As civil war reignites in South Sudan, so too does a battle over aid

[John Ashworth]

As civil war reignites in South Sudan, so too does a battle over aid

“The civilians bring the aid workers, and the aid workers bring
everything else.”

Joshua Craze and Joseph Falzetta
The New Humanitarian
JUBA 22 April 2026

At a glance: How aid is entangled in South Sudan’s conflict

- The government has repeatedly denied humanitarian access to
rebel-held areas, while directing groups to relocate their operations
into state-controlled territory.
- The country’s protracted economic collapse means humanitarian groups
have become major contributors to government revenue.
- The SPLM/A-IO, the country’s main rebel faction, is also exploiting
aid where it can.
- Millions of dollars’ worth of food and medicine intended for
civilians has been stolen or diverted by fighters in recent months.
- Coupled with the decimation of humanitarian budgets, aid is now
reaching fewer and fewer people.
- Donor attempts to push back on aid manipulation and diversion may
have ended up supporting the government’s counterinsurgency
operations.

One morning in February, a team from the World Food Programme (WFP)
arrived in the village of Mogok, in South Sudan’s Jonglei State. For
the starving residents, it was a long-awaited visit.

The country’s peace agreement had fallen apart just over a year
earlier, and the government had cut off opposition-held Mogok from
aid. Supplies had run low and children had grown visibly thinner.
“There is no sorghum here, no maize. Only fish and the roots of river
plants,” one villager said.

In the weeks before the visit, Mogok’s inhabitants had repeatedly
asked when WFP would come. After aid workers finally arrived,
villagers offered them a precious goat.

That same morning, 20 kilometres south of Mogok, in the village of
Pankor, expectations of an aid delivery were also running high. The
situation in Pankor was just as dire, and the arrival of a
government-aligned militia – following news of aid workers appearing
nearby – spurred optimism.

Only days earlier, the local county commissioner, who hails from
Pankor, had told community members that aid would soon arrive. “The UN
agencies will come and bring for you everything,” he said.

Using a loudspeaker, the militia, known as the Agwelek, invited
Pankor’s residents to gather in a hut to be registered for food aid.
After the villagers assembled, fighters tied some of them up, and then
opened fire. At least 22 were executed, according to two eyewitnesses.

Photos shared on social media after the massacre convey the
consequences. In one, a rail-thin young man, his arms bound behind his
back, lies face-first in the ashes of a cooking fire. In another,
three women and two children lie together on the ground of the hut
where they had gathered to register.

The events in Mogok and Pankor point to a wider pattern: Aid in South
Sudan's civil war is entangled in the conflict's complex dynamics.
From humanitarians being denied access to areas where people are
starving, to the use of aid workers as bait for a massacre, assistance
is being weaponised.

None of this should come as a surprise: Aid has long been central to
warfare in the Sudans, and there are few countries that have been as
closely studied for how conflict actors manipulate assistance. Yet
history is now repeating itself with deadly consequences.

As conflict spreads, the South Sudanese government, which determines
whether humanitarians can access different parts of the country, is
pressuring organisations to withdraw from rebel-held areas and
profiting from relief operations. The SPLM/A-IO, the country’s main
rebel faction, is also exploiting aid where it can.

In recent months, the battle over humanitarianism has seen millions of
dollars’ worth of food and medicine intended for civilians stolen or
diverted by fighters, while dozens of NGO-run health facilities have
been looted or destroyed, including by government airstrikes.

Coupled with the decimation of humanitarian budgets, aid is now
reaching fewer and fewer people in South Sudan, even as the situation
grows ever more dire. Ten million people – the majority of the
population – are currently in need of assistance, according to the
UN’s humanitarian coordination arm (OCHA), and extreme levels of
hunger and malnutrition have spread through areas affected by
fighting.

Starving the needy

The current civil war began in March 2025, when South Sudanese
President Salva Kiir arrested one of his vice-presidents – the leader
of the SPLM/A-IO, Riek Machar – for his alleged role in orchestrating
an attack on a military barracks in Upper Nile State. The two men had
formed a unity government in 2020 after a civil war between their
forces cost over 400,000 lives.

The following month, a government memo divided up the parts of the
country populated by the Nuer (South Sudan’s second-largest ethnic
group and a major component of the SPLM/A-IO) into “hostile” and
“friendly” counties.

What followed was a campaign of aerial bombardment that primarily
targeted “hostile” counties, destroying medical facilities, markets,
and homes, and displacing hundreds of thousands of people.

In December, after the government attempted to use political
appointments to divide Nuer groups loyal to the opposition, the rebels
overran a series of military garrisons in Jonglei. The following
month, the government responded by launching a counteroffensive dubbed
“Operation Enduring Peace”.

