About 30 minutes later, the aircraft lifted off into the night sky, encountering no small-arms fire from either faction as they left Sudan, General Sims said. They landed in Ethiopia where the evacuees transferred into a C-17 transport plane that flew them to Camp Lemonnier, the American military base in Djibouti.
The evacuees constitute a tiny fraction of an estimated 16,000 Americans still in Sudan, mostly dual nationals. Leaving may not be so easy for them. Given the challenging environment, the U.S. government does not expect to evacuate private citizens “in the coming days,” one State Department official, John Bass, told reporters.
Still, in the early hours of Sunday, others countries and organizations started to do just that.
The biggest convoy was organized by the United Nations, with a long train of vehicles leaving from the U.N. headquarters in Khartoum shortly after dawn.
Space was at a premium. One bus hired by the United Nations hadn’t shown up, because an embassy had offered its operator more money, a Western official said. But then an aid agency that joined the convoy also did not get the bus it expected, because it had been outbid by the United Nations, the official said.
An exodus of Sudanese, too, continued, mostly those with the funds to leave. Some took buses to the Egyptian border, 600 miles to the north. Others headed for Port Sudan, where they hoped to find a flight or a boat to Saudi Arabia.
Kholood Khair, a political analyst, jumped at the chance offered by a short window of relative calm on Sunday morning to start a long journey to the east. She feared she might not get such an opportunity again. “Staying became untenable,” Ms. Khair said.
On WhatsApp and social media sites, Sudanese would-be evacuees exchanged information about ticket prices, border crossings and security conditions. But even the flow of information was endangered as the internet grew weaker, or cut out altogether, in the country.
