Project Dynamo founder Bryan Stern told NR that he felt obligated to fill the vacuum left by the Biden administration’s inaction.
Bryan Stern learned about the escalating conflict in Sudan like many Americans – on TV.
Rival factions were firing on one another in the streets. In late April, the Biden administration shuttered the U.S. embassy in Khartoum and flew special-operations soldiers into the war-torn country in helicopters to rescue about 100 embassy staffers.
The administration’s message to the roughly 16,000 other Americans believed then to be remaining in the country: Don’t expect the U.S. government to do the same for you. White House press secretary Karine Jean-Pierre told reporters in late April that “it is not our standard procedure to evacuate American citizens living abroad.”
But it is standard procedure for Project Dynamo, Stern’s nonprofit, donor-funded rescue operation. “This is why we exist,” Stern recalled telling himself when he learned about the crisis in northeast African nation. “Let’s go to work.”
On Sunday, Project Dynamo volunteers flew a group of Americans and American allies out of Sudan on a chartered flight. While other governments have flown their people out of Sudan, the Biden administration has not. “Rhino River,” as Project Dynamo’s operation was nicknamed, was the first air evacuation of Americans out of the country since fighting broke out last month.
“You have Americans stuck in a bad spot, and the embassy is closed,” Stern told National Review. “That’s almost the mission statement of Dynamo.”
Stern, a U.S. Army and Navy vet, founded Project Dynamo in August 2021, to rescue Americans from the chaos around the Biden administration’s bungled withdrawal from Afghanistan.
“Dynamo was supposed to be run for three weeks,” Stern said. But he hasn’t been able to quit the rescue game, largely because he keeps finding more Americans in need of rescue.
After those initial rescue operations in Afghanistan, Stern and his small group of Dynamo volunteers started rescuing Americans stuck in Ukraine after the Russian army attacked. Last fall, Stern and some of his other Florida-based colleagues helped rescue people stranded on storm-battered barrier islands after Hurricane Ian pummeled the state’s southwest coast.
Stern and his team say they’ve helped rescue more than 6,000 people in less than two years.
Stern said that when he learned about the Americans stranded in Sudan, he put a button on his website and promoted it on social media to get a sense of the threat people were feeling in the country. Just because TV news says that people are in danger doesn’t mean the people are actually in fear, he said. Within hours, he said, people started reaching out for help.
One hiccup: Stern knew little about Sudan. He’d been to Africa before, he said, “but never this part of Africa.” And he knew no one in the country who could help him.
As they’d done in the past, Stern and his Dynamo colleagues began tapping into local networks and developing human and physical infrastructure in Sudan. They identified who would qualify as an ideal evacuee – Americans with U.S. passports and Sudan citizens with green cards.
“We basically set the standard as anyone who can get to Egypt or the United States legally,” Stern said. “What I can’t do is fly in a bunch of illegals, so to speak, into Egypt. That’s a great way for Egypt to kick me out. That’s a great way for those people to end up in jail.”
The initial plan was to fly a plane into the Wadi Seidna military air base north of Khartoum, which other countries, including England and Canada, had been using. But that didn’t pan out. At one point, a Turkish plane flying into the base was fired on.
Stern said their options then were to move people on the ground, either north – a more dangerous route – or east, toward Port Sudan on the Red Sea. They chose to bus people to Port Sudan.
After receiving intense criticism, the Biden administration eventually did launch overland rescue operations in Sudan. At one point, Stern said, the Dynamo convoy joined the bigger U.S. convoy, which was supported by armed drones for the roughly 500-mile journey.
At Port Sudan, they had the option to evacuate people by boat or by airplane, Stern said. Several countries are taking people by boat across the Red Sea to Jeddah, Saudi Arabia. Stern said he didn’t like the idea of essentially sending his evacuees to a Saudi refugee camp, where being American could be held against them.
They decided instead to charter a plane, as they’d done on multiple occasions in Afghanistan.
Stern said it’s hard, administratively, to get access to a plane, and to get permission to land it from a government that’s busy fighting a civil war, and that doesn’t know his organization.
It’s hard, Stern said, but hard is not the same as impossible.
“Where do you start?” Stern said. “I don’t know. We start making phone calls. Oh yeah, by the way, I don’t know a single person in Sudan.”
As the Dynamo volunteers have done in the past, they made phone calls and sent letters, and collected rejections. But the rejections typically included information they could learn from. Stern compared the process of getting permission to land a plane to solving a math equation.
“It’s algebra,” he said. “I have a quadratic equation, and I’m trying to solve for X.”
Stern said they initially had 120 people manifested for a 106-seat plane they chartered. But, he expected, correctly, that the number would drop – people would change their mind about leaving or find another way out of the country.
Stern said they lost contact with 20 of their people after the group’s bus was attacked by the Russian-backed Rapid Support Forces, or RSF, who stole their belongings, including their cell phones. Stern said they believe the group eventually made it safely to Port Sudan – another bus driver saw the driver of the bus that was attacked, who relayed the story. But Stern said his Dynamo colleagues still have not made contact with the people who were aboard the bus.
“Those people then, who are alive, come to Port Sudan, but now we have no way of coordinating with them,” he said. “Now they’re in the maze of Port Sudan.”
Some of the other people on the manifest couldn’t fly because of problems with their documentation, Stern said. They ended up flying 86 people to Cairo, Egypt on Sunday.
Project Dynamo intends to keep working in Sudan, “to the extent that funding will allow,” Stern said. He said Dynamo paid over $400,000 to charter the plane, in addition to paying for buses, gas, insurance, and hotel rooms. Getting donations for operations in Sudan has proved difficult. “Honestly . . . who cares about Sudan? Not too many people,” Stern said.
There are still Americans stranded in inland Sudan, with few options to get to Port Sudan. Stern said he’s getting requests every day from people looking to evacuate. Stern said the situation in Sudan – where two heavily armed groups who “know the cracks in the sidewalks,” and are operating in a part of the world with a history of genocide and terrorism, and where life is cheap – is at least as dangerous for Americans as the situation in Afghanistan and Ukraine. “I would actually argue probably a little more dangerous,” he said.
Vedant Patel, a U.S. State Department spokesman, has said the U.S. government does not have any additional convoys planned in Sudan, citing “the very delicate security situation and security environment in Khartoum and Port Sudan as well,” according to CNN. Secretary of State Antony Blinken suggested in an interview with Fox News that there could be more U.S. convoys in the future, “as long as there are American citizens in Sudan who are seeking our assistance in leaving Sudan.”
A Navy ship is now transporting people from Port Sudan to Jeddah, where the U.S. has established a reception center to process American evacuees, according to CNN.
Stern said Project Dynamo doesn’t do anything that the U.S. government couldn’t do itself. “I’m not competing with the government,” he said.
In addition to its work in Sudan, Project Dynamo continues to assist Americans and American allies trapped in Afghanistan and Ukraine, Stern said. The organization just helped a single woman who is eight months pregnant leave Afghanistan, keeping her in a safehouse and providing her a male escort to move on the ground in the country, he said.
After nearly two years of conducting rescue operations around the world, Stern said it is clear to him that the U.S. government needs to stop cutting, running, and leaving its people to fend for themselves when things go south in foreign countries.
“It sends an unbelievably bad message to the world that every time there’s a problem we evacuate and leave our people behind,” he said. “At some point, we’ve got to say, ‘We’re the most powerful nation in the world, we actually care about our people, we actually do. Don’t mess with them or you’re going to meet F-16s and Seals.’”
“If you have a military and everyone knows that you won’t use it, from a deterrence perspective it doesn’t mean anything then.”