Kool Gatyen Pajock, 18 months old, lay in a South Sudan hospital as a physiotherapist wrapped bandages around his legs while his grandmother, Nyayual Chuol, watched over him.
Government forces shot the baby in the leg and killed his parents, Chuol said. She carried him 130 kilometers (80 miles) from their village to the hospital in Akobo, in South Sudan’s northeastern region near the Ethiopian border.
The family is among the 280,000 people displaced over the past two months by renewed fighting in Jonglei state between the government army, the South Sudan People’s Defense Forces, and the Sudan People’s Liberation Movement in Opposition.
“I have nothing to take care of this baby,” Chuol said. “I’m worried about my four other children who scattered when the attack happened. I don’t know where they are now.”
The violence threatens the fragile peace brokered in 2018 after a five-year civil war.
Opposition leader Riek Machar was named first vice president alongside President Salva Kiir under a 2020 power-sharing agreement. But Kiir placed Machar under house arrest following new outbreaks of violence in March. Machar was charged in September with treason along with seven opposition members linked to an attack on government forces.
The conflict escalated in December when opposition forces seized government outposts in Jonglei. The government has conducted a counteroffensive since January with aerial bombardments and ground assaults, despite an official commitment to the peace agreement.
In addition to being forced from their homes, civilians have suffered significant casualties.
“People are still fearing that the government army may come and attack here,” Chuol said. “This is what is worrying me right now.”
Nyankhiay Gatluak Jock, 28, escaped from her village of Walgak after a government attack in early February.
“They bombed us from the gunship helicopter, and after that the soldiers came with their vehicles and started shooting,” Jock said. She was among 42,000 displaced people sheltering in Akobo under the protection of the United Nations Mission in South Sudan.
“We want to ask the president to tell his army to differentiate between the combatants and the civilians,” Jock said while breastfeeding two children in a church with other displaced women and youth.
After government forces bombed a hospital operated by humanitarian group Doctors Without Borders on Feb. 3, Nyaphan Nyang Lual headed for Akobo with her husband, daughter and 1-month-old granddaughter. On the road, her husband was shot and her daughter abducted by armed youths.
Lual reached Akobo with her granddaughter, Bhan Tut Mut, but could not find food assistance and worried for the infant, who developed diarrhea.
“We took her to the clinic, but there is no medicine there, and I cannot afford to buy from the pharmacy,” Lual said.
Humanitarian services have not been spared. The U.N. Office for the Coordination of Humanitarian Affairs said 13 health facilities in Jonglei were “looted or partially destroyed.” Reports of widespread sexual violence have also emerged.
Funding cuts and government-imposed restrictions on humanitarian organizations have resulted in a lack of resources and supplies, according to aid workers frustrated by an inability to provide necessary assistance.
“We have nothing… no feeding, no medication,” said Susan Tab, a reproductive health officer in Akobo with Nile Hope, a South Sudanese organization. “The only thing we can provide to help these displaced people is psychosocial support.”
U.N. humanitarian chief Tom Fletcher visited Akobo on Feb. 21 during a tour of South Sudan’s areas affected by the fighting.
During nearly three years of civil war in Sudan to the north and conflicts in nearby countries in the Horn of Africa, Fletcher said South Sudan has become “one of the most neglected crises in the world right now.”
“I want to make this crisis more visible to the public. And I want them to demand change. To demand funding. To demand political engagement to end this war,” Fletcher said.
He was greeted in Akobo by thousands of displaced women and children who remained unsure of their safety and future. Some held posters with handwritten messages, including one that read, “They killed everyone.”
“Help is coming,” Fletcher told the survivors.
