Khartoum, June 14 (IANS) The UN refugee agency has said that more than 14,000 South Sudanese civilians had fled to Sudan during the past two weeks due to the violence in their home country’s oil-rich areas.
“In the last week we have an influx of about 7,000, and in the last two weeks about 14,000 arriving and that’s considered an emergency within an emergency,” Ann Encontre, UNHCR’s regional refugee coordinator for South Sudan said, in a statement on Saturday, Xinhua reported.
She added that most of the fleeing South Sudanese civilians were women and children who escaped the violence in the oil-producing Upper Nile and Unity States during the past two weeks.
Sudan is accommodating more than 157,000 South Sudanese citizens who fled their troubled country, where the UN agencies operating in Sudan have recently complained over shortage in funding to fulfill the needs of the Southern Sudanese refugees.
South Sudan gained its independence in 2011, but plunged into violence in December 2013 as fighting erupted between troops loyal to President Salva Kiir and defectors headed by his former deputy Riek Machar.
The conflict soon turned into an all-out war, with violence taking on an ethnic dimension that pitted the president’s Dinka tribe against Machar’s Nuer ethnic group.
The clashes have left thousands of South Sudanese dead and forced around 1.9 million people to flee their homes.