Fighting between soldiers in the Bor area of Southern Sudan escalated on Wednesday morning causing more than 1,000 civilians to seek safety in a nearby United Nations compound, Reuters reported.
More fighting broke out between South Sudanese soldiers in the military base in Torit, east of Juba, the capital of South Sudan, intensifying fear a larger civil conflict will erupt in the nation which experienced similar situations in the 1990s, according to Reuters.
Soldiers were attacking each other at two different military barracks with one journalist reporting that former Vice President Riek Machar loyalists were now controlling the area, Reuters reported. Machar was removed from power in July and tensions have only been on the rise in South Sudan since then.
In 1991, Nuer soldiers loyal to Machar murdered hundreds of Dinka, President Salva Kiir's ethnic group, and locals fear this could happen once again as the fighting grows beyond the military camps, Reuters reported.
Until Wednesday, the fighting had not escalated to the oil producing region of the two-year-old country, which depends on crude exports of oil by a pipeline running through Sudan, according to Reuters.
"The worry is that once this conflict spreads out of Juba to other areas it is in (a) much more ethnic landscape, and then you have the remobilisation of the old militias," a Western diplomat who has long dealt with South Sudan told Reuters.
The diplomat also told Reuters the fighting was causing the nation to move towards another ethnic civil conflict that may be "difficult to roll back" once it begins, adding Kiir had made the situation worse by deeming it an attempted coup instead of infighting in the army.
"It will impact a lot of countries, and they are not beacons of stability," he said of the region around South Sudan. "There will be negative consequences for everybody," Reuters reported.
So far, the government has arrested 10 people including seven former ministers in hopes of questioning others involved in the alleged coup, including Machar, according to Reuters.
"Last night there was fighting in two military barracks," Hussein Maar, deputy governor of Jonglei state, told Reuters. Another journalist told Reuters troops led by Peter Gadet, another Machar ally, took control of various abandoned bases where Dinka soldiers were outnumbered.
The United States are taking measures to remove Americans from the area, and Britain said it was evacuating embassy staff and taking the names of any Britons who wished to leave due to the amount of aid workers currently in Sudan, Reuters reported.
Currently, the death toll is between 400-500 and up to 800 wounded. The newly independent South Sudan has suffered decades of civil conflict between what was then north and south Sudan, according to Reuters.
"Most people are scared they might be confronted with a mob or see dead bodies," an aid worker in Juba told Reuters.
