Nigerian authorities say they have started evacuating its students stranded in Sudan amid fighting there.
In a tweet, the Chairman, Nigerians in Diaspora Commission, Abike Dabiri-Erewa, shared images of the students queuing up orderly to board their buses to Egypt supervised.
The exercise was supervised by Nigerian mission officials in Sudan.
As a rising civil conflict threatens to destabilise the wider region, fierce clashes between Sudan’s military and the nation’s primary paramilitary organisation have killed hundreds of people and forced thousands to flee for safety.
The fighting broke out in the middle of April amid what appeared to be a struggle for power between the two major military government factions.
The paramilitaries of the Rapid Support Forces (RSF), a group of militia, support the former warlord Gen Mohamed Hamdan Dagalo, also known as Hemedti, while the Sudanese armed forces generally support Gen Abdel Fattah al-Burhan, the de facto ruler of the country.
The power struggle dates back to the years before a 2019 uprising that toppled tyrant Omar al-Bashir. During that time, he amassed powerful security forces that he purposefully pitted against one another.
Bashir established the RSF in order to put an end to a rebellion in Darfur that had been going on for more than 20 years as a result of the locals being neglected politically and economically by the central government of Sudan. The Janjaweed moniker, which grew to be connected with many crimes, was also used to refer to the RSF.
Before sending them to put down a rebellion in South Darfur, Bashir converted the Janjaweed into a semi-organised paramilitary force in 2013 and awarded their leaders military ranks. Later, many of them were sent to fight in the wars in Yemen and Libya.
