Wadi Seidna's origin is older than Sudan's independence. On 2 December 1942, with the Second World War raging across North Africa, the US Army Air Forces activated the 46th Ferrying Squadron at the base. The squadron was part of the Air Transport Command's 13th Ferrying Group, whose territory covered a vast arc from El Geneina in western Anglo-Egyptian Sudan to Karachi in British India, and from Cairo up to Tehran. Wadi Seidna was one of the stations that made Allied logistics possible across the Middle East and South Asia - a node in the invisible network of airstrips that kept supplies, personnel, and mail moving to the front lines. The RAF operated alongside the Americans; when the war with Italy began, two civilian Italian transport aircraft sharing the airfield were captured outright. No. 114 Maintenance Unit formed here in April 1942. No. 115 Transport Wing was established in May 1944. Tropical trials of RAF aircraft were conducted at the base during and after the war. By 1946, the activity had wound down and the field reverted to Sudanese military use.

After Sudanese independence in 1956, Wadi Seidna continued as a military base under the Sudanese Air Force. Its location - 22 kilometers north of central Khartoum, 1.5 kilometers west of the Nile, with the Khartoum VOR-DME (identifier KTM) 15.2 nautical miles south - made it a natural military complement to the civilian Khartoum International Airport. Through decades of Sudanese political turbulence, the base served as a transport and logistics hub for the Sudanese military. It did not become internationally prominent until the morning of 15 April 2023, when war erupted between the Sudanese Armed Forces and the Rapid Support Forces. Within hours, Khartoum International was unsafe and soon effectively closed - fighting raged in and around the airport, and the RSF seized much of the facility. Foreign governments had citizens trapped in the capital with no way out. Wadi Seidna, still under SAF control, became the only option.

What happened between 22 and 26 April 2023 at Wadi Seidna was one of the most complex multinational evacuation operations of the twenty-first century. The French got there first - Operation Sagittaire landed a C-130 on 22-23 April with commandos who negotiated access with the Sudanese military, then flew three A400M Atlas transports from Djibouti to evacuate French and foreign nationals. The Spanish Air and Space Force followed. The German Luftwaffe flew in. The Royal Netherlands Air Force arrived. The British Royal Air Force came too. By the end, thousands of foreign nationals - British, German, French, Dutch, Spanish, Americans, and others - had been evacuated from Khartoum through Wadi Seidna's runway. It was messy. Senior German officials accused the British of landing without Sudanese Armed Forces permission, which briefly led the SAF to refuse access to the base; one account alleged the British had to pay the SAF to restore access, causing at least half a day's delay in German rescue efforts. The UK Ministry of Defence called the reports "complete nonsense." The geopolitics of the evacuation, with multiple Western militaries competing for runway slots, made the operation more fraught than its logistics already required.

The evacuations ended but the fighting did not. On 21 May 2023, Rapid Support Forces fighters in about 20 trucks tried to cross the Nile on a bridge east of Wadi Seidna to reach the airfield. Heavy SAF artillery stopped them. The RSF pressure on the base would continue for years. On 21 March 2024, an RSF kamikaze drone destroyed a Sudanese Air Force C-130H Hercules as it was taxiing on the Wadi Seidna runway - a significant blow to the SAF's transport capability, since the aircraft was one of very few such transports the Sudanese Air Force still possessed. On 25 February 2025, a Sudanese Air Force Antonov An-26 transport aircraft crashed in Omdurman shortly after takeoff from Wadi Seidna, killing at least 46 people. Among the dead was Major General Bahr Ahmed, a senior commander in the Khartoum area. The crash's cause was not immediately determined, but the broader context of drone warfare and attrition on SAF aircraft fleet suggested that Wadi Seidna operations had become genuinely dangerous.

The history of Wadi Seidna tells you something about what air bases are, in the end. They are flat ground and pavement. They are fuel storage and ordnance bunkers. They are, more importantly, access: the place where the outside world can reach this particular piece of geography, and vice versa. For eighteen months in 1942-44, the outside world was the Allied war effort, and the pavement flowed Hurricanes and Dakotas to the Eastern Mediterranean and beyond. For seventy-two hours in April 2023, the outside world was desperate foreign embassies, and the pavement flowed C-130s and A400Ms in the other direction, carrying out the civilians the war had stranded. For the SAF pilots and mechanics who have kept Wadi Seidna operational since April 2023, it has been both the last functioning major military airfield near the capital and a constant target. The runway remains. The war continues. What the base has done before, it will probably do again.