"Death is so horribly common ... There has been a collective numbing of South Sudanese people."
About a third of South Sudan's 12 million population have fled their homes since the latest civil war erupted in 2013 between soldiers of President Salva Kiir, an ethnic Dinka, and his former vice president, Riek Machar, a Nuer.
International organisations have documented numerous examples of mass killings, many of which were ethnically targeted, but there is no official death toll for the war. The United Nations Mission in South Sudan told the Thomson Reuters Foundation that it has been unable to provide a death toll because warring parties have denied access to areas where there has been violence. The country's vast size, poor infrastructure and weak civil society add to the difficulty, said Jehanne Henry, an expert on South Sudan with Human Rights Watch.
Estimates of the number of people killed in the ongoing civil war, which entered its fifth year last week, range from 50,000 to 300,000 deaths.
The U.N. has said the violence in South Sudan, which has been at war for all but a few years since 1955, amounts to ethnic cleansing and risks escalating into genocide.
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