South Sudan: After the Fire, Before the Rain

Biel Boutrosb was in his family home in Juba, South Sudan's capital, when he heard gunfire on the evening of December 15th last year. He soon realised that the shots were coming closer to his neighbourhood.

Mr Boutrosb, who is 32 years old and works for the South Sudan Human Rights Society for Advocacy, based in Juba, feared that soldiers from the presidential guard were targeting homes of suspected opponents. He fled for his life.

He boarded a plane to Uganda and from there flew to South Africa, where he has family. "I am still receiving death threats from government loyalists," he said. "If I return, my life will be endangered."

Mr Boutrosb is one of about 900,000 people forced to leave their homes since the fighting began, and among an estimated 200,000 who have fled the country, according to the United Nations High Commissioner for Refugees (UNHCR).

The strife in the oil-rich state began as a political conflict between President Salva Kiir and Riek Machar, his former vice-president, whom Mr Kiir summarily dismissed in July last year. The situation turned violent on December 15th 2013 when fighting erupted in a military barracks in Juba between the two men's supporters.

In the weeks that followed, the violence quickly spread to four of the country's ten states, driven by factions "seeking to exploit the chaos and confusion to pursue ethnic driven agendas", said Joe Contreras, acting spokesperson for the UN Mission in South Sudan (UNMISS).

Most of South Sudan's displaced are either hiding in the bush, packed into crowded United Nations compounds, or languishing in refugee camps in a host of neighbouring countries, according to UNMISS.

More than 23,000 South Sudanese have migrated to Kenya since hostilities started last December, according to the UNHCR. Most have found refuge in the Kakuma camp in Turkana, in north-west Kenya. At the end of January, more than 132,000 refugees from across the region were living in Kakuma, which is the world's second-largest refugee camp, according to the UNHCR.

The largest is in Dadaab, Kenya, about 100km from the Somali border, with about 369,000 exiles.

In Uganda, 80,000 South Sudanese are staying in the Adjumani and Arua refugee camps close to the border with South Sudan, while in Ethiopia, 65,000 are tented in the Leitchor camp in western Gambella, according to the refugee agency.