AYOD, South Sudan: Long-horned cattle wade through flooded lands and climb a slope along a canal that has become a refuge for displaced families in South Sudan. Smoke from burning dung rises near homes of mud and grass where thousands of people now live after floods swept away their village.
“Too much suffering,” said Bichiok Hoth Chuiny, a woman in her 70s. She supported herself with a stick as she walked in the newly established community of Pajiek in Jonglei state north of the capital, Juba.
For the first time in decades, the flooding had forced her to flee. Her efforts to protect her home by building dykes failed. Her former village of Gorwai is now a swamp.
“I had to be dragged in a canoe up to here,” Chuiny said. An AP journalist was the first to visit the community.
Such flooding is becoming a yearly disaster in South Sudan, which the World Bank has described as “the world’s most vulnerable country to climate change and also the one most lacking in coping capacity.”
More than 379,000 people have been displaced by flooding this year, according to the UN humanitarian agency.
Seasonal flooding has long been part of the lifestyle of pastoral communities around the Sudd, the largest wetlands in Africa, in the Nile River floodplain. But since the 1960s the swamp has kept growing, submerging villages, ruining farmland and killing livestock.
“The Dinka, Nuer and Murle communities of Jonglei are losing the ability to keep cattle and do farming in that region the way they used to,” said Daniel Akech Thiong, a senior analyst with the International Crisis Group.
South Sudan is poorly equipped to adjust. Independent since 2011, the country plunged into civil war in 2013. Despite a peace deal in 2018, the government has failed to address numerous crises. Some 2.4 million people remain internally displaced by conflict and flooding.
The latest overflowing of the Nile has been blamed on factors including the opening of dams upstream in Uganda after Lake Victoria rose to its highest levels in five years.
The century-old Jonglei Canal, which was never completed, has become a refuge for many.
“We don’t know up to where this flooding would have pushed us if the canal was not there,” said Peter Kuach Gatchang, the paramount chief of Pajiek. He was already raising a small garden of pumpkins and eggplants in his new home.
The 340-kilometer (211-mile) Jonglei Canal was first imagined in the early 1900s by Anglo-Egyptian colonial authorities to increase the Nile’s outflow toward Egypt in the north. But its development was interrupted by the long fight of southern Sudanese against the Sudanese regime in Khartoum that eventually led to the creation of a separate country.
Gatchang said the new community in Pajiek is neglected: “We have no school and no clinic here, and if you stay for a few days, you will see us carrying our patients on stretchers up to Ayod town.”
Ayod, the county headquarters, is reached by a six-hour walk through the waist-high water.
Pajiek also has no mobile network and no government presence. The area is under the control of the Sudan People’s Liberation Movement-in-Opposition, founded by President Salva Kiir’s rival turned Vice President Riek Machar.
Villagers rely on aid. On a recent day, hundreds of women lined up in a nearby field to receive some from the World Food Program.
Nyabuot Reat Kuor walked home with a 50-kilogram (110-pound) bag of sorghum balanced on her head.
“This flooding has destroyed our farm, killed our livestock and displaced us for good,” the mother of eight said. “Our old village of Gorwai has become a river.”
When food assistance runs out, she said, they will survive on wild leaves and water lilies from the swamp. Already in recent years, food aid rations have been cut in half as international funding for such crises drops.
More than 69,000 people who have migrated to the Jonglei Canal in Ayod county are registered for food assistance, according to WFP.
“There are no passable roads at this time of the year, and the canal is too low to support boats carrying a lot of food,” said John Kimemia, a WFP airdrop coordinator.
In the neighboring Paguong village that is surrounded by flooded lands, the health center has few supplies. Medics haven’t been paid since June due to an economic crisis that has seen civil servants nationwide go unpaid for more than a year.
South Sudan’s economic woes have deepened with the disruption of oil exports after a major pipeline was damaged in Sudan during that country’s ongoing civil war.
“The last time we got drugs was in September. We mobilized the women to carry them on foot from Ayod town,” said Juong Dok Tut, a clinical officer.
Patients, mostly women and children, sat on the ground as they waited to see the doctor. Panic rippled through the group when a thin green snake passed among them. It wasn’t poisonous, but many others in the area are. People who venture into the water to fish or collect water lilies are at risk.
