A presidential phone call and a secret C-130 landing helped build a corridor out of chaos
By Sophie Pedder
At 3am on April 24th, nine days into the street warfare that had rocked the Sudanese capital, Elizabeth Boughey was woken up by a colleague. A British schoolteacher at the American School of Khartoum, she had been forced to flee to a hotel in the centre of the city after civil war broke out on April 15th. “Bullets came through the walls of our apartment, through the glass,” Boughey told me later. She and her fellow teachers were looking in desperation for a way out of the country. The British and American governments had airlifted out diplomats the day before, leaving others to fend for themselves. Now, her colleague told her, the French were offering the teachers what seemed like a last chance of a safe passage out. But they would need to make a dangerous dash to the French embassy.
