NAIROBI (Reuters) – Residents said at least 19 people were killed in an airstrike carried out by South Sudan’s air force in the east of the country, less than two weeks after government forces withdrew from the area following intense fighting with an ethnic militia.
The specter of civil war, similar to the one that erupted between 2013 and 2018 claiming hundreds of thousands of lives, emerged after clashes broke out in the town of Nasir, near the Ethiopian border, between government forces and the White Army, a loosely structured group mostly comprising armed Nuer youth.
The government accuses the party of First Vice President Riek Machar, a Nuer, of collaborating with the White Army, which fought alongside Machar’s forces during the civil war against the predominantly Dinka troops loyal to President Salva Kiir. Machar’s party has denied involvement in such cooperation.
A South Sudanese general was among about 27 soldiers killed on March 7 when an attack targeted a UN helicopter trying to evacuate them from Nasir.
South Sudan’s Information Minister Michael Makuei told journalists that the air force bombed Nasir on Monday morning.
Kang Wan, a community leader in Nasir, said the incident occurred late Sunday evening, and that of the 19 dead, 15 people were killed immediately, while the others later succumbed to their wounds.
Another resident said they saw 16 bodies and that three others had died.
“All of them got burned, everything got burned,” Wan told Reuters by telephone.
Médecins Sans Frontières said its hospital in nearby Ulang received three wounded patients from Nasir on Monday morning.
“Two of them were declared dead on arrival due to the severe burns they had sustained,” MSF said in a statement.
Nasir County Commissioner James Gatluak Lew, who is allied to Machar, said the South Sudanese armed forces were likely seeking revenge for the helicopter attack.
Last week, Uganda said it had deployed special forces in South Sudan’s capital Juba to “secure it”. The South Sudanese government at the time denied the presence of Ugandan troops in the country.
However, Makuei said in a statement some Ugandan army units were in the country “to back up and support the (national army) according to their needs
