JUBA (The Thursday Times) — United Nations peacekeepers and South Sudan’s authorities knew an attack on the town of Abiemnom was coming but failed to take the steps that could have prevented a massacre of more than 200 people in March, Amnesty International said in a report released on Thursday.
Between 1,000 and 1,500 armed men from neighbouring Mayom County in Unity State overran the town near the Sudan border in a four-hour assault in the early hours of March 1, the rights group said. They shot residents in their homes and as they fled, burned homes and the market, and ransacked part of the local hospital.
South Sudanese authorities put the death toll at 213, including 130 residents, 76 members of the security forces, and seven foreign nationals. Most of the dead were buried in two mass graves on the edge of the town. Amnesty called it one of the country’s largest documented massacres since 2020.
Warnings two weeks ahead
Amnesty said both the government and the UN Mission in South Sudan, known as UNMISS, had information about two weeks in advance that an attack was likely, and that a similar deadly raid had hit Abiemnom in April 2025.
“Both the government and UNMISS had sufficient information and time to take more effective preventive action. Their failure to take stronger action cost lives,” said Tigere Chagutah, Amnesty’s regional director for East and Southern Africa.
According to the report, seven of the killings it documented took place just outside the rear gates of the UN’s temporary base, where residents had run hoping for protection. UNMISS sent 40 more police officers to the town only after the attack, which Amnesty said raised serious questions about why they had not been sent before.
UN cites limited resources
An UNMISS spokesperson said the mission had done its best with limited resources, focusing on protecting and treating about 2,500 people who sheltered at a protected area it had set up in anticipation of the attack. The spokesperson said the mission had repeatedly asked the national army to send more forces after the early warnings.
The UN Security Council renewed the mission’s mandate in April but cut its authorised troop ceiling from 17,000 to 12,000. South Sudanese authorities did not respond to Amnesty’s requests for comment on the findings, the group said.
Amnesty, which interviewed 82 people and reviewed satellite imagery, called for an independent investigation into the killings and a separate review of the peacekeepers’ response. The report comes weeks before South Sudan’s elections, scheduled for December 22, which many fear could strain a fragile 2018 peace deal.
