The United States has ordered all its non-emergency staff in South Sudan to leave, amid rising tensions in the country.<\/p>\n
Fighting in recent days has threatened an already fragile peace deal between President Salva Kiir and Vice-President Riek Machar.<\/p>\n
The two leaders signed a peace agreement in 2018 to end a five-year civil war that killed hundreds of thousands of people, but their relationship has remained fraught.<\/p>\n
On Sunday, the US State Department said that fighting was ongoing in South Sudan between various political and ethnic groups and that \u201cweapons are readily available to the population\u201d.<\/p>\n
\u201cDue to the risks in the country, on March 08, 2025, the Department of State ordered the departure of non-emergency US government employees,\u201d it said.<\/p>\n
The UN human rights commission for South Sudan on Saturday warned of an \u201calarming regression\u201d that threatened to undo years of progress towards peace.<\/p>\n
President Kiir has called for calm and made an assurance that the country would not return to war.<\/p>\n
In an escalation of the tensions, a UN helicopter that had been evacuating members of the national army was shot at on Friday, killing several people, including one crew member.<\/p>\n
Earlier in the week, the deputy chief of the army and two ministers allied to Machar were arrested by security forces, which an opposition spokesman termed a \u201cgrave violation\u201d of the peace deal.<\/p>\n
The arrests of the Machar-allied officials followed clashes in the country\u2019s Upper Nile state between government forces and a militia known as the White Army, which had fought alongside Machar during the civil war.<\/p>\n
South Sudan, the world\u2019s newest nation, gained independence in 2011 after seceding from Sudan.<\/p>\n
But just two years later, following a rift between Kiir and Machar, the country descended into a civil war, in which more than 400,000 people were killed.<\/p>\n
The 2018 power-sharing agreement between the two stopped the fighting, but key elements of the deal have not been implemented \u2013 including a new constitution, an election, and the reunification of armed groups into a single army.<\/p>\n
Sporadic violence between ethnic or local groups has continued in parts of the country.<\/p>","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"
The United States has ordered all its non-emergency staff in South Sudan to leave, amid rising tensions in the country. Fighting in recent days has threatened an already fragile peace deal between President Salva Kiir and Vice-President Riek Machar. The two leaders signed a peace agreement in 2018 to end a five-year civil war that […]<\/p>\n","protected":false},"author":0,"featured_media":0,"comment_status":"open","ping_status":"closed","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"jetpack_post_was_ever_published":false,"_jetpack_newsletter_access":"","_jetpack_dont_email_post_to_subs":false,"_jetpack_newsletter_tier_id":0,"footnotes":""},"categories":[1],"tags":[],"class_list":["post-111702","post","type-post","status-publish","format-standard","hentry","category-uncategorized","entry"],"jetpack_sharing_enabled":true,"jetpack_featured_media_url":"","jetpack-related-posts":[],"_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/chezaspin.com\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/111702","targetHints":{"allow":["GET"]}}],"collection":[{"href":"https:\/\/chezaspin.com\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"https:\/\/chezaspin.com\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/chezaspin.com\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/comments?post=111702"}],"version-history":[{"count":0,"href":"https:\/\/chezaspin.com\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/111702\/revisions"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/chezaspin.com\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media?parent=111702"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/chezaspin.com\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/categories?post=111702"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/chezaspin.com\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/tags?post=111702"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}