Canada's Sudan relief flights held up by mechanical difficulties, shooting incident involving Turkish plane
CBC
Two Canadian evacuation flights are scheduled to land in Khartoum late Friday after two earlier airlifts to extract Canadians from the war zone were cancelled, federal officials said.
One of Canada's planned evacuation flights to Sudan ran into mechanical problems Friday in the nearby country of Djibouti. Defence Minister Anita Anand said the problem has since been resolved.
A second Canadian flight, involving a C-130J Hercules transport, was cancelled after a Turkish relief plane was fired on by one of the warring parties.
The problems emerged just one day after Canada began its long-anticipated humanitarian mission in the east African country, now in the midst of a precarious ceasefire between two warring factions.
Canada has been staging its evacuation flights out of Djibouti. Two aircraft are assigned to the mission.
Anand, who spoke early Friday, did not say where the C-130J encountered its mechanical issues, or what the nature of the problem was.
"We need to ensure that occurs safely and that's the question on the table right now," Anand told reporters at a media availability in Dartmouth, N.S.
WATCH: Defence minister gives update on evacuation efforts
Canadians and other foreign nationals have been caught in the crossfire of Sudan's civil conflict after violence broke out last week between the east African country's army and a paramilitary force.
Canadians waiting at the airstrip on Friday said they were left outside most of the time with little water or food, and almost no information.
"The British Army are the ones that have been providing food, water and anything else that people need," said Safia Mustafa, who grew up in St. Catharines, Ont., but now lives in Calgary. "They've been really, really helpful. They help people with their bags shuttling back and forth."
Mustafa said a handful of Canadian military personnel on the ground have been "doing their best to ... communicate with us," but they seemed stressed.
"I think a lot of it is out of their control," she said.
The fragility of Sudan's truce was underscored Friday by reports that a Turkish evacuation plane came under fire at an airbase outside Sudan's capital Khartoum as it was coming in to land.
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