'South Sudan is one of UNHCR’s most underfunded crises already and we are now mobilising to support this new influx,' agency spokesperson Charlotte Hallqvist said. Civil war broke out there barely two years later, killing an estimated 400,000 people. South Sudan gained independence from Sudan in 2011 after two decades of north-south conflict. The true number is likely much higher, it says.Īid agencies fear the influx will worsen an already dire humanitarian crisis in South Sudan where more than 2 million people are displaced and three quarters of the 11-million-strong population need aid. Since the fighting erupted in Khartoum, the UNHCR has registered more than 30,000 people crossing into South Sudan, more than 90% of them South Sudanese. Up to last month, more than 800,000 South Sudanese refugees lived in Sudan, refugees from decades of conflict. The fighting has turned the humanitarian situation on its head. She hopes the United Nations will help her move to another country. 'The heat is killing us and some people have gone four days without eating, and there is no place to sleep, and the children are getting sick,' Mijok said. The United Nations refugee agency, UNHCR, and other aid groups are distributing food, water, buckets, blankets and mats. The refugees have made basic shelters out of sticks and pieces of fabric. They are now among thousands camping out in South Sudan's Renk County, in a dilapidated university campus, its buildings pockmarked by bullets from fighting a decade ago. He had to stay behind as they did not have enough money to pay for his place on the trucks and buses that carried Mijok, their son and their daughter to the border, a nerve-wracking two days on bush roads. Then the shots started ringing out and her family had to pack up and leave that behind them - all of them apart from Mijok's husband. She had managed to carve out a new life for herself as a housemaid in the city of Omdurman, across the River Nile from Sudan's capital Khartoum. I would have gone anywhere, but I had no choice,' the 26-year-old said. 'I would not have come back to South Sudan.

RENK, South Sudan, May 8 (Reuters) - The last place Lina Mijok wanted to go as she fled fighting in Sudan was back to her own country, South Sudan, which she had left as civil war erupted in 2013.īut when Sudan's army started battling the paramilitary Rapid Support Forces in the streets around to her home last month, South Sudan was the only place she and her two young children could reach.

Should we stay shriver