During the lead-up to the operation, the Agwelek’s leader, Johnson
Olonyi, who is also a general in the South Sudanese army (the SSPDF),
told his troops: “Do not spare an elderly, don’t spare a chicken,
don’t spare a house or anything.” Government spokesperson Ateny Wek
Ateny called Olonyi’s comments “a slip of the tongue” that were not
indicative of government policy.

Yet at least some of Olonyi’s instructions were carried out. In the
town of Akobo, an opposition stronghold where some of Jonglei’s
residents had taken refuge, civilians described witnessing fighters
loyal to Kiir’s regime razing villages, rounding up and killing their
inhabitants, and deliberately destroying water sources.

The South Sudanese army is now entrenched in most of the country’s
major towns, while opposition forces hold sway over large swathes of
the countryside. Controlling humanitarian resources and denying access
to hungry populations are once again proving powerful tools of war.

The government holds the upper hand in wielding these tools.

In recent months, it has repeatedly denied humanitarian access to
rebel-held areas, while directing aid organisations to relocate their
operations into government-controlled territory, aid workers, UN
officials, and diplomats told The New Humanitarian.

This has caused a particularly acute crisis in a roughly 40-kilometre
stretch of opposition-held territory in the southeast of Nasir County,
in Upper Nile – a key battleground in the current conflict – where
international aid organisations have been unable to deliver food aid
for over a year.

Government airstrikes and heavy fighting in Nasir have displaced tens
of thousands of people into informal sites along the Sobat River. The
Integrated Food Security Phase Classification, a UN-supported analysis
body, warned in November that the county was at risk of famine,
including more than 16,000 people at imminent risk of starvation.

An invitation to a massacre

Parts of northern Jonglei have also been placed under government siege.

Last August, humanitarian barges were held for over a week on the
White Nile, preventing them from continuing their mission and
delivering food to opposition-held areas. After negotiations, some
places received food, but access to other areas continued to be
blocked.

In January of this year, as the government announced its
counteroffensive, it ordered all aid groups to vacate three
opposition-held counties in northern Jonglei, an area roughly the size
of Belgium.

In March, the medical group Médecins Sans Frontières said the
government was preventing their staff from reaching the village of
Nyatim, where, they said, dozens of civilians displaced by the
fighting had starved to death or died from disease.

Humanitarian actors say their ability to push back and demand full
access is limited because they are dependent on government permissions
and fear losing their ability to operate in the country.

But that fear offers scant comfort in places like Pankor, where hunger
caused by government denial of humanitarian aid meant villagers were
desperate and expectant when the Agwelek turned up in February.

The militia had what they felt was unfinished business with the Gawaar
Nuer, a section of the Nuer ethnic group that lives in Pankor.

In 2022, the Agwelek had successfully taken crucial settlements along
the White Nile to the north. The Gawaar Nuer, fearing they would be
denied humanitarian access – and lucrative fees from checkpoints
stippled along the river – mobilised for a counterattack. Community
leaders told young Gawaar that they were attacking the government so
the community could access aid, in what was a more bellicose version
of the daily struggles against the government for humanitarian access
fought by aid workers in Juba.

Their counterattack, led by the charismatic Nuer prophet Makuach Tut,
rampaged through the west bank of the White Nile into areas inhabited
by Shilluk communities, from which the Agwelek draw support. There,
Tut’s men killed and looted.

For the 30 or so Agwelek who travelled to Pankor on the morning of 21
February, the massacre was revenge for what had happened in 2022. The
humanitarians were used once again, this time as a lure.

Masters of the craft

Humanitarian aid has long been central to waging war in the Sudans.
During the second Sudanese civil war (1983-2005), fought between the
government in Khartoum and the southern rebels (the SPLM/A) who would
go on to lead an independent South Sudan, both parties diverted food
aid to their troops and restricted access to enemy-held areas.

During the first South Sudanese civil war (2013–2018), the
now-governing SPLM/A, led by Kiir, took up the same wartime playbook.
In southern Unity State, for example, it declared certain areas “safe
zones” and encouraged humanitarians to distribute aid there. Civilians
flocked to these areas, where the government could control them and
divert food aid to soldiers. The rest of southern Unity was declared
hostile. Government-backed militias repeatedly rampaged through the
region, razing villages, looting cattle, and raping women.

As during South Sudan’s first civil war, access to opposition areas
has not been entirely cut off during the current conflict.

Some aid groups have managed to negotiate directly with local county
commissioners and militia leaders, while permits from Juba have also
ebbed and flowed with the rhythm of the conflict.

