LONDON: Families from the UK are pleading with the British government to help them reunite with their relatives after failing to secure evacuation from Sudan or facing trouble with their travel documents, it was revealed on Wednesday.
UK citizens and their representative in Westminster told The Independent that their relatives are still stuck in the country, which is in the grip of a deadly battle between Gen. Abdel-Fattah Burhan and a paramilitary group called the Rapid Support Forces, commanded by Gen. Mohamed Hamdan Dagalo.
More than 500 civilians have been killed in the clashes and hundreds of thousands of people displaced across the country, sparking a rapid evacuation program in which Saudi Arabia has been a leading player.
Britons have said their repeated calls for assistance in getting relatives rescued have gone unanswered.
The requests for assistance came after Rishi Sunak praised the British government for a “successful” operation to “evacuate British nationals who wished to leave, their dependents and other nationalities from Sudan,” which ended on Monday.
Sunak added that it had been the “largest and longest evacuation of any Western country and one that those involved can be proud of.”
A British-Sudanese couple appealed to Cardiff MP and Labour Party shadow justice minister, Anna McMorrin, who has described the plight of Mohamed, 27, and his heavily pregnant wife Manahil, 26, as “desperate.”
Manahil applied for a UK visa to be with her husband just before the fighting broke out in Sudan, and her passport is now stuck in the British embassy in Khartoum, where staff have all been evacuated.
“To leave a heavily pregnant wife in the fighting is just horrific. This is an incredibly hostile response to people who are dependent on British families,” McMorrin told The Independent. She likened the British response to failed efforts to airlift citizens from Afghanistan in the summer of 2021 when Kabul fell to the Taliban.
“This happened in Afghanistan where we couldn’t repatriate people that were stuck and it is happening now in Sudan, we should be stepping up and showing leadership as a country,” she said.
A UK government spokesperson said: “The UK has carried out by far the longest and largest evacuation of any Western country from Sudan, bringing 2,341 people out in under one week. It has always been the case that the evacuation has been open to British nationals and their eligible family members, with a later exemption for NHS clinicians.”
They added: “Preventing a humanitarian emergency in Sudan is our focus right now. Alongside the UK evacuation effort, we are working with international partners and the United Nations to bring an end to fighting.”
