burhan and Dagalo, both with powerful foreign backers, were allies in an October 2021 military coup that halted Sudan’s fraught transition to democracy, but they have since turned on each other.

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