The scramble to flee Sudan

With help from Lee Hudson

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The U.S. government evacuated its diplomats from the Sudanese capital on Sunday but left behind hundreds of Americans who have spent the past two days scrambling to find ways to flee the city.

In social media and text messages sent from Khartoum, Americans shared stories with NatSec Daily about narrowly escaping gun fighting and coming close to getting stuck between exchanges of rocket-propelled grenades as they tried to find safe passage to the airport and port. The current violence has led to more than 400 people dead and thousands wounded.

In the early hours after fighting began in Sudan, several American citizens, all of whom requested to remain anonymous to protect their safety because they were still en route home, said they contacted the U.S. government for assistance.

One of the Americans said they called and emailed the State Department last week, only to be told that the U.S. government would not be assisting with the evacuation of its citizens. (“This is not Lebanon in 2006,” a senior administration official told NatSec Daily.) Another American citizen who was living in Sudan for work said they eventually found a way out of the country after getting on a French convoy.

Asked about whether the Biden administration coordinated with European countries to help evacuate American citizens from Khartoum, a second senior U.S. official said: “We’ve remained in touch with American citizens and have offered best practices … on security measures and precautions to take on the ground.” The official did not specify whether the administration had specifically asked the French to help with evacuations.

Another senior Biden official in the United Kingdom said the U.S. has worked closely with its allies to coordinate some of the evacuations of Americans and Europeans. The official said the U.S. also helped the U.K. military coordinate the departure of its embassy staff.

National security adviser JAKE SULLIVAN said Monday that the U.S. had begun to facilitate the land evacuation of private citizens from Sudan, including by placing intelligence, surveillance and reconnaissance assets over the route to ensure safe travel between Khartoum and the Port of Sudan.

The U.S. also has a Navy ship off the Port of Sudan, per the first senior administration official, and the administration is “making plans” to provide additional naval assets in the Red Sea to ferry people to safety, provide medical support or other contingency assistance.

But for the last two days, Americans have largely had to fend for themselves, according to the Americans in Khartoum who spoke to NatSec Daily.

Leaving his apartment building, one of the American citizens said he and a group of 20 people left to meet the French military convoy in the middle of the night.

“It was pure dark, no lights on the street. We go out, we take our go bags and there are buildings riddled with bullets. Windows are blown out. Buildings were caught on fire,” the American said, adding that the group stopped by the French embassy. “They were burning everything.”

The French military then led the group out of the city to an undisclosed location — an air strip two hours outside of the city. The caravan included 25 armored vehicles.

“This is the second time the caravan went. The first time they got shot at. So we weren’t told where we were going,” the American said. At the airstrip, hundreds of people stood in line to get onto French and other European military aircraft — most of which were headed for Djibouti.

The Inbox

ANOTHER BROKEN TRUCE: Sudan’s warring generals pledged Tuesday to abide by a new three-day truce brokered by the United States and Saudi Arabia, but, like the attempted ceasefires before, that didn’t last very long.

Soon after, heavy gunfire and explosions were heard in the capital of Khartoum, and residents spotted warplanes flying overhead, the Associated Press’ SAMY MAGDY reports. There’s been little respite as fighting between the Sudanese army and the Rapid Support Forces paramilitary group enters its second week.

Secretary of State ANTONY BLINKEN announced the new truce late Monday, an extension of the nominal three-day holiday ceasefire that was agreed to “following intense negotiation over the past 48 hours.”

If the warring generals can’t commit to any real ceasefire, Sen. CHRIS COONS (D-Del.) said, the U.S. should consider placing new sanctions on the country.

“I think sanctions are appropriate … in the near term, because frankly they’re squandering their chance at peace,” he said on CNN Tuesday morning. Last year, the Treasury Department sanctioned security forces in Sudan for human rights abuses.

MICK MULROY, a former Pentagon official and retired CIA officer, also supports the use of sanctions if the conflict isn’t quelled. As both sides are being supported by separate countries, “this has the possibility to become a long-term civil war that is devastating to the country and damaging to the region,” he told NatSec Daily.

WHAT’S AT STAKE: America’s continued support for Ukraine depends a lot on the success of Kyiv’s expected counteroffensive, the Wall Street Journal’s SABRINA SIDDIQUI and GORDON LUBOLD report, echoing Alex’s and JONATHAN LEMIRE’s story from Monday.

Sen. JACK REED (D-R.I.), chair of the Senate Armed Services Committee, told WSJ if the war appears to be “at an endless stalemate,” it will be harder to make the case politically and to the American public.

