Denise Bowers and her husband Chris said they made the journey home to Bluffton, South Carolina via Egypt.
Hundreds of American citizens have 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 U.S. citizens who seek to depart Sudan to move overland to a location where they can more easily exit the country,” Vedant Patel, a State Department spokesperson told a press briefing.
Patel said that fewer than 5,000 citizens had requested additional information from the U.S. and of those only a fraction had actively sought assistance to depart Sudan. “Several hundred U.S. citizens “have already departed Sudan, either by land, sea or aircraft,” he added.
Saudi Arabia’s foreign ministry said in a statement Saturday that U.S. nationals were among almost 1,900 foreign evacuees who arrived in the port of Jeddah by ship on Saturday. It did not say how many Americans were on board.
While several countries have evacuated nationals by air, some have gone via Port Sudan on the Red Sea, around 500 miles by road from Khartoum.
Around 16,000 American citizens were in the country before the violence broke out just over two weeks ago.
While U.S. personnel were evacuated from the U.S. 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 Thursday that they made it to the Egyptian capital Cairo after an arduous journey that involved travel by bus and ferry.
Chris, 53, said they watched the U.S. Embassy evacuation from their apartment in Sudan’s capital Khartoum, but had to make their own way out of the large African nation.
Denise, 52, who had been working as a teacher, added that the U.S. government “had absolutely nothing to do with us getting out safely,” although the embassy had been aware that they were in Sudan. She said that they had been advised to join a convoy traveling from the Turkish embassy.
Chris, 53, added that he was glad they had escaped but he “felt bad” for those left behind. “The fact that we got on a bus and half of our friends couldn’t come with us made us feel horrible,” he said.
The couple returned from Egypt to Bluffton, South Carolina late Friday.
Along with thousands of others, they were forced to leave after the military and its partner turned rival, the Rapid Security Forces, began battling for control of the large African nation’s major institutions earlier this month.
The country’s top commander and de facto ruler, Gen. Abdel Fattah Burhan, and his former deputy, Gen. Mohammed Hamdan Dagalo — a former camel dealer widely known as Hemedti who leads the Rapid Security Forces, had previously teamed up to co-orchestrate the coup that overthrew the government in October 2021.
But the alliance between the two military leaders spectacularly broke down over how to manage the transition to a civilian government, a disagreement over how the Rapid Security Forces should be integrated into the armed forces and what authority should oversee the process.
Chris said it was “pretty scary” and he could hear warplanes flying and shooting missiles and “bullets whizzing over our heads.”
Since then at least 512 people have been killed and close to 4,200 wounded, according to the United Nations, although it is likely the real death toll is much higher.
The bombardments, gun battles and sniper fire in densely populated areas have hit civilian infrastructure, including many hospitals. Several attempts at a cease-fire have so far failed.
However, Volker Perthes, U.N. special representative in Sudan, told the BBC Saturday, that the sides had nominated representatives for talks which had been suggested for Saudi Arabia, or in South Sudan, though he said there was a practical question over whether they could get there to “actually sit together.”
He said no timeline had been set for talks, adding that both sides “think they will win, but they are both sort of more open to negotiations.” He added that “the word ‘negotiations’ or ‘talks’ was not there in their discourse in the first week or so.”