It is a war without a name, but nevertheless a war. In South Sudan, aircraft bombard the population in opposition area and tens of thousands of citizens fled. Uganda has sent soldiers to South Sudan to protect President Salva Kiir in his confrontation with opposition leader Riek Machar. According to some sources, chemicals are used as a weapon in air strikes.
NRC received images of the bombing and from burnt victims in, among others, the important city of Nassir and the villages Kuich and Mathiang, which are close to the Ethiopian border. These images have been verified through open source research and the exact locations of the attacks are outdated. Whether the attacks were carried out by the Ugandan or the South Sudanese Air Force is unclear. Uganda denies involvement.
According to Human rights organization Human Rights Watch (HRW) Four air strikes took place in Nassir and surrounding places last month, with 58 people killed and many others were burning. According to HRW, chemical weapons were used. “These weapons have killed dozens of people, including children,” writes Nyagoah Tut Pur, South Sudan researcher at the organization.
“The vessels poison fell out of the air that Sunday evening,” says a community worker who wants to remain anonymous from Nassir. In the town in the Upper Nile region, which was recaptured this week by the South Sudanese army, he took photos of patients with severe burns after a bombing on 16 March. A nearby clinic received eleven patients in the days that followed, five of whom died of their injuries. “Their burns were very serious,” a doctor says NRC“But we miss the expertise to determine whether chemical weapons were the cause.”
News site Surdans Post wrote that there are indications that ethyl acetate has been used, a very flammable chemical connection. By NRC Verified images can be seen partly melted blue vessels on the locations in question with the text ‘ethyl acetate’.
Chemical bombing in Nassir
“Ethyl acetate can be used as a chemical weapon,” says a security expert from Doctors Sans Frontières, who wants to remain anonymous due to safety reasons. “In that case the chemicals are dropped from an airplane or helicopter. The liquid has a low boiling point, creating vapor. That vapor is heavier than air and spreads quickly and wide over the ground. Then the vapor is lit, which has a huge explosion effect.”
Human Rights Watch interviewed an eyewitness of a bombing on Mathiang who saw how the barrels were thrown out of a plane. A 39-year-old woman said: “The barrel came down, I thought it would fall on our house … while they fell, the barrels fell flame.” Another eyewitness told how the area where the barrels ended up burned. Rain eventually went out of fire. “But it still smells … and it’s not the smell of gasoline or kerosene,” he said.
Power struggle
South Sudan, the world’s youngest nation, has become one of the most corrupt and worst controlled countries in the world since its independence in 2011. It is not a country with an army, but an army with a country where soldiers become politicians and compete with each other without working together. And often they company that competition with weapons. This is how a kleptocracy of warlords has arisen.
“South Sudan is not a nation, but a village, a kind of cattle camp,” says politician and author Peter Adwok Nyaba. “Soldiers from the national army rob citizens and the secret service grabs dissidents on. South Sudanese no longer dare to talk and if they want to be heard they express their discontent by rebelling on the basis of a stem earlier.”
After independence in 2011, a civil war broke out between Kiir and Machar, with 400,000 people killed. In part, it was ethnically based: Kirr is a Dinka, Machar a Nuer. In the peace agreement concluded in 2018, it was stipulated, among other things, that a joint army would be established and that free elections would come. Both did not happen.
Melted barrels of ethyl acetate, photographed by residents of the bombed cities.
Ministers, generals and other officials from the opposition camp were included in the government apparatus. At the end of last year, Kiir began to clear them away, which was the reason for a new round of military confrontations.
At the beginning of March, the Witte Army, a militia with young fighters who supports Machar, reduced a UN helicopter with government soldiers and a high commander on board. In a furious response to that attack, President Kiir placed his political rival Machar under house arrest.
That arrest ignited the situation. In the meantime, in addition to the Upper Nile region, there is also fighting with nuer soldiers in the southern region of equatoria, near the capital Juba.
Perhaps the fighting in South Sudan would be manageable if an even greater war would not rage in neighboring Sudan at the same time. Not only will weapons come in South Sudan through the two warring parties in Sudan-the government army of President Burhan and the Rapid Support Forces (RSF) of General Hemedti-also skip the fights. Last month in the border area with Sudan Soldiers from Machar Slaags with the RSF, employees of Machar told NRC.
Supporters of Machar recently went to Port Sudan, presumably to obtain support from Burhan. Kiir, in turn, traveled to the United Arab Emirates, the large pillar of the RSF, to negotiate a loan of 1.5 billion dollars for his financially collected government.
Liker Schaleer Conflict
“The war in South Sudan is already in full swing, with more weapons we could have already been contradicted,” says a family member of Machar NRC. “With the arrest of Machar, Kiir has canceled the peace treaty and we are free to fight back.”
Chemical bombing in Kuich
Nicholas Haysom of the UN mission in South Sudan warned last week For such a large -scale conflict. “It would not only destroy South Sudan, but the entire region, which simply cannot afford a new war.”
In addition, the worries about the use of chemical weapons are added. Human Rights Watch states: “The government must immediately stop using such weapons against communities.”