Over 50 people, including women and children, have allegedly been killed in attacks along South Sudan’s border with Sudan, according to a local official said on Monday, January 29. This attack has been said to be the deadliest since the spate of attacks began in 2021, because of a boundary dispute.
According to the information Minister for Abyei, Bulis Koch, armed youths from South Sudan’s Warrap State carried out the massacre in the neighbouring Abyei region.
Abyei is an oil-rich area that is mutually administered by South Sudan and Sudan– the two countries having both staked claims to it.
Koch had informed Reuters that 52 people(women, children and police officers included) were killed and 64 people, wounded during the Saturday attacks.
A Ghanaian peacekeeper from a United Nations from a United Nations force based in Abyei was murdered when the UN base in Agok town was attacked amid the violence, the U.N. Interim Security Force for Abyei –UNISFA said on Sunday.
According to Koch, hundreds of dislodged civilians had sought shelter at a UNISFA base.
There have been continued clashes in Abyei between rival factions of the Dinka ethnic group related to the site of the administrative boundary that is a source of considerable tax revenues.
Civil war in South Sudan, fought largely along ethnic lines between Dinkas and Nuers, led to hundreds of thousands of deaths between 2013 and 2018.
Since then, continuous and persistent clashes among a variety of armed groups have kept killing and displacing large numbers of civilians. In November 2023, the Abyei conflict les to the death of 32 people.