Four life-threatening snake bites cases occurred in October, Tut said. “We managed these cases with the antivenom treatments we had, but now they’re over, so we don’t know what to do if it happens again.”
As flooding becomes a yearly disaster in South Sudan, thousands survive on the edge of a canal
https://arab.news/b65aw
As flooding becomes a yearly disaster in South Sudan, thousands survive on the edge of a canal
- More than 379,000 people have been displaced by flooding this year, according to the UN humanitarian agency
- Latest overflowing of the Nile has been blamed on factors including the opening of dams upstream in Uganda
Israeli military raids in Syria raise tensions as they carve out a buffer zone
- Syria’s interim president, Ahmad Al-Sharaa, who led the rebels who took over the country, said he has no desire for a conflict with Israel
- Damascus has struggled to push Israel diplomatically to stop its attacks and pull its troops out of a formerly United Nations-patrolled buffer zone
BEIRUT: Qassim Hamadeh woke to the sounds of gunfire and explosions in his village of Beit Jin in southwestern Syria last month. Within hours, he had lost two sons, a daughter-in-law and his 4-year-old and 10-year-old grandsons. The five were among 13 villagers killed that day by Israeli forces.
Israeli troops had raided the village — not for the first time — seeking to capture, as they said, members of a militant group planning attacks into Israel. Israel said militants opened fire at the troops, wounding six, and that troops returned fire and brought in air support.
Hamadeh, like others in Beit Jin, dismissed Israel’s claims of militants operating in the village. The residents said armed villagers confronted Israeli soldiers they saw as invaders, only to be met with Israeli tank and artillery fire, followed by a drone strike. The government in Damascus called it a “massacre.”
The raid and similar recent Israeli actions inside Syria have increased tensions, frustrated locals and also scuttled chances — despite US pressure — of any imminent thaw in relations between the two neighbors.
An expanding Israeli presence
An Israeli-Syria rapprochement seemed possible last December, after Sunni Islamist-led rebels overthrew autocratic Syrian President Bashar Assad, a close ally of Iran, Israel’s archenemy.
Syria’s interim president, Ahmad Al-Sharaa, who led the rebels who took over the country, said he has no desire for a conflict with Israel. But Israel was suspicious, mistrusting Al-Sharaa because of his militant past and his group’s history of aligning with Al-Qaeda.
Israeli forces quickly moved to impose a new reality on the ground. They mobilized into the UN-mandated buffer zone in southern Syria next to the Golan Heights, which Israel captured from Syria during the 1967 Mideast war and later annexed — a move not recognized by most of the international community.
Israeli forces erected checkpoints and military installations, including on a hilltop that overlooks wide swaths of Syria. They set up landing pads on strategic Mt. Hermon nearby. Israeli reconnaissance drones frequently fly over surrounding Syrian towns, with residents often sighting Israeli tanks and Humvee vehicles patrolling those areas.
Israel has said its presence is temporary to clear out pro-Assad remnants and militants — to protect Israel from attacks. But it has given no indication its forces would leave anytime soon. Talks between the two countries to reach a security agreement have so far yielded no result.
Ghosts of Lebanon and Gaza
The events in neighboring Lebanon, which shares a border with both Israel and Syria, and the two-year war in Gaza between Israel and the militant Palestinian group Hamas have also raised concerns among Syrians that Israel plans a permanent land grab in southern Syria.
Israeli forces still have a presence in southern Lebanon, over a year since a US-brokered ceasefire halted the latest Israel-Hezbollah war. That war began a day after Hamas attacked southern Israel on Oct. 7, 2023, with Hezbollah firing rockets into Israel in solidarity with its ally Hamas.
Israel’s operations in Lebanon, which included bombardment across the tiny country and a ground incursion last year, have severely weakened Hezbollah.
Today, Israel still controls five hilltop points in southern Lebanon, launches near-daily airstrikes against alleged Hezbollah targets and flies reconnaissance drones over the country, sometimes also carrying out overnight ground incursions.
In Gaza, where US President Donald Trump’s 20-point ceasefire deal has brought about a truce between Israel and Hamas, similar buffer zones under Israeli control are planned even after Israel eventually withdraws from the more than half of the territory it still controls.
At a meeting of regional leaders and international