South Sudan army forces kill 19 rebels - Press TV

South Sudanese army forces have attacked a rebel base in Jonglei state, killing at least 19 militants and losing one soldier.

The army spokesman Philip Aguer said on Wednesday that troops conducted an attack on a base of rebel commander David Yau Yau, firing "rocket-propelled grenades and mortar shells,” after the rebels killed a soldier.

He added that 15 bodies of rebels killed during the attack were left on the battleground and “later another four were found in the grass".

Yau Yau rebelled against Juba's government after he was defeated in April 2010 elections. However, he accepted amnesty in June 2011, a month before South Sudan won independence from Sudan after decades of civil war.

South Sudan’s Jonglei state was one of the hardest hit in Sudan's 1983-2005 north-south civil war.

The new oil-rich nation is one of the least-developed countries in the world where one in every seven children dies before the age of five.

MKA/SZH