Amnesty International said Thursday that the United Nations peacekeeping mission in South Sudan and the country’s authorities had enough warning to prevent the March 1 attack on Abiemnom, a remote village near the Sudan border where more than 200 people were killed, and did not act strongly enough to stop it.
The rights group’s new report says the mission, known as UNMISS, knew an assault was likely but left roughly three dozen peacekeepers in the area without reinforcement until after the attack. Both the government and the mission had enough information and time to take more effective preventive action, and their failure to do more cost lives, said Tigere Chagutah, Amnesty’s director for East and Southern Africa. UNMISS sent 40 additional police after the killings.
Amnesty’s account of the raid itself is detailed. Between 1,000 and 1,500 armed men from neighboring Mayom County shot residents, burned homes and looted part of the hospital, the report says. Satellite images show more than 230 structures burned, and most victims were buried in two mass graves. Authorities put the death toll at more than 200: 130 town residents, 76 security personnel and seven foreign nationals. Amnesty said the attack may have been triggered by tensions over the earlier killings of several young men from Mayom.
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That figure is higher than the one first given. In the days after the attack, South Sudan’s information minister, James Monyluak Mijok, said 169 people had been killed, 90 of them civilians and 79 government soldiers, and warned that the toll could rise. The health minister said all 169 bodies were buried in a mass grave. The new count and the earlier one use different categories, and the reports reviewed by The Eastern Updates do not say how the revision was reached.
The accounts of who carried out the attack have never been settled. Mijok blamed unidentified youths from Mayom, and said the fighting lasted three to four hours before the army drove the attackers out. He called the attack barbaric. Local officials in the Ruweng Administrative Area went further, alleging that some attackers belonged to the Nuer White Army and were backed by the opposition SPLA-IO. The SPLA-IO denied it and said its forces remained in their designated positions. Community leaders and former officials in Ruweng alleged separately that government forces had armed the youths, and a former Mayom commissioner alleged that Unity State officials knew of the attack in advance. None of those allegations has been independently confirmed, and Amnesty’s report, as described in the coverage reviewed, does not adopt them.
UNMISS rejected the suggestion that it did too little. Its spokesperson, Priyanka Chowdhury, said the mission did its best with limited resources to protect and treat about 2,500 people sheltering in a protected area it had set up in anticipation of an attack. Facing budget cuts, she said, the mission had concentrated its available capacity on protecting civilians inside its base. She said the mission had known tensions were high since mid-February and had repeatedly asked the national army to send more forces after early warnings. The mission’s own count of people sheltering at its base was given as more than 1,000 in the first days after the raid, and the reports do not explain the difference from the 2,500 figure.
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Amnesty questioned why more troops were not deployed sooner, particularly after a similar deadly attack in April 2025. In that assault, armed youths from Mayom briefly seized Abiemnom and killed at least 27 people, according to an earlier account of the episode.
The budget pressure Chowdhury described is real. The UN Security Council renewed the mission’s mandate in April but cut its authorized troop ceiling from 17,000 to 12,000. Protecting civilians is a core task of the mission.
South Sudanese authorities did not respond to two letters from Amnesty requesting information and responses to the report’s preliminary findings. The group called for an independent investigation into the killings and a separate review of the peacekeepers’ response. Chagutah said Abiemnom’s survivors deserve “truth, justice” and assurances that such a tragedy will not be repeated. In May, in a separate statement on the UN arms embargo, Amnesty said it was dismayed that several Security Council members wanted the embargo lifted and that some abstained when the Council voted to renew it for another year.
The findings arrive as South Sudan prepares for elections on December 22, which many fear could unravel a fragile peace. On Tuesday, African Union envoy Jakaya Kikwete urged the Security Council to help ensure the vote is peaceful. Murithi Mutiga of the International Crisis Group warned that a rushed election could be “a final blow” to the 2018 peace agreement that ended five years of civil war.
Other recent accounts of the election preparations are mixed. The government insists the vote must go ahead, and the foreign ministry said earlier that Kikwete had expressed satisfaction with the preparations after a five-day visit to Juba. The chair of the National Elections Commission, Abednego Akok Kacuol, has acknowledged gaps and contradictions in the legal framework and warned that funding shortages could hamper the process. Some opposition groups argue that conditions for a credible vote have not been met. First Vice President Riek Machar, leader of the SPLM-IO, is detained in Juba and faces treason charges, according to a regional report.
South Sudan is due to hold the elections on December 22.
