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South Sudan faces new war over oil
By the time they vanished into the night, hundreds of homes had been razed, 11 people lay dead and the village's inhabitants faced starvation, having lost all their precious cattle.
"Everyone is on his own now," said Jamuth Nyading, a 42-year-old Sudanese herdsman, who gathered his two wives and 12 children and fled to the nearby town of Malakal. "You cannot cultivate, you cannot herd cattle, you cannot go fishing in the Nile without risk of being killed. We can't go back, not only because of fear, but also lack of food."
Mr Nyading's ordeal would be grimly familiar had it taken place in Darfur, the region of western Sudan blighted by civil war and awarded the dubious blessing of world attention for the last six years.
Instead, he abandoned his home in southern Sudan, an area supposedly at peace since a landmark agreement four years ago ended decades of fighting.