Siege of Khartoum population of Khartoum was about 34,000. Gordon's plight excited great concern in the British press, and even Queen Victoria intervened on his behalf. The government ordered him to return, but Gordon refused, saying he was honour-bound to defend the city. By July 1884, Gladstone reluctantly agreed to send an expedition to Khartoum. The expedition, led by Sir Garnet Wolseley, took several months to organise and only entered Sudan in January 1885, but by then the situation of the Egyptian garrison and civilians had become desperate, with food supplies running low, many inhabitants dying of hunger and the defenders' morale at
Khartoum of them diplomats. The US ambassador, the US deputy ambassador, and the Belgian "chargé d'affaires" were murdered. The remaining hostages were released. A 1973 United States Department of State document, declassified in 2006, concluded: "The Khartoum operation was planned and carried out with the full knowledge and personal approval of Yasser Arafat." In 1977, the first oil pipeline between Khartoum and the Port of Sudan was completed. Throughout the 1970s and 1980s, Khartoum was the destination for hundreds of thousands refugees fleeing conflicts in neighboring nations such as Chad, Eritrea, Ethiopia, and Uganda. Many Eritrean and Ethiopian refugees assimilated into