Location: Sudan sends hundreds of soldiers to the Saudi-Yemeni border

How many soldiers entered Saudi Arabia on their way to Yemen?

1018 officers and soldiers entered the Kingdom by sea on September 22, 2020, and reached the city of Jizan, in the southeast of the country, near the Yemeni border.

What is the Sudanese government’s position on the Yemen war?

Prime Minister Abdullah Hamdok pledged to return his soldiers from Yemen, but the head of the Sovereignty Council, Abd al-Fattah al-Burhan, pledged their return to the return of “legitimacy”.

The British “Middle East Eye” website revealed, on Friday, the arrival of Sudanese fighters to Saudi Arabia, last week, in order to transfer them to Yemen, in conjunction with the Sudanese Prime Minister Abdullah Hamdok’s pledge to return his country’s soldiers from Yemen.

Sudan had announced, last January, that it would reduce its military presence in Yemen from about 5,000 soldiers to about 650 soldiers.

Sudan was participating with about 15,000 soldiers as part of the coalition to support legitimacy led by Saudi Arabia and the UAE since 2015. Against the Iranian-backed Houthi militia.

Private Saudi sources told Middle East Eye that 1,018 officers and soldiers from the Sudanese army entered the Kingdom by sea on September 22, and arrived in the southeastern city of Jizan, near the Yemeni border.

Another source indicated that two Sudanese planes carrying military personnel left Khartoum to Najran airport in southern Saudi Arabia the day before the arrival of the naval regiment.

In the meantime, Sudanese Prime Minister Abdullah Hamdok pledged to return the Sudanese soldiers participating in the Saudi-led coalition in Yemen, without specifying a date for that.

In an interview with the American “Atlantic Council” think tank, on Friday, Hamdok described his country’s participation in the coalition as a “legacy left by the previous regime,” referring to the regime of President Omar al-Bashir.

He added, “The conflict in Yemen has no military solution, whether from our side or any other party in the world, and it must be resolved through political means.”

He explained that the number of his country’s remaining soldiers in Yemen is “not much,” estimating the presence of about 5,000 Sudanese soldiers with the last batch that returned to the country.

Former Sudanese President Omar al-Bashir had decided to participate in the war in Yemen alongside Saudi Arabia in 2015, to help Yemeni President Abd Rabbu Mansour Hadi regain power, and Sudanese forces were particularly active in the country’s coast on the Red Sea.

Since the overthrow of Al-Bashir’s government a year and a half ago, the new rulers, who are a mixture of civilians and soldiers, have begun to push the Sudanese forces out of Yemen.

But several hundred RSF forces remained in Aden, which is controlled by the UAE, and on the Saudi-Yemeni border.

The head of the Sudanese Transitional Sovereignty Council, Lieutenant General Abdel Fattah Al-Burhan, had previously set what he called “necessity” as a condition for the withdrawal of Sudanese forces from Yemen, before saying that their return is linked to restoring legitimacy and the end of the coalition mission.