Civilian casualties mount in South Sudan amid fighting between Army and local militias

Wiyuach Makuach recalls surviving an airstrike in South Sudan amid escalating violence and humanitarian crises.

Wiyuach Makuach sat on her bed in a dimly lit ward of a hospital near South Sudan’s border with Ethiopia and rested her remaining arm in her lap as she recalled the airstrike that took her other arm and nearly killed her.

“Everything was on fire,” she said in an interview at the hospital in the border town of Akobo where she was being treated for her injuries.

The bombing happened on May 3, 2025, at another hospital in the northern community of Fangak, where she had traveled to be with her 25-year-old son while he sought treatment for tuberculosis. A series of strikes there, including several at the Doctors Without Borders facility, killed seven people.

“I ran outside and started rubbing mud on myself to stop the burning,” Ms. Makuach said.

Ms. Makuach, 60, is just one of the dozens of civilians who aid groups say have been killed or badly injured by airstrikes in recent weeks as South Sudan’s Army clashes with militia groups across the country. The Army says it targets only combatants, and has not commented on civilian casualties.

“The Army displaced us and our families into the bush and that’s when we decided we would fight back,” said Gatkuoth Wie, 24, who was wounded while fighting in northern Jonglei State.

The fighting has led to U.N. warnings that South Sudan is again on the brink of civil war. Meanwhile, U.S. President Donald Trump's administration is seeking to send to South Sudan a group of eight deportees from Cuba, Vietnam, and elsewhere who have been convicted in the U.S. of serious crimes, sparking a legal fight that has reached the Supreme Court.