on Tuesday 15 April, 2025

South Sudan Clashes Kill Nearly 200, Displace 125,000 Since March – UN

File Photo: Senior officials of the South Sudan People's Defence Forces visit Sudanese nationals seeking safety at the army headquarters after a night of violence in Juba, South Sudan. AP

by : AFP

Escalating clashes in South Sudan have killed almost 200 people and displaced an estimated 125,000 more since March, the United Nations said on Tuesday.

Tensions have increased over attacks in the northeastern Upper Nile State between forces allied to President Salva Kiir and his rival the first vice president, threatening a fragile power-sharing agreement that ended a five-year civil war.

Political instability has also plagued the young nation, which only declared independence in 2011, with international observers urging restraint following the detention of Vice President Riek Machar last month.

Earlier this month, Human Rights Watch said the armed forces had dropped improvised incendiary weapons and killed nearly 60 people over a month-long period in Upper Nile State.

Displaced people who fled the ongoing violence by two rival Sudanese generals, gather in a room inside the university of Al-Jazira, transformed into a makeshift shelter, in al-Hasahisa south of Khartoum on July 8, 2023. (Photo by – / AFP)

*People gather by a medical centre building riddled with bullet holes at the Souk Sitta (Market Six) in the south of Khartoum on June 1, 2023. (Photo by – / AFP)*

“Since March 2025, armed clashes and aerial bombardments have killed more than 180 people, injured over 250 others, and displaced an estimated 125,000 people,” the United Nations said in a statement.

The rise is a steep increase on the UN’s last warning in March, when it said at least 50,000 people had been displaced since February.

“This latest surge in violence must stop,” Anita Kiki Gbeho, an official with the United Nations Office for the Coordination of Humanitarian Affairs (OCHA) in South Sudan said in the statement.

“This violence comes at a time when humanitarian funding is dwindling and urgent needs are rising — not only in Upper Nile but across South Sudan,” she added.

The UN said the violence had claimed the lives of four humanitarian workers, with six health facilities forced to close.

Such closures come as the country — desperately poor despite its oil wealth — also grapples with a cholera outbreak, which the UN said “has already claimed 919 lives and infected nearly 49,000 people in South Sudan”.

[PHOTO FOR ILLUSTRATIVE PURPOSES ONLY] Greek nationals from Sudan arrive with a military C-27 plane at the military airport of Elefsina, south of Athens, on April 25, 2023. (Photo by Aris Messinis / AFP)

A handout picture taken on April 19, 2023 and obtained from Doctors Without Borders (MSF) on April 21 shows a crowded ward at a hospital in El Fasher in Sudan’s North Darfur region, where multiple people have been wounded in ongoing battles there. (Photo by Ali SHUKUR / Médecins sans Frontières (MSF) / AFP)

UNICEF labelled it the worst outbreak in the nation’s short history last month, noting that between September and March half the cases were children under 15 years old.

The fighting threatens a 2018 peace deal between Kiir and Machar, who fought a five-year civil war that killed some 400,000 people.

Kiir’s allies have accused Machar’s forces of fomenting unrest in Nasir County in league with the White Army, a loose band of armed youths from the vice president’s Nuer ethnic community.

The tensions began to rise earlier this year when an estimated 6,000 White Army combatants overran a military encampment in Nasir.

An attempted rescue by the United Nations led to the deaths of a UN crew member and senior South Sudanese general, among others.

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