Importantly, it’s still unclear what “success” or “failure” in Ukraine’s counteroffensive looks like. “The upcoming counteroffensive probably won’t immediately end the war, so it’s not just about how much territory Ukraine retakes in the coming months. How the counteroffensive affects each side’s ability to sustain the war is also important. That may not be clear for some time,” the Foreign Policy Research Institute’s ROB LEE tweeted Tuesday.

But the story is another indicator that a lot is riding on how Ukrainian troops perform whenever the counteroffensive gets underway.

LAVROV SLAMS U.S. AT U.N.: Russian Foreign Minister SERGEY LAVROV‘s appearance at a United Nations Security Council meeting was marked by intense criticism of the U.S. and its allies for bringing the world to a “dangerous threshold,” the Washington Post’s KAREN DeYOUNG reports.

Lavrov claimed that Washington is using the war in Ukraine to prevent the rise of other powers and tried appealing to the global south, many of whom have been affected by rising food prices since the war began. U.S. Ambassador to the U.N. LINDA THOMAS-GREENFIELD pushed back against Lavrov by asserting that Moscow’s comments about the war are hypocritical.

“This is a serious topic, even if it was convened by a council member whose actions demonstrate a blatant disregard for the U.N. Charter,” Thomas-Greenfield said.

The Russian minister’s appearance at the U.N. was his first visit to the U.S. since Russia invaded Ukraine more than a year ago. Lavrov’s comments are also another example of how Russia has used its presidency of the U.N. Security Council to justify its war in Ukraine.

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2024

THE REELECT: President JOE BIDEN is running for reelection, his campaign announced in a video on Tuesday. It struck familiar themes, namely protecting democracy at home and abroad, using imagery of the Jan. 6 Capitol insurrection. It sounds like that will, once again, be a major throughline of his presidential campaign.

NUKES TO SEOUL: Former national security adviser JOHN BOLTON called for redeploying tactical nuclear weapons to South Korea to counter North Korean aggression.

“Having tactical nuclear weapons back on the peninsula would be clear evidence of our resolve and determination to deter North Korea,” Bolton, a likely 2024 GOP presidential candidate, told Reuters’ HYONHEE SHIN on the sidelines of a forum in Seoul on Tuesday.

His remarks came as Biden prepares to meet with South Korean President YOON SUK YEOL in Washington, where they’re expected to discuss ways to improve confidence in U.S. extended deterrence.

Keystrokes

DISRUPTED IRAN ELECTION PLOT: A U.S. Cyber Command hacking unit disrupted an Iranian attempt to attack a U.S. city’s election results reporting system ahead of the 2020 elections, said Maj. Gen. WILLIAM HARTMAN, commander of Cyber Command’s Cyber National Mission Force.

In an address at the RSA conference in San Francisco late Monday, reported on by our own MAGGIE MILLER (for Pros!), Hartman detailed that the attempted attack was uncovered by CNMF members during a “reconnaissance mission in foreign space,” and involved an Iranian threat group known as “Pioneer Kitten.”

“We detected that that malicious cyber actor had gained access to a city’s local infrastructure that was used to report the results of voting for the 2020 elections,” Hartman said. “To be clear, this isn’t infrastructure involved in casting a vote; it isn’t infrastructure involved in counting votes.”

ERIC GOLDSTEIN, the executive assistant director for cybersecurity at the Cybersecurity and Infrastructure Security Agency, said on the same panel that CISA was able to immediately get in contact with the impacted victim city and “remediate the intrusion before it could occur.”

“There was no impact to election infrastructure, no impact to voting systems, no impact to the free and fair conduct of the election,” Goldstein said.

The Complex

NEW TANK DEBUTS IN MOSCOW: The Russian Armed Forces have rolled out new T-14 Armata battle tanks to fire on Ukrainian positions, according to the Kremlin-controlled RIA news agency, which added that the tanks “have not yet participated in direct assault operations.”

RIA said the tanks are fitted with extra protection and crews have undergone “combat coordination” at training grounds in Kyiv. But these claims appear to conflict with the U.K. Ministry of Defense, which previously said development of the tanks were “dogged with delays, reduction in planned fleet size, and reports of manufacturing problems.”

“If Russia deploys T-14 it will likely be primarily for propaganda purposes. Production is probably only in the low tens, while commanders are unlikely to trust the vehicle in combat,” the U.K. ministry also said in a series of tweets in January.

PREDICTING COVID: The Pentagon is doubling down on fitness tracker technology that can predict Covid-19 days before a user notices symptoms by moving the project from research to a full-fledged program, Lt Col. JEFFREY SCHNEIDER, a program manager at the Defense Innovation Unit tells our own LEE HUDSON.

The Rapid Assessment of Threat Exposure project, developed in partnership with the Defense Threat Reduction Agency, uses a predictive artificial intelligence algorithm that was trained with data from over 11,000 users during the pandemic.