Late last year, WFP airdropped food for approximately 36,000 people in
some areas of Nasir, according to an agency spokesperson, even as its
efforts to access sites along the Sobat River remained stalled.

Yet the granting of humanitarian aid can also be part of the war
effort, with access often allowed only once the government has
captured a place.

In January, the government ordered aid groups and peacekeepers out of
opposition-held Akobo, then invited them back once the town was
captured by government forces. In April, when the town was recaptured
by the opposition, it barred humanitarian flights again.

In May 2025, the government hired BAR Aviation, an Israeli-Ugandan
company with close ties to the Ugandan military, which then
subcontracted the US firm Fogbow to conduct food airdrops to Nasir
town. The town had been recently recaptured by the government and was
being used as a base to launch military operations toward opposition
encampments near the Ethiopian border. In an interview at the time,
the humanitarian affairs minister, Albino Atak, said the airdrops were
intended to bring the civilian population back to town.

On the other hand, opposition officials, wary of civilians moving into
government areas, told people – without evidence – that the food being
dropped in Nasir had been poisoned.

In contested counties across the country, similar tactics are being
used to control population flows and the humanitarian resources they
often bring. “The civilians bring the aid workers,” explained one
South Sudanese humanitarian based in Upper Nile, “and the aid workers
bring everything else.”

Hauled off by soldiers

While humanitarian aid has been denied to some of the country’s most
needy, belligerent forces have helped themselves.

Last September, a government-allied militia looted a WFP barge in the
town of New Fangak, in Jonglei. Asked about the incident, one of the
generals who issued the order indicated that his soldiers were also
hungry.

The government later made a placatory gesture and gave WFP food aid
roughly equivalent to what was stolen, though this did not include the
non-food items pillaged, nor did it help get the food to the
populations for which it was originally intended.

Earlier this year, a 12-barge WFP convoy – worth approximately $2
million – transporting more than 1,500 metric tonnes of food to
opposition-held areas of Nasir was looted while moving along the river
next to Baliet County, in Upper Nile. The government-appointed county
commissioner organised the raid, which was carried out with the
participation of the community, according to government officials in
Malakal, the state capital, as well as two diplomats. Some of the
stolen food was then taken to Malakal for sale; the county
commissioner has not been arrested or removed for his role in the
raid. The New Humanitarian was unable to reach him for comment.

Health facilities have been singled out during recent fighting. Since
the beginning of the year, 28 facilities have been looted or damaged
in Jonglei alone, according to the UN.

In one incident, government soldiers looted hundreds of boxes of
medical supplies from a humanitarian-run facility near Ayod town in
January, shortly after recapturing a nearby military barracks,
according to an NGO incident report and multiple interviews. The
facility was stripped bare. Solar panels, doors, and the cool boxes
used to store vaccines were all taken by the soldiers.

Opposition fighters have also looted, according to more than half a
dozen sources. Last September, fighters loyal to Tut, who supports the
SPLM/A-IO, seized WFP and UNICEF aid in Ayod. Opposition-allied
fighters also stripped humanitarian-operated health facilities as they
retreated during the counteroffensive last month, intent on leaving
nothing behind for government forces.

As well as food and medicine, other humanitarian assets like Land
Cruisers and Starlink internet terminals have become valuable
resources for waging war.

At least 14 humanitarian Land Cruisers were seized by fighters from
both sides during recent fighting in Jonglei, one senior aid worker
reported. Some were then used to transport heavy weaponry.

One NGO director in Jonglei laughed when asked whether his
organisation’s assets had been used by any of the belligerent parties.
“Even the internet that the opposition is using to speak with you now
– that’s our internet!” they said.

“They tax, they tax, they tax”

The institutional benefits of humanitarian agencies extend beyond
outright theft.

As people enter areas seeking assistance, and populations grow,
traders begin to import food and other goods to meet growing demand.
Commercial airlines open new routes. Civilians become exploitable
labour, so soldiers no longer need to spend hours each day cutting
their own firewood or doing other mundane chores.

Thanks to South Sudan’s protracted economic collapse, humanitarian
organisations have also become major taxpayers in Juba, and at the
state and county level, where they are often the principal source of
funds.

Two aid workers in Jonglei said their staff pay 10% of their monthly
salary to local authorities in the areas they control, all off the
books.

Another recalled how families in Ayod complained that government
officials had collected 10 kilos of sorghum from each family’s 50-kilo
sack after a recent food distribution.

“When the food is given by WFP, they tax, they tax, they tax – every
family,” he said. “They get a lot of food for themselves that way,
both sides.”

