Due to the civil war in Sudan, the Hungarian government evacuated 32 people, including 7 Hungarian citizens, in a special operation, announced Minister of Defense Kristóf Szalay-Bobrovniczky at the Kecskemét Air Base on Thursday morning.
The minister said after the landing of the Airbus A319 military aircraft carrying evacuated Hungarians and foreign nationals that “the safety of the Hungarian people is the most important thing wherever they are in the world.”
“Thirty-two people were brought home from the civil war-stricken Sudan. With this, all Hungarians arrived home safely,” said the Hungarian minister.
Szalay-Bobrovniczky stated that he could not say more about the technical details of the operation, code-named “Desert Caravan,” which he said was carried out with great care and precision for security reasons. The operation succeeded in bringing home seven Hungarian nationals as well as evacuating nationals from eight other countries, including the U.S., Canada, Norway, Turkey and Sudan.
Szalay-Bobrovniczkyat indicated that the operation was conducted with the resources of the Hungarian Armed Forces in cooperation with the Hungarian Ministry of Foreign Affairs and the Ministry of the Interior.
The defense minister thanked all those involved in the operation who managed to safely evacuate the 32 people trapped in the country in the shortest possible time.
Clashes in Sudan have been taking place since April 15 between the army led by General Abdel Fattah al-Burhani, who headed the military takeover in 2021, and the paramilitary Rapid Support Forces (RSF) under the control of his rival and former deputy, General Mohamed Hamdan Dagalo, known as Hemedti.
According to the Sudanese Ministry of Health, the clashes have already left 512 dead and 4,193 wounded. The warring sides agreed on a three-day ceasefire on Monday, with the African Union (AU) calling for a lasting ceasefire. Since the fighting erupted, several countries have begun evacuating their citizens from Sudan, while more than 10,000 people of different nationalities have fled to Egypt in the past five days.
