At least seven killed in South Sudan hospital bombing: MSF | News | USAEMALL.com

At least seven people have been killed and another 20 injured in an attack on a town in South Sudan, the medical charity Doctors Without Borders, known by its French initials MSF, has said, as fears grow that the world’s youngest nation will relapse into all-out civil war.

MSF said in statement that it “strongly condemned the deliberate bombing of its hospital in Old Fangak” on Saturday and that the attack destroyed the last remaining functioning hospital and pharmacy there in the north of the country.

MSF initially urged in an X post: “Stop the bombing. Protect civilians. Protect healthcare.” It said the attack was “a clear violation of international law”.

It was not immediately clear why the facility was targeted. A spokesperson for South Sudan’s military could not be reached for comment, according to The Associated Press news agency.

Mamman Mustapha, Head of Mission with MSF in South Sudan, told Al Jazeera from the capital Juba that his team on the ground reported “two helicopter gunships attacking the hospital”.

Mustapha said the helicopters bombed the hospital and its medical supplies, then “continued shelling the town of Old Fangak”.

“The civilian population has fled and the situation is quite horrific and catastrophic … We are quite shocked. The hospital has been there for 10 years, since 2014,” he added.

A further MSF statement said, “The attack began at around 4:30am (02:30GMT) when two helicopter gunships first dropped a bomb on the MSF pharmacy, burning it to the ground, then went on to fire on the town of Old Fangak for around 30 minutes…There are reports of more fatalities and wounded in the community.”

Additional attacks took place hours later near a market in Old Fangak, causing widespread panic and displacement of civilians, according to several witnesses.

Fears of renewed civil war

The United Nations has warned in recent weeks that South Sudan, plagued by instability since gaining independence from Sudan in 2011, is on the brink of a renewed civil war.

The country descended into conflict in recent months due to the collapse of a power-sharing agreement between rival generals, President Salva Kiir and First Vice-President Riek Machar.

Kiir and Machar represent the two largest ethnic groups, the Dinka and Nuer, respectively, which fought a civil war between 2013 and 2018 that cost some 400,000 lives before a 2018 peace deal saw the two leaders form a government of national unity.

Now, tensions between Kiir and Machar have boiled over again, the latter placed under house arrest since March for alleged subversion.

Old Fangak, where the attack on the MSF hospital occurred, is one of several major towns in Fangak county, Jonglei State, an ethnically Nuer part of the country that is historically associated with Machar’s Sudan People’s Liberation Movement-in-Opposition (SPLM-IO) party.

Reporting from Nairobi, Al Jazeera’s Catherine Soi said she had been speaking to the Fangak county commissioner, who pointed the finger of blame at the government for the attack. The official, she said, was allied with the SPLM-IO.

This commissioner told Al Jazeera that “only the army has the capacity to carry out such an attack”. “We’ve also been talking to eyewitnesses who say that … the aircraft was a government aircraft,” said Soi.

“We also know that two weeks ago another MSF facility in that area was also attacked and looted, so we are waiting for the government official to give their version of the story,” she said.

Last month, an army base was looted by gunmen in the northern town of Nasir in oil-rich Upper Nile State. Soi said the attack had allegedly been carried out by the White Army, which is said to be allied with Machar’s SPLM-IO.

“He is under house arrest, several of other opposition politicians have also been arrested,” said Soi. “We’ve heard from the government spokesman who says investigations are still going on. And when that happens, these politicians are going to be charged with rebellion.”

The hospital attack is the latest escalation in a government-led assault on opposition groups across the country. Since March, government troops backed by soldiers from Uganda have conducted dozens of air raids on areas in neighbouring Upper Nile State.

Multiple Western embassies, including that of the United States, said in a statement on Friday that the political and security situation in South Sudan has “markedly worsened” in recent days.

The embassies urged Kiir to free Machar from house arrest and called for a “return to dialogue urgently aimed at achieving a political solution”.

An election, which was supposed to be held in 2023, has already been postponed twice and is now not scheduled until 2026.