Nearly one million refugees from South Sudan face dire conditions: UNHCR

The United Nations High Commissioner for Refugees (UNHCR) has warned that nearly one million refugees from South Sudan are living under dire condition in displacement camps in the conflict-ridden region.

"With refugees fleeing South Sudan in their thousands, surrounding countries are straining under the weight of large numbers of displaced people and critically underfunded operations," the UNHCR said in a statement on Monday.

“Already there are some 930,000 refugees in the region, and more are arriving daily," the statement added.

The UN body noted that arrivals of South Sudanese fleeing their country after an outbreak of fresh fighting in the capital, Juba, had peaked at "more than 8,000 in one day" last month.

Ninety percent of new arrivals were women and children, the agency added.

The UNHCR said despite setting up a new 100,000-capacity camp at Yumbe, in northern Uganda, it urgently needs more money to accommodate nearly one million South Sudanese refugees in six countries in the region, as well as some 1.6 million people internally displaced in the wake of fresh conflicts.

Thousands of people have been killed and more than three million forced to flee their homes in the war that started in December 2013, when South Sudan’s President Salva Kiir sacked then Vice President Riek Machar only two years after the country seceded from Sudan.

SS