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JUBA, South Sudan — The security forces went house to house, rounding up civilians by the dozens and binding the wrists of some with wire, survivors said. Some were summarily shot in the street, they said, while others were hauled off to crowded cells. Bodies of the executed were tossed into shallow graves, one recalled. Another jail where civilians had been taken reeked of death, a witness said.
JUBA, South Sudan — As heavy fighting between government forces and rebels continued in South Sudan on Wednesday, President Salva Kiir spoke out against ethnically motivated killings in a Christmas address.
“We thought that the war was fought between the soldiers,” said Peter Nhial, 30, one of many in a crowd of desperate people to describe attacks on civilians.
Tens of thousands of South Sudanese have sought refuge in United Nations compounds across the country amid violence that is believed to have claimed thousands of lives, shaking a young nation that gained independence from Sudan in 2011.
Little more than a week after political tensions between South Sudan’s leaders erupted into clashes in the streets of the capital, Juba, the crisis has broadened into a societal conflict in which longstanding ethnic divisions are fueling the violence and civilians are often the targets, not accidental victims, of the fighting.
In his address at a cathedral in Juba, the capital, Mr. Kiir acknowledged that Christmas this year was “very gloomy” but told his people: “Don’t despair. You hope for the best. Don’t lose hope.”
On Tuesday, the top United Nations human rights official, Navi Pillay, expressed deep concern about “the serious and growing human rights violations” taking place in Juba and elsewhere in the country.
Diplomats from Africa, Europe and the United States have called for an end to hostilities and urged the two sides to begin negotiations before the violence escalates into an all-out civil war. The revolt, which began last week, has spread rapidly to half of the country’s 10 states and to more than 20 cities and towns nationwide.
“Mass extrajudicial killings, the targeting of individuals on the basis of their ethnicity and arbitrary detentions have been documented in recent days,” she said in a statement.
Last week, Mr. Kiir accused his former vice president, Riek Machar, of attempting a coup. Mr. Machar, whom Mr. Kiir summarily dismissed in July, has denied the accusation and says he will sit down at the negotiating table only after his political allies have been freed from detention.
The United Nations Security Council voted unanimously on Tuesday to nearly double its peacekeeping force in South Sudan, hoping that a rapid influx of international forces will help quell the violence threatening to tear the young nation apart.
The battle for the city of Malakal, in the northern part of the country, was particularly fierce on Wednesday. Since Tuesday, 40 people have been treated for gunshot wounds at the hospital there, including five who have died, said Michael White, who is in charge of the Doctors Without Borders mission in South Sudan.
But even as it moved to add nearly 6,000 international troops and police officers to the more than 7,600 peacekeeping forces already in South Sudan, the United Nations secretary general, Ban Ki-moon, soberly warned that they might not be enough.
The sound of tanks and rocket-propelled grenades echoed through the streets of the city on Wednesday. Some reports said that Malakal had fallen to the rebels, but a military spokesman said its fate was still undecided. “It’s not clear who controls the city,” said the spokesman, Col. Philip Aguer.
“Even with additional capabilities, we will not be able to protect every civilian in need in South Sudan,” Mr. Ban said.
In Bentiu, the capital of the oil-producing Unity State, 26 patients required surgery as a result of the fighting last week. The most serious wounds were inflicted by opportunistic looters wielding machetes in the Bentiu market, Mr. White said. The city is in the hands of a general who sides with Mr. Machar.
“We have reports of horrific attacks,” he said, asserting that the attacks on civilians could constitute war crimes or crimes against humanity. “Innocent civilians are being targeted because of their ethnicity. This is a grave violation of human rights, which could fuel a spiral of civil unrest across the country.”
“Bentiu is still under control of forces loyal to Machar,” Colonel Aguer said. “For Bentiu, the S.P.L.A. is now studying what to do about it, what action to take.” The S.P.L.A. is the South Sudanese military, known as the Sudan People’s Liberation Army.
South Sudan was born in 2011 after years of international diplomacy as a way of ending decades of conflict with Sudan. Donor nations like the United States have spent billions of dollars trying to turn one of the poorest nations in the world into a viable state, but the country has long been strained by deep internal divisions.
In a sign of the confusion surrounding the conflict, the United Nations Mission in South Sudan said in a statement on Wednesday that it was not in a position to confirm a report by Navi Pillay, the United Nations’ top human rights official, of a mass grave in Bentiu.
The latest conflict began last week after President Salva Kiir accused his former vice president, Riek Machar, of trying to stage a coup. Skirmishes rooted in politics then spiraled with shocking speed into attacks based on ethnicity, victims said. Mr. Kiir is a member of the Dinka ethnic group, the country’s largest. Mr. Machar is a Nuer.
The mission said it was “deeply concerned over reports of extrajudicial killings in Juba and other locations in South Sudan,” adding that it was “investigating reports of such atrocities.”
The mistrust between the two groups has laid bare how much of the fledging nation’s cohesion was defined by opposition to the Sudanese government in Khartoum, rather than a broad sense of unity and national identity.
Addressing the widespread concern about killings, lootings and other abuses, Mr. Kiir told the hundreds gathered at the cathedral in Juba: “Anybody that goes to the residential areas to kill people or to loot the property of others and hoping that he’s doing it to support me must know that that person is not supporting me. Instead, you are destroying me.”
Survivors at a displaced-persons camp in a United Nations compound in Juba spoke of mass arrests and impromptu language tests being given by security forces to determine which ethnic group people came from — an exchange they said could determine life or death.
