Hundreds of civilians were killed after rebels in South Sudan captured a key oil town in the north of the country, the UN said yesterday, in what it described as one of the bloodiest chapters in a five-month-old conflict.
After the anti-government forces captured Bentiu, the capital of oil-producing Unity state, last week, “they searched a number of places where hundreds of South Sudanese and foreign civilians had taken refuge and killed hundreds of the civilians after determining their ethnicity or nationality”, the UN said.
Government forces and rebels loyal to Riek Machar, the former vice-president who was dismissed by President Salva Kiir last year, are battling for control of the country’s dwindling oil production in a sign both sides have given up on faltering peace talks and are instead seeking a military and economic stranglehold over the cash-strapped country.