The fighting in Sudan between the Rapid Support Forces (RSF) and the Sudanese Armed Forces (SAF) caused hundreds of thousands to flee their homes. The East African country is facing a humanitarian crisis and is on the brink of a civil war. With the increasing violence, the U.S. shuttered its embassy indefinitely and evacuated staff using elite special operations forces.

But what about the private American citizens initially stranded in Sudan? Should they have received the same level of assistance as United States Embassy personnel?

Straight Arrow News contributor Katherine Zimmerman argues the U.S. military should not be responsible for rescuing civilians who were aware of the risks.

The initial message from the embassy, even after the U.S. military aided an evacuation, was for Americans to shelter in place, and that it would provide guidance to help Americans who desire to leave about which routes appeared to be safe.

Meanwhile, many European and regional partners were actively facilitating the departure of their own citizens and Americans —space-permitting — by airlift from two airstrips outside the capital or other means such as convoys. The U.S. government kept repeating the conditions did not support such an organized effort. Ultimately, a week after U.S. personnel had fled the country, the United States government organized three convoys to take Americans to Port Sudan from where they could travel to Jeddah, Saudi Arabia. The scramble to get American personnel out of the country, combined with a chaotic effort to respond to demands to help American citizens still in the country, revealed how unprepared the United States government was for this crisis. It also shows how low the tolerance for risk remains at the State Department, a hangover from what happened over a decade ago in Benghazi, Libya.

Experts who follow Sudan closely have noted that all the warnings that war was coming were there. In terms of what Americans should expect from their government, it fell short this time. But the insistence that the U.S. military should have conducted an operation to evacuate private citizens from Sudan is misplaced. Unlike Americans staffing the U.S. Embassy on official government business in Sudan, these citizens were in the country in a private capacity. The support they received should have been better coordinated, certainly. But American soldiers should not be placed in harm’s way to rescue private citizens who had ample warning of the risks they were taking.