The SPLM/A-IO, cash-strapped and bereft of financial support, is also
aware that NGOs represent valuable sources of cash, and has developed
parallel administrations in the areas under its control.

Still, it is the government that benefits the most from the
infrastructural advantages and tax base that the humanitarians
provide. It goes to great lengths to control aid agencies’ areas of
operation.

It does this by restricting where flights can land, arresting aid
workers who work in opposition-held areas, and threatening to take
away humanitarian organisations’ operating licenses, which are
provided by officials in Juba.

Eight aid workers who spoke to The New Humanitarian said their
organisations had faced significant pressure from authorities to
relocate their operations from opposition areas, where most of the
war-affected civilian population now resides, to government areas.
They, like others who were interviewed for this story, spoke on the
condition of anonymity out of fear that their organisations would face
retaliation.

Last June, Justin Nhial Batoang, the government-appointed commissioner
of Ulang County, another opposition stronghold in Upper Nile, gave
humanitarian organisations 72 hours to relocate their operations to
the government-controlled county headquarters or have their licenses
revoked and be labelled “the enemy of peace”.

“The authorities of Ulang will not be responsible if anything happens
to an organisation” that continues “operating under the territory of
the SPLM-IO or any other political party”, he warned in a statement.

Opposition officials have issued similar ultimatums, though with far
less authority to back them up. “Ultimately, the green light for
access comes from Juba,” one aid worker said.

An unlikely supporter

Some recent attempts to push back on aid manipulation and diversion
have been controversial.

On 8 January, the US government announced that it was suspending all
foreign assistance to Ayod County, barring humanitarians from spending
American money there.

Yet far from admonishing Kiir’s regime as the Americans intended, the
diplomats may have ended up supporting its counterinsurgency.

The suspension occurred after a series of incidents in Ayod town, the
county headquarters, involving aid workers being detained and
humanitarian assets being seized by the government-appointed
commissioner, James Chuol Jiek. During one incident, construction
equipment hired by the UN for the rehabilitation of roads was used by
the commissioner to dig trenches for the army. Contacted for comment,
Jiek’s office denied that these incidents had occurred, while saying
an apology letter had been issued.

The suspension of aid was supposed to demonstrate “US resolve to
forcefully respond when South Sudanese officials take advantage of the
United States instead of working in partnership with us to help the
South Sudanese people,” the US embassy said in a statement.

While this means government-held Ayod town is denied US-funded
humanitarian aid, it has both a functioning market and an airstrip.
The rural opposition-held areas of Ayod, in contrast, are facing
flooded fields and government attacks, and have little means to import
desperately needed food supplies, said humanitarians who had recently
visited the area. Aid agencies with US funding were forced to look for
other donors, in a landscape of extremely restricted humanitarian
financing, in order to comply with the American directive.

Among aid workers, the American decision has been divisive. Critics
say the move punishes a civilian population that is itself harassed by
the government and not a beneficiary of its actions. Others
acknowledge that a firm stance towards the regime was overdue, even as
they fear the decision’s adverse effects.

“In principle, [the US directive] is the implementation of an actual
red line, which has been needed in South Sudan, albeit in an
uncoordinated way with a complete disregard for outcomes,” said Chris
Newton, an analyst with the International Crisis Group.

Some aid workers have also criticised a recent allocation of roughly
$100 million by the US into the South Sudan Humanitarian Fund (SSHF),
a country-based pooled fund controlled by OCHA.

OCHA had a relatively short six-month window in which to spend the
funds and an overwhelming number of “priority 1” counties, or areas
with the highest severity of humanitarian needs. It decided to omit
many parts of the country held by the opposition and impacted by
recent fighting, including Nasir and much of northern Jonglei.

The head of OCHA in South Sudan, David Carden, confirmed that his
agency did not allocate the US funds to opposition-held counties most
affected by the violence but said $11.4 million was set aside for
Akobo, Nyirol, Uror and Nasir over the past four months through other
sources.

Nonetheless, many humanitarians fear donor requirements to spend funds
quickly risk trumping real humanitarian needs and rewarding
government-held territories at the expense of difficult-to-access,
opposition-held areas.

For communities facing the brunt of state violence, such decisions are
unlikely to ease the perception that aid is aligned with those in
power.

“Why,” the Nuer prophet Tut asked The New Humanitarian in July 2025,
“are the humanitarians always supporting the government?”

Edited by Philip Kleinfeld.

https://www.thenewhumanitarian.org/analysis/2026/04/22/civil-war-reignites-south-sudan-so-too-does-battle-over-aid

END
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