South Sudanese gunmen have slaughtered 208 people and kidnapped more than 100 children in a brutal cross-border cattle raid into.
The attack took place on Friday in Ethiopia’s Gambela region which, alongside a neighbouring province, hosts more than 284,000 South Sudanese refugees who fled war in their country.
One government official claimed to be ‘closing in’ on the attackers, while another boasted they had ‘decimated scores’ of the gunmen who carried out the raid.
By yesterday afternoon, the toll from their deadly raid had risen to ‘208 dead and 75 people wounded’ from 140 a day earlier. Some 2,000 head of cattle were also taken.
The Murle, a tribe from South Sudan based in the eastern Jonglei region, often stage raids to steal cattle.
They attacked the Nuer tribe, one of the two main ethnic groups in South Sudan, but who also live across the border in Ethiopia.
‘Our forces have been in pursuit of the attackers and they decimated scores of them,’ Tewolde Muluteg, an Ethiopian government spokesperson said, without indicating whether the Ethiopian forces entered South Sudan territory.
‘In border areas cattle feuds and raids are not uncommon. Of course, something of this magnitude is different,’ he added.
‘We don’t think [the armed men] have any links to the South Sudan government or the rebels.’
Ethiopia has been heavily involved in the South Sudan peace process, partly because of the risk that the conflict could destabilise Gambella.
South Sudan rebel leader Riek Machar is due to return to South Sudan’s capital Juba on Monday from his rebel base at Pagak in the far east of the country, close to the Ethiopian border, rebel spokesman Colonel Nyarji Roman said.
Machar, who has not set foot in Juba for two years, is to form a transitional government with his rival, President Salva Kiir, as part of a peace deal signed in August.
Machar, who was Kiir’s deputy before the war, has been living in exile in Kenya and Ethiopia, but was re-appointed vice president in February.
He is expected to be swiftly sworn into office as vice president at the presidential palace alongside Kiir on Monday but a welcome rally by his supporters may be cancelled amid government security fears.
After winning independence from Sudan in 2011, South Sudan descended into war two years later, setting off a cycle of retaliatory killings that have split the poverty-stricken country along ethnic lines.
Tens of thousands have been killed and over two million people forced to flee their homes during the war.
Both the government and rebel sides have been accused of perpetrating ethnic massacres, recruiting and killing children and carrying out widespread rape, torture and forced displacement of populations to ‘cleanse’ areas of their opponents.
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