Warring forces in South Sudan have carried out horrific crimes against children, including castration, rape and tying them together before slitting their throats, the UN has said.
“Survivors report that boys
have been castrated and left to bleed to death… girls as young as eight
have been gang raped and murdered,” UN children’s agency chief Anthony
Lake said in a statement released earlier this week.
“Children have been tied together before their attackers slit their throats… others have been thrown into burning buildings.”
Tens of thousands are
believed to have been killed in the 18-month war, although there is no
clear toll. At least 129 children were killed in May in the northern
state of Unity, scene of some of heaviest fighting in the civil war,
Unicef added.
Civil war began in December
2013 when President Salva Kiir accused his former deputy Riek Machar of
planning a coup, setting off a cycle of retaliatory killings across the
country that has split the poverty-stricken, landlocked country along
ethnic lines.
It has been characterised by ethnic massacres, rape and the use of child soldiers.
“The violence against
children in South Sudan has reached a new level of brutality,” Lake
added. Thousands of children have also been abducted to fight.
“Children are also being
aggressively recruited into armed groups of both sides on an alarming
scale – an estimated 13,000 children forced to participate in a conflict
not of their making,” Lake added.
“Imagine the psychological
and physical effects on these children – not only of the violence
inflicted on them but also the violence they are forced to inflict on
others.”
A quarter of a million
children face starvation , while two-thirds of the country’s 12 million
people need aid, with 4.5 million people facing severe food insecurity,
according to the UN.
“In the name of humanity and common decency this violence against the innocent must stop,” he said.
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