A new report by Amnesty International has detailed the crimes committed with ‘staggering brutality’ by government soldiers and allied militia in South Sudan.
Children were killed by being swung against tree trunks and civilians were raped, burned alive, run over with armored vehicles and hanged from trees, even as the government pursued a new peace deal to end a civil war, it says.
The report, released Wednesday, is based on interviews with 100 displaced people from Leer and Mayendit counties in Unity State.
It describes attacks that took place between April and July this year, during a targeted offensive aimed at ‘clearing opposition-held areas.’
Leer and Mayendit have been among the hardest hit regions during South Sudan’s five-year civil war, in which tens of thousands have died and over 2 million have fled the country, triggering Africa’s worst refugee crisis since the 1994 Rwandan genocide.
According to the report, those unable to flee the government offensive were often killed, with elderly and disabled people burned alive in their homes.
Civilians told Amnesty how soldiers and militias drove amphibious vehicles into swaps in search of people who had fled, while firing gunshots at random into the reeds hoping to hit them.
An elderly woman, Nyalony, described how she witnessed her husband and two other men killed by soldiers: ‘When the attack started, early in the morning while we were sleeping, my husband and I ran to the swamp together.
‘Later in the morning, after the fighting was over, the soldiers came into the swamp looking for people, and sprayed the…
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