Amnesty faults South Sudan and UN mission over Abiemnom killings

Amnesty International accused South Sudan's government and the United Nations peacekeeping mission of ignoring warnings before an attack that killed more than 200 people in the northern town of Abiemnom, in a report published on 12 November.

The assault came on the morning of 1 March and lasted about four hours. Amnesty said between 1,000 and 1,500 armed men from Mayom County in Unity State carried it out in the Ruweng Administrative Area, a stretch of northern South Sudan near the border with Sudan.

Authorities counted at least 213 dead: 130 residents, 76 security personnel and seven foreign nationals, The Rio Times reported. Amnesty gives the toll as more than 200. Most of the bodies were buried in two mass graves on the outskirts of the town, according to Arab News. Satellite imagery reviewed by Amnesty showed more than 230 structures destroyed by fire.

Amnesty said both the government and the UN Mission in South Sudan, known as UNMISS, knew about two weeks in advance that an attack was likely. In the 48 hours before it, about 1,000 people sought protection at or near the mission's temporary operating base on the edge of town. Seven people were killed outside the base's rear gates. UNMISS temporarily sent 40 members of its Formed Police Unit to Abiemnom after the attack, which Amnesty said raised the question of why they had not been there earlier.

Witnesses described attackers shooting residents in their homes and courtyards, and people fleeing or seeking shelter. "They pulled my cousin from under the bed and shot him in the head and killed him on the spot," a 20-year-old survivor told Amnesty, in an account published by Arab News. Arab News described the attackers as from the Nuer ethnic group.

UNMISS spokesperson Priyanka Chowdhury said the mission had acted on early warnings by engaging the authorities and repeatedly requesting the deployment of additional security forces. She said budget cuts had forced it to scale back at the Abiemnom base, and that it had concentrated its available capacity on protecting civilians inside the base rather than spreading limited forces across tasks it could not sustain.

"This is one of South Sudan's largest documented massacres since 2020," said Tigere Chagutah, Amnesty's regional director for East and Southern Africa. He said the government and UNMISS "had sufficient information and time to take more effective preventive action".

Amnesty linked the raid to the unresolved killing of several young men from Mayom in February 2026, describing that as a reported trigger rather than a proven cause. It said it wrote twice to South Sudan's authorities and received no reply, so the government's response to the findings is not known. The group called for an independent investigation, a parliamentary inquiry, fair trials for suspects and a public review of UNMISS's response before, during and after the attack.