Gunmen attacked a United Nations helicopter on an evacuation mission in a volatile part of South Sudan on Friday, killing one crew member and injuring two others, the United Nations said.
The helicopter crew was trying to rescue wounded South Sudanese soldiers in Upper Nile State, an attempt to defuse tensions in the area, the United Nations said. It added that the wounded soldiers had also been killed. It did not say whether the helicopter was on the ground or airborne when it came under assault, but one armed group called the White Army said the shooting erupted as the men prepared to board.
The attack followed days of spiking political tensions in the east African nation, the world’s youngest country, amid growing fears among residents and Western officials that it was tumbling toward a new civil conflict.
In a speech appealing for calm, President Salva Kiir of South Sudan vowed not to let that happen. “Let no one take law into their hands,” he said on Friday. “The government which I lead will handle this crisis.”
But critics said that Mr. Kiir and rival leaders were largely responsible for the crisis.
A power-sharing agreement between Mr. Kiir and his first vice president, Riek Machar, ended a brutal civil war in 2018; in recent weeks, it has teetered on the brink of collapse as forces loyal to both men have clashed in Upper Nile State.
South Sudan’s information minister said that 27 soldiers were killed in the helicopter attack on Friday but provided no other detail, and the figure could not be confirmed independently.
The White Army, which is allied with Mr. Machar, issued a statement saying that the dead included a major general of the South Sudan military, three of his bodyguards and the helicopter co-pilot. The general’s guards “opened fire on the White Army security officers who had been assigned to facilitate their safe evacuation,” the statement said, and the White Army returned fire. That account could not be confirmed either.
In Juba, the country’s capital, Mr. Kiir has sought to consolidate his power by arresting Mr. Machar’s allies, including the petroleum minister, Puot Kang Chol, and the deputy army chief, Gen. Gabriel Duop Lam.
The White Army overran an army base at Mr. Machar’s stronghold in Upper Nile State.
“South Sudan is slipping rapidly toward full-blown war,” said Alan Boswell, a South Sudan expert at the International Crisis Group. He warned that any renewed conflict was likely to merge with the war in neighboring Sudan, to devastating effect.
“The region could slip into one large proxy war,” he said in a statement, urging regional powers like Kenya and Ethiopia “to act with supreme urgency” to mitigate the crisis. Otherwise, he warned, “large-scale ethnic massacres” were an imminent threat.
Pope Francis urged Mr. Kiir and Mr. Machar to resolve their differences during a visit to South Sudan two years ago. But the latest cycle of arrests and violence has stoked fears that the relationship is crumbling beyond repair.
South Sudan’s minister for peace-building, Stephen Par Kuol, was among those arrested by Mr. Kiir’s loyalists this week, though he was released on Friday.
South Sudan was formed in 2011 when it split from Sudan after a brutal decades-long struggle for independence. But within a few years, a bitter rivalry between Mr. Kiir and Mr. Machar led to a bloody civil war that eventually caused an estimated 400,000 deaths.
Peace, always shaky, has been severely tested in the past two years as the civil war in Sudan, to the north, has wounded South Sudan’s weak economy by cutting the oil production that produces most of the country’s revenue. Presidential elections, which have been postponed repeatedly, are now scheduled to take place next year.
The United States, which played a central role in the creation of South Sudan, is the country’s largest international donor. But the Trump administration, which is slashing America’s foreign aid budget, has identified South Sudan as a place where U.S. presence should be scaled back.
Frantic international efforts to calm the combustible political situation received a hard blow on Friday as news of the helicopter assault emerged.
Nicholas Haysom, the chief of the United Nations mission to Sudan, condemned the attack as “utterly abhorrent” and said it “may constitute a war crime under international law.”
