The Associated Press this week reported that South Sudanese troops went on a almost four-hour rampage through the compound in one of the worst targeted attacks on aid workers in the country’s three-year civil war.
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South Sudan’s civil war has been characterised by war crimes and human rights abuses with civilians massacred – often along tribal lines – women and girls raped and children forced to become soldiers.
A peace deal was signed between the two leaders in 2015, but has since been repeatedly violated repeatedly by fighting.
An opposition spokesman, James Gatdet Dak, writing on his Facebook page, said its fighters had “successfully relocated our leader to a neighbouring country where he will now have unhindered access to the rest of the world and the media”.
Meanwhile UN chief Ban Ki-moon has expressed disappointment over the failure of talks between the Sudanese government and rebels on a cease fire in Darfur and two other conflict zones. An estimated 16,000 children have been recruited by armed groups and armed forces since the crisis in South Sudan first began in December 2013. But the government has not accepted the force, saying that such a deployment would be a violation of South Sudan’s sovereignty without President Kiir’s approval.
Since the outbreak of fighting in July, Kiir has sacked Machar from his post and appointed Taban Deng Gai, a former opposition negotiator who broke ranks with Machar, as vice president.
Child soldiers are defined as anyone recruited to join armed groups under the age of 18, and the International Criminal Court considers the recruitment of those under 15 to be a war crime. It says government forces, or their supporters, recently used intimidation to recruit an entire village of boys, some as young as 12 years old.
The South Sudan opposition said on Wednesday that he had left to a “safe country within the region”.
Last week, the United Nations voted to send 4 000 regional peacekeepers to Juba.
South Sudan’s President Kiir told Al Jazeera on Sunday that it had not yet closed the door on a United Nations protection force.
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An upsurge in clashes in Juba and other parts of the African nation is threatening to undo much of the progress made previous year, when 1,775 child soldiers were released in what UNICEF called one of the largest demobilisations of children ever.
