South Sudanese government troops raped then torched girls alive inside their homes during a recent campaign notable for its “new brutality and intensity,” a UN rights report said yesterday.
Rights investigators from the UN mission in South Sudan (UNMISS) described “widespread human rights abuses” in a report based on 115 victims and eyewitnesses from the northern battleground state of Unity, scene of some of the heaviest recent fighting in an 18-month-long civil war.
The military, the Sudan People’s Liberation Army (SPLA), launched a major offensive against rebel forces in April, with fierce fighting in Unity State’s northern Mayom County, formerly known as al-Mayom district and once a key oil-producing area.
“Survivors of these attacks reported that SPLA and allied militias from Mayom County carried out a campaign against the local population that killed civilians, looted and destroyed villages and displaced over 100,000 people,” the UN statement read. “Some of the most disturbing allegations compiled by UNMISS human rights officers focused on the abduction and sexual abuse of women and girls, some of whom were reportedly burned alive in their dwellings.”
The civil war began in December 2013, when South Sudanese President Salva Kiir accused former South Sudanese vice president Riek Machar of planning a coup, setting off a cycle of retaliatory killings that have split the poverty-stricken, landlocked nation along ethnic lines.
The upsurge in fighting “has not only been marked by allegations of killing, rape, abduction, looting, arson and displacement, but by a new brutality and intensity,” the UN statement said.
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