Escalating clashes in South Sudan have killed almost 200 people and displaced an estimated 125,000 more since March, the United Nations said on Tuesday.
Tensions have increased over attacks in the northeastern Upper Nile State between forces allied to President Salva Kiir and his rival the first vice president, threatening a fragile power-sharing agreement that ended a five-year civil war.
Political instability has also plagued the young nation, which only declared independence in 2011, with international observers urging restraint following the detention of Vice President Riek Machar last month.
Earlier this month, Human Rights Watch said the armed forces had dropped improvised incendiary weapons and killed nearly 60 people over a month-long period in Upper Nile State.
“Since March 2025, armed clashes and aerial bombardments have killed more than 180 people, injured over 250 others, and displaced an estimated 125,000 people,” the United Nations said in a statement.
The rise is a steep increase on the UN’s last warning in March, when it said at least 50,000 people had been displaced since February.
“This latest surge in violence must stop,” Anita Kiki Gbeho, an official with the United Nations Office for the Coordination of Humanitarian Affairs (OCHA) in South Sudan said in the statement.
“This violence comes at a time when humanitarian funding is dwindling and urgent needs are rising — not only in Upper Nile but across South Sudan,” she added.
The UN said the violence had claimed the lives of four humanitarian workers, with six health facilities forced to close.
Such closures come as the country — desperately poor despite its oil wealth — also grapples with a cholera outbreak, which the UN said “has already claimed 919 lives and infected nearly 49,000 people in South Sudan”.
UNICEF labelled it the worst outbreak in the nation’s short history last month, noting that between September and March half the cases were children under 15 years old.
The fighting threatens a 2018 peace deal between Kiir and Machar, who fought a five-year civil war that killed some 400,000 people.
Kiir’s allies have accused Machar’s forces of fomenting unrest in Nasir County in league with the White Army, a loose band of armed youths from the vice president’s Nuer ethnic community.
The tensions began to rise earlier this year when an estimated 6,000 White Army combatants overran a military encampment in Nasir.
An attempted rescue by the United Nations led to the deaths of a UN crew member and senior South Sudanese general, among others.
