NEWSLINE

By: Ilya Gridneff Associated Press A heavily armed UN convoy walks through the streets of Malakal, the capital of oil-producing Upper Nile state. House after house has been burned to the ground. Hospital patients have been shot by armed rebels while lying in their beds. Dozens of corpses litter the streets. “This is about revenge now. There is no humanity here,” said Col. Jan Hoff, an officer in Norway’s army who has served in Afghanistan, Iraq and Syria. South Sudan, he said, is the worst he’s seen. “It’s absolutely horrific,” Hoff said this week as he led a heavily armed UN convoy through the streets of Malakal, the capital of oil-producing Upper Nile state. “This is tribe against tribe. In Syria it was foreign fighters against the government. Here I don’t think it’s about the government.”  A corpse nearby is already a skeleton wrapped in a soldier’s uniform. Hoff said he counted 30 bodies on a recent day. A colleague had counted 70. T

It is heartbreaking to see the devastation wrought on the people of South Sudan since the sudden outbreak of fighting there two months ago. More than 850,000 South Sudanese have been forced to flee their homes ; family members have been killed and injured, homes and livelihoods lost. More than 150,000 have left the country altogether. Children who should be going to school have been orphaned, lost, attacked and recruited into armed forces. Even those who are still with their families have seen things they should not be seeing, experienced violence they should not witness. Hundreds of thousands of children are displaced, living in the open, facing disease and malnutrition, with no place to go where they feel safe, and no school to give them a sense of normality. And as if that were not enough, the rainy season will begin in around six weeks. Under the best of circumstances, the rains bring much flooding to South Sudan, but with over 700,000 people displaced within

Upper Nile state citizens in Malakal's UNMISSCompound have said the rebel fighters have disappeared from the town. 23 February 2014 By Ariik Atekdit JUBA, 23 February 2014 [Gurtong] – Some internally displaced persons (IDPs) residing in the UN base who chatted on facebook with Gurtong's reporter on Saturday said: "Anti-government forces in Malakal have disappeared this morning (Saturday) and nobody knows where they have gone all to." "I don't know whether they have gone back to Nasir or hiding somewhere in the town," an IDP in the UN base said. Another IDP in the same camp has echoed the same message.  "This is true. They are not seen at all. And we cannot independently find their whereabouts because we are confined in the UN camp." Malakal was recaptured on Wednesday by Mr. Machar's rebels with government officials announcing it as a tactical withdrawal