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Hundreds Of Families Flee South Sudan Fighting

Hundreds Of Families Flee South Sudan Fighting

From Aljazeera

Four-hundred families arrived in the baking, dusty village of Calek recently after they fled in two waves from Abyei, a contested fist of land on the border of Sudan and South Sudan.

“I had five children,” young mother Achol Dhieu, 30, told Al Jazeera. “I ran away with two babies because the other three were hiding in a church and died when the rebels burned it down. My husband too was killed in August.”

The first wave of families were displaced in September by violent raids from the Misseriya – Arab cattle-herding militia rumoured to be armed by Sudan’s government to the north.

The second came running from clashes in eastern Abyei between South Sudanese government forces and the Sudan People’s Liberation Army In Opposition – fighters formerly part of the national army until the government fractured in December 2013. That’s when Vice President Riek Machar launched a violent opposition to President Salva Kiir, setting his loyal Nuer tribesmen against Salva’s Dinka people.

The new families in Calek – all a sub-tribe of the Dinka – left with nothing in October and walked south for a month through the bush into South Sudan’s Northern Bahr el Ghazal state, their ancestral homeland.

 

Written by /Read more at  Aljazeera