South Sudan Needs Decisive African Union Action on Escalating Abuses

Coordinated airstrikes on civilian settlements in South Sudan’s Upper Nile and Jonglei states have killed dozens of noncombatants and displaced thousands since the start of 2025, according to forensic interviews, satellite telemetry, and survivor testimony compiled by Human Rights Watch. These bombardments mark a sharp escalation within a broader campaign of atrocities that has expanded to include systematic sexual violence, the forced conscription of minors, and the targeted executions of village elders who resist militia mobilization. Investigators have traced these operations to a deliberately fragmented security architecture. Within this system, government-aligned units and regional armed groups exploit jurisdictional gray zones to extract resources, while senior political figures maintain plausible deniability for the violence unfolding on the ground.

The violence has evolved methodically over the past year, shifting from isolated clashes along contested grazing corridors to calculated assaults on populated centers. Between January and October, field researchers documented at least fourteen separate incidents in which fixed-wing aircraft dropped unguided munitions on villages that lacked strategic military installations, leaving behind cratered clinics and charred market squares. Concurrently, verified testimonies detail how combatants have deployed sexual violence as a deliberate mechanism of territorial control, while sweeping recruitment drives have forcibly pulled boys and men into frontline battalions. Throughout this period, command-and-control structures have remained intentionally opaque, allowing mid-level commanders to operate with near-autonomy while systematically insulating political leadership from direct operational accountability.

This deterioration closely mirrors the structural collapse of 2013, when elite fractures splintered into ethnic militias and ignited a civil war that ultimately killed hundreds of thousands before the 2018 peace agreement established a tenuous power-sharing framework. Today’s abuses are not spontaneous eruptions but calculated extensions of unimplemented security sector reforms and a governance model that routinely outsources coercion to armed proxies. The ongoing war in neighboring Sudan has further compounded the crisis, opening porous supply routes through Upper Nile state that funnel small arms and ammunition directly into South Sudanese territory. These corridors simultaneously draw local factions into regional proxy calculations that consistently subordinate civilian safety to short-term battlefield advantage.

The implications of this escalation extend far beyond South Sudan’s borders. If regional bodies permit these campaigns to continue without consequence, it will establish a dangerous precedent in which strategic silence functions as tacit endorsement of wartime atrocities. A persistent absence of accountability threatens to normalize militia-based territorial control, destabilizing vital cross-border trade routes, triggering secondary displacement into Uganda and Kenya, and eroding institutional confidence in continental security mechanisms. When forensic and testimonial evidence points to a systematic dismantling of humanitarian protections, international diplomatic caution cannot substitute for verifiable enforcement.

Ahead of its January 19 convening, the African Union’s Peace and Security Council must transition from passive monitoring to measurable intervention. Investigators are urging the council to impose targeted financial and travel sanctions on commanders and political enablers directly linked to the documented atrocities, while mandating secure humanitarian corridors into Jonglei and Upper Nile, where aid convoys currently face aerial harassment and arbitrary ground checkpoints. Without enforceable compliance mechanisms and transparent oversight, the region will remain locked into recurring cycles of state-sponsored coercion and mass displacement.