On the night of July 7, seven American diplomats in Juba left a farewell dinner early and were headed back to the U.S. Embassy, anxious to avoid the city’s deepening chaos, when their two-car convoy was ambushed by the South Sudanese presidential guard of Salva Kiir.
South Sudanese troops fired between 50 and 100 rounds at the two armored SUVs as soon as they passed the presidential palace. No one in either vehicle, which included James Donegan, the second-highest ranking U.S. official in South Sudan, was hurt or killed in the attack, but it wasn’t for a lack of trying: Three separate clusters of South Sudanese soldiers unloaded on the unarmed diplomats’ vehicles. Eventually, a U.S. Marine rapid response team from the embassy had to fetch three of the waylaid Americans and their South Sudanese driver.
Our diplomats seem rather disposable these days.