S Sudan clashes leave 20 dead day after ceasefire violation

Bloomberg

Almost two dozen government troops were killed in South Sudan during fighting, just a day after a cease-fire agreement came into effect, according to the main rebel group. The nation’s army and rebels last week agreed to cease hostilities from midnight December 24, in a bid to end three years of violence that’s claimed tens
of thousands of lives and forced
4 million people from their homes in the nation that only got
independence in 2011.
“The government continued with aggression,” the rebel group’s dep-uty spokesman, Lam Paul Gabriel, said on his Facebook page on Dec 26. “Our forces repulsed the attackers and pursued them to their base in Kansuk, where over 20 of them lost their lives and several injured.”
The rebel group led by former vice president Riek Machar violated a ceasefire agreement signed on Dec 21 in neighbouring Ethiopia and was seeking to gain more territory to boost its bargaining power at new peace talks, army spokesman Lul Ruai Koang said.
“They have been trying to capture strategic locations before IGAD and CTSAMM come and do verification on positions,” Koang said, referring to groups monitoring the cease-fire. “They have
intention of more territorial gains.”
Both sides blamed each other of planning more attacks for the final days of 2017. Another peace deal shattered in July 2016 when a transitional government in which rebel-group leader Riek Machar deputized President Salva Kiir fell apart after the parties started fighting in the capital, Juba. Talks re-initiated this month included several other armed groups that sprouted after last year’s violence.
In an attack last month by fighters loyal to former South
Sudanese Vice President Riek Machar on government troops in the north of the country left at least 28 people dead, a government official said.
In one raid in Rubkuai county in Southern Liech state, three soldiers and eight attackers died, while the second attack in Leer county left one soldier and 16 assailants dead, South Liech Information Minister Peter Makouth Malual said by phone in Juba. Seven government forces were
injured in the attacks, he said.

UN: Civil war in South Sudan had ‘staggering impact’ on children
DUBAI / Reuters

South Sudan’s four-year civil war has had a “staggering impact” on children, with more than half its minors affected
by forced recruitment, food shortages or loss of schooling, the United Nations said.
The upheaval is “threatening an entire generation,” the UN Children’s Fund said in a report, citing estimates that more than 19,000 have been recruited into the army or militias and over 2,300 have been killed or injured since the conflict began in December 2013. Two million children are out of school, it said.
South Sudan’s conflict has claimed tens of thousands of lives, forced 4 million from their homes and cratered an economy that already desperately needed development on independence in 2011.
Authorities, trying to attract oil companies to expl-
oit sub-Saharan Africa’s th-ird-largest reserves, held
an energy conference in Juba in November and plan to more than double daily output to 280,000 barrels by
the end of .