Indian Government Rescues Stranded Citizens from Sudan Under Operation Kaveri

New Delhi (India), April 26, 2023: An Indian Air Force (IAF) C-130J aircraft carrying 135 Indian nationals arrived in the Saudi Arabian city of Jeddah in the early hours of Wednesday. This was the third batch of citizens to be rescued from war-torn Sudan under Operation Kaveri.

The Indian government is facilitating the journey of these citizens back to India soon, as per the tweet by V Muraleedharan, the Minister of State in the Ministry of External Affairs. Another IAF aircraft carrying 148 Indian citizens had also landed in Jeddah earlier in the morning.

Operation Kaveri is a government-run initiative to extract stranded Indian citizens from Sudan, which has been ravaged by severe violence due to clashes between the country’s forces and rebel RAF.

The government has focused on the safety of over 3,000 Indian citizens located throughout Sudan. The first batch of stranded Indians in Sudan were evacuated under Operation Kaveri on Tuesday. INS Sumedha had departed Port Sudan for Jeddah with 278 people onboard. India’s Foreign Minister, S Jaishankar, announced the launch of Operation Kaveri on Monday, stating that the government was “committed to assisting all our brethren in Sudan.”

The conflict in Sudan began due to a power struggle between two factions of the country’s military regime, resulting in the death of more than 250 people and leaving approximately 2,600 others injured in Khartoum and other cities. The situation has raised the possibility of a civil war breaking out across the country.

The country has been under the control of a council of generals since the 2021 coup, with two military leaders at the center of the current dispute: Gen Abdel Fattah al-Burhan and his deputy, Gen Mohamed Hamdan Dagalo.