More Than 1 Million Refugees Have Now Fled South Sudan | Huffington Post

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war and terrorism, migration,vulnerability, Severity Level 5, High Severity Crisis

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> More Than 1 Million Refugees Have Now Fled South Sudan
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> LONDON (Thomson Reuters Foundation) - The number of South Sudanese who have fled their conflict-ridden homeland for a neighboring country passed one million this week following renewed violence, the U.N. refugee agency (UNHCR) said on Friday.
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> Most refugees are women and children, UNHCR spokesman Leo Dobbs told a press briefing in Geneva.
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> “They include survivors of violent attacks, sexual assault, children that have been separated from their parents or traveled alone,” he said in a summary of the briefing online.
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> Fighting erupted in South Sudan at the end of 2013 between soldiers loyal to President Salva Kiir and those backing his former deputy Riek Machar.
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> A peace deal signed in 2015 proved shaky and fresh clashes flared again in the capital, Juba, in July, raising fears that the five-year-old nation could slide back into civil war.
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> More than 185,000 people have since sought shelter across the border in Uganda, Ethiopia, Kenya, the Democratic Republic of Congo and Central African Republic, Dobbs said.
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> Uganda, which hosts more than 370,000 South Sudanese, recorded more than 20,000 new arrivals over the past week alone, bringing the total number of refugees past the one million mark.
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> “With this milestone, South Sudan joins Syria, Afghanistan and Somalia as countries which have produced more than a million refugees,” said Dobbs.
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> “New arrivals report increased fighting across the Greater Equatoria region and attacks by armed groups that kill civilians, loot villages, sexually assault women and girls, and recruit young boys.”
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> The conflict has also fueled hunger and disease in the country of 11 million people, already one of the world’s poorest.
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> Last month, Kiir publicly agreed to accept 4,000 U.N. peacekeepers adding to the 12,000-strong mission already on the ground but on Wednesday U.N. peacekeeping chief Herve Ladsous said the government had yet to take any action on its pledge.
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> (Reporting by Umberto Bacchi @UmbertoBacchi, Editing by Ros Russell)