By Cristina Krippahl
Heavy fighting, hundreds dead, thousands on the run and urgent appeals from the international community for an end to the violence: the story unfolding in South Sudan seems sadly familiar.
Rival factions took up arms again in South Sudan's capital of Juba on Monday in the fifth day of fighting between troops loyal to President Salva Kiir and soldiers backing Vice-President Riek Machar.
Current confrontations started on Thursday night, raising fears of another full-blown conflict after a two-year civil war. Peter Schumann, former director of the United Nations mission to Sudan, told DW: "My understanding, from what I see and what I hear from Juba is that the probability of it [the situation] escalating into a full-scale war is much higher than it stabilizing." Schumann is worried that the situation is very similar to the one that led to a civil war in December 2013.
There are conflicting reports on the number of dead, but they are estimated to be in the hundreds. The United Nations have called for an immediate end of the battles and the fulfilling of the peace agreement signed by the two leaders in August of last year. This came about after intense pressure from the international community and ended the two-year civil war. The UN has also warned that attacks on civilians, U.N. personnel and U.N. premises, all of which happened in the last couple of days, might amount to war crimes that would need to be investigated.
Ahmed Soliman, research associate at the British think tank Chatham House, says the one positive thing in the middle of this renewed violence "was its very rapid condemnation not only by the leaders themselves, but also by the UN Security Council, the regional body IGAD (Intergovernmental Authority on Development) and the African Union, as well as the pleading for peace by the South Sudan Council of Churches." Soliman hopes that this swift reaction may prevent the violence from spreading.