The South Sudanese military has retaken Bor, the capital of the strategic but unstable Jonglei State, which rebel forces took control of last week. Three American aircraft flying into Bor to evacuate American citizens were attacked on Saturday morning and forced to turn back. Four American service members on board were wounded, one seriously. A subsequent evacuation mission on Sunday was successful.
Stephen Bol, part of an organizing committee at the camp, said that boys who had left the compound looking for food had disappeared, and that at least 2,000 people, including relatives of the people huddled here, were unaccounted for.
As hundreds of civilians returned to Bor on Wednesday, Agence France-Presse reported that the streets were littered with bodies and signs of looted stores were visible.
“We don’t know whether they are alive or they have been killed,” he said.
The United Nations Office for the Coordination of Humanitarian Affairs said in a statement on Wednesday that at least 92,000 people had been displaced by the violence, and that “the real number of people displaced is likely to be significantly higher.” Nearly 60,000 people have sought safety at United Nations peacekeeping bases, including about 20,000 in Juba alone.
Majang Riek, 49, showing the deep gashes slashed into his wrists and forearms where, he said, he was bound with wire, described being hauled off to jail with more than 70 others. There, he said, he was beaten with rifle butts.
Aid agencies say they need $166 million to address the repercussions of the violence, including sanitation, health care, shelter, food and water.
Deng Wang, 34, had a white bandage on top of his head where, he said, he was struck with a machete, and a deep gouge in his forehead that he said had come from the tip of a rifle. Soldiers came to his home last week and arrested him, tying his hands and taking him with about 200 other members of his ethnic group, the Nuer. His house was set on fire, he said, killing one of his small children.
James Gajaak, 32, the chairman of a committee responsible for displaced people at a United Nations compound near the Juba airport, said that 300 to 400 people were arriving each day, many with their possessions loaded in enormous piles on top of the vans that dropped them off. “We don’t have enough water, and there is no shelter at all,” he said. “Even the 4-day-old babies have no shelter at all.”
Of the 200 people he was held with, fewer than 10 survived, he said. Small groups were led away, followed by gunshots. Mr. Wang said he had seen several graves with “dead bodies, yes, so many.” He credited his survival to the fact that he speaks Dinka and did not have any of the markings on his face associated with the Nuer ethnic group.
Dr. Christine Bimansha, a physician at the Doctors Without Borders clinic in Juba, said that clinic employees were already treating more than 200 people a day and were concerned about clean water and sanitation. “An outbreak of any transmissible disease — that’s our greatest fear,” she said.
Outside the capital, members of Mr. Kiir’s Dinka ethnic group have sought United Nations protection from attacks. In the town of Akobo, armed Nuer youths overran a United Nations base, killing Dinka civilians who were taking shelter there along with two of the peacekeepers trying to protect them. United Nations officials have said Dinka workers have been killed at oil facilities.
Isma’il
Kushkush contributed reporting from Khartoum, Sudan, and Rick Gladstone from New York.
Ms. Pillay alluded to the ethnic animosities in her statement on Tuesday, including the discovery of a mass grave in Bentiu, the capital of Unity State, that her aides said contained corpses of possible soldiers who were Dinka.
In a sign of the confusion surrounding the conflict, the United Nations Mission in South Sudan said in a statement on Wednesday it was not yet in a position to confirm the existence of the mass grave in Bentiu. But the mission said it was “deeply concerned over reports of extrajudicial killings in Juba and other locations in South Sudan and is investigating reports of such atrocities.”
On Tuesday, the South Sudanese government said it had retaken Bor, a city where an estimated 17,000 people have sought refuge at a United Nations compound. Col. Philip Aguer, a spokesman for the South Sudanese military, said government forces were now “in full control” of the city, adding that there were casualties, but that he did not yet know the full extent of them. His assertions could not be confirmed.
In a dispatch from Bor on Wednesday, Agence France-Presse reported that parts of the city had been looted and pillaged, with some bodies still lying on the streets and occasional bursts of gunfire heard, but that hundreds of jubilant civilians were heading back to their homes, celebrating what appeared to be the return of government authority.
Hilde F. Johnson, the head of the United Nations Mission in South Sudan, told reporters in Juba on Tuesday that the situation remained a struggle for political power, with ethnic violence an outgrowth rather than the root cause. But that did not lessen the danger that it could degenerate further.
“We have seen the signs of this already and we do not want to see any development of this nature taking hold in this country, and we have the historical analogies fresh in our minds,” Ms. Johnson said, in a seeming reference to conflicts in Bosnia or Rwanda.
In the displaced-persons camp in Juba, where hungry people crowded under the meager shade offered by tiny shrubs, small tents and slapdash shelters, Mr. Wang said he had searched in vain among thousands for his wife and four other children.
“I don’t know if they’re still alive,” he said.
United States forces, which have been evacuating Americans from South Sudan and have positioned aircraft and other equipment at a military base in Djibouti, on the Horn of Africa, took further precautionary steps Tuesday night. A Pentagon spokesman, Col. Steven H. Warren of the Army, said a platoon of Marines and a KC-130J refueling aircraft had been sent to Entebbe, Uganda, much closer to South Sudan, to give American commanders “additional options and the ability to more quickly respond, if required, to help protect U.S. personnel and facilities.”
In a statement, Colonel Warren said, “These movements were made with the full knowledge and cooperation of Ugandan authorities.”
Reporting was contributed by Isma’il Kushkush from Khartoum, Sudan, Somini Sengupta from Los Angeles, Eric Schmitt from Washington and Rick Gladstone from New York.
