On Sunday, April 23, barely one week after vicious fighting erupted in Khartoum, the capital of Sudan, the United States special forces evacuated U.S. embassy staff by helicopter, and other foreign nationals fled the city in hastily arranged emergency convoys. As the chaotic face-off between Sudan’s de facto leader, General Abdel Fattah al-Burhan, and his heavily armed rival, General Mohamed Hamdan Dagalo, known as Hemedti, continued, it was unclear when the diplomats would return.
What is happening in Sudan is a mobster shootout, and the world is running away from it. That’s a reasonable first reflex to a terrifying war that has already involved the use of the country’s heaviest weapons in the streets of the capital. Residents have been sheltering in their homes as attack helicopters and fighter jets scream overhead and battles rage in the street; many buildings have been reduced to rubble. Water supplies have been cut off, and electricity is intermittent; hospitals are in crisis. A city of seven million people has had no operating bakeries, no food supplies coming in, and no markets for a week. The World Food Program halted its operations there after three of its staff were killed. Aid compounds have been looted.
