Syrian Foreign Minister Asaad al-Shaibani announced Monday that Damascus will send a team to Sudan to assist in evacuating Syrian citizens stranded amid the country’s ongoing war.
In a post on X, Shaibani said a special team would be sent to assess the situation of Syrians under the current circumstances, provide necessary support, and work on evacuating them.
He did not mention the number of Syrians residing in Sudan or what prompted Damascus to dispatch a team there.
Sudan has been devastated by a two-year conflict between the regular army led by Abdel Fattah al-Burhan and his former deputy, Mohamed Hamdan Daglo, who leads the Rapid Support Forces paramilitary.
The war, which began as a power struggle between the two figures before reaching breaking point in April 2023, has killed tens of thousands, displaced more than 13 million people and triggered what the United Nations calls one of the world's worst humanitarian disasters.
Syrians began fleeing to the northeast African country soon after the war in their country erupted in 2011, after forces of the former regime violently cracked down on democracy protests.
According to UN figures from 2021, approximately 90,000 Syrians live in Khartoum and other parts of Sudan, but informal estimates put the number as over twice that much. No official statistics are available.
Some Syrians were reported killed when the conflict there erupted in 2023 between the army and paramilitaries.
Sudan’s only operating international airport is in the eastern coastal city of Port Sudan, the wartime seat of the army-aligned government, which until recently had been spared the conflict.
But the city has come under heavy attack since 4 May, with drone strikes targeting both military and civilian sites, including the airport, fuel depots, the power station, and the Flamingo naval base.