The wearables use biomarker data to generate a wellness score that may indicate the user has an infection.

The Pentagon announced Tuesday that DIU awarded Philips $10 million to add 4,500 users, including Air Combat Command’s first sergeants. Philips is continuing to develop the algorithm and intends to expand the technology by including other respiratory diseases, said NAVIN NATOEWAL, the company’s head of integrated technology solutions.

On the Hill

DEFENSE INDUSTRY REFORM: The chair of the Senate Armed Services Committee is backing reforms to the International Traffic in Arms Regulations regime and an overhaul of the foreign military sales process, our friends at Morning Defense report (for Pros!).

Reed, who does not have jurisdiction over either issue, hopes his influential voice will light a fire under the lawmakers who do. But it is possible that the annual defense policy bill could serve as the vehicle to pass reforms if they come out of the foreign affairs panels.

As Morning Defense notes, the State Department is not enthusiastic about ITAR changes. But the agency and the Defense Department are separately mulling ways to streamline their ends of the foreign military sales process.

Meanwhile, Australia and the U.K. have been pressing for ITAR changes to realize the AUKUS pact’s tech-sharing goals. HFAC Chair MICHAEL McCAUL (R-Texas) has said he is working on legislation to exempt AUKUS nations from ITAR.

DON’T OVERCLASSIFY: After the leak of classified information, lawmakers don’t want the administration to go too far in reviewing their classifications procedures, our own ANTHONY ADRAGNA and JOE GOULD report.

Both Democrats and Republicans say it’s important to control who has access to information, while also reducing the amount of material that’s classified in the first place. There is so much needlessly classified information that the government cannot effectively protect the truly sensitive intel, they argue.

“People realize that there’s a lot of stuff that gets classified that really shouldn’t be,” Senate Intelligence Committee member JOHN CORNYN (R-Texas) said in an interview. “The volume of classified materials has just exploded because of computers. And so they are not able to manage it. It’s a real problem.”

Broadsides

DON’T TRUST CHINA: Beijing cannot be trusted to mediate peace between Russia and Ukraine, Czech President PETR PAVEL warned, telling our own LILI BAYER and KETRIN JOCHECOVÁ that China benefits from prolonging the war.

Beijing, he said, can get cheap oil, gas and other resources from Moscow — in exchange for its “no limits” partnership with the Kremlin. “It is also good for China that the West is probably becoming a little bit weaker by supporting Ukraine,” he added.

His comments come as China is trying to position itself as a peacemaker in Ukraine, recently floating a vague roadmap to ending the conflict. And while most Western allies have been skeptical of the overtures, some countries like France insist China could play a major role in peace talks.

Transitions

— ALEXANDRA PROKOPENKO is joining the Carnegie Endowment for International Peace as a non-resident scholar working on Russia’s economy, technology and sanctions. From 2017 to early 2022, she worked at the Central Bank of Russia.

What to Read

— DMYTRO KULEBA, Foreign Affairs: Why NATO must admit Ukraine

— CHOE SANG-HUN, The New York Times: Why the Seoul-Tokyo détente is crucial to U.S. strategy

— Editorial Board, The Wall Street Journal: The Pentagon tilts at windmills

Tomorrow Today

— Senate Armed Services Committee, 9:30 a.m.: Review Of The Defense Authorization Request For Fiscal Year 2024 And The Future Years Defense Program

— House Transportation and Infrastructure Committee, 10 a.m.: Coast Guard Authorization Act of 2023

— The SETA Foundation at Washington D.C., 10 a.m.: Türkiye-Iran Relations and the Regional Dynamics

— House Armed Services Committee, 10:30 a.m.: U.S. Military Posture And National Security Challenges In Europe

— Senate Committee on Homeland Security and Governmental Affairs, 10:30 a.m.: Lessons Learned: 10 Years Since The Boston Marathon Bombings

— The Armed Forces Communications and Electronics Association, 11 a.m.: TechNet Cyber Webinar Series: Software Modernization

— The Atlantic Council, 11 a.m.: Sudan: Unpacking the crisis

— The Center for a New American Security, 1 p.m.: The Pitch 2023: A Competition of New Ideas

— Senate Foreign Relations Committee, 2 p.m.: U.S. Policy on Tunisia

— House Armed Services Committee, 2 p.m.: FY24 National Security Space Programs Hearing

— House Armed Services Committee, 2:30 p.m.: Fiscal Year 2024 Army Modernization Programs

— The University of Maryland’s Department of Physics, 4 p.m.: The Future Nuclear Deterrence and Arms Control

Thanks to our editor, Heidi Vogt, from whom we’re always trying to escape.

We also thank our producer, Jeffrey Horst, who we congratulate on getting promoted!