RENK, South Sudan (SONNA) \u2014 Tens of thousands of exhausted people are heading home to the world\u2019s youngest country as they flee a brutal conflict in neighboring Sudan.<\/p>\n
There\u2019s a bottleneck of men, women and children camping near the dusty border of Sudan and South Sudan and the international community and the government are worried about a prolonged conflict.<\/p>\n
Fighting\u00a0between\u00a0Sudan\u2019s military\u00a0and a rival militia killed at least 863 civilians in Sudan before a seven-day\u00a0ceasefire\u00a0began Monday night.\u00a0Many in South Sudan\u00a0are concerned about what could happen if the fighting next door continues.<\/p>\n
\u201cAfter escaping danger there\u2019s more violence,\u201d said South Sudanese Alwel Ngok, sitting on the ground outside a church. \u201cThere\u2019s no food, no shelter, we\u2019re totally stranded, and I\u2019m very tired and need to leave,\u201d she said.<\/p>\n
Ngok thought she\u2019d be safe returning home after fleeing clashes in Sudan\u2019s capital, Khartoum, where she watched three of her relatives killed. She and her five children arrived in Renk, South Sudan, where people were sheltering on the ground, some sleeping with their luggage piled up near thin mats. Women prepared food in large cooking pots as teenagers roamed aimlessly. Days after Ngok and her family arrived, she said, a man was beaten to death with sticks in a fight that began with a dispute over water.<\/p>\n
Years of\u00a0fighting\u00a0between government and opposition forces in South Sudan killed almost 400,000 people and displaced millions until a peace agreement was signed nearly five years ago. Enacting a solid peace has been\u00a0sluggish: The country has yet to deploy a unified military and create a permanent constitution.<\/p>\n
Large-scale clashes between the main parties have subsided, but there is still fighting in parts of the country.<\/p>\n
South Sudan has billions in oil reserves that it moves to international markets through a pipeline that runs through Sudan in territories controlled by the warring parties. If that pipeline is damaged, South Sudan\u2019s economy could collapse within months, said Ferenc David Marko, a researcher at the International Crisis Group.<\/p>\n
RENK, South Sudan (SONNA) \u2014 Tens of thousands of exhausted people are heading home to the world\u2019s youngest country as they flee a brutal conflict in neighboring Sudan. There\u2019s a bottleneck of men, women and children camping near the dusty border of Sudan and South Sudan and the international community and the government are worried […]<\/p>\n","protected":false},"author":120,"featured_media":417217,"comment_status":"open","ping_status":"open","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"content-type":"","footnotes":""},"categories":[78],"tags":[],"class_list":{"0":"post-417216","1":"post","2":"type-post","3":"status-publish","4":"format-standard","5":"has-post-thumbnail","7":"category-world"},"_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/sonna.so\/en\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/417216","targetHints":{"allow":["GET"]}}],"collection":[{"href":"https:\/\/sonna.so\/en\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"https:\/\/sonna.so\/en\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/sonna.so\/en\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/users\/120"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/sonna.so\/en\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/comments?post=417216"}],"version-history":[{"count":1,"href":"https:\/\/sonna.so\/en\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/417216\/revisions"}],"predecessor-version":[{"id":417218,"href":"https:\/\/sonna.so\/en\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/417216\/revisions\/417218"}],"wp:featuredmedia":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/sonna.so\/en\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media\/417217"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/sonna.so\/en\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media?parent=417216"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/sonna.so\/en\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/categories?post=417216"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/sonna.so\/en\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/tags?post=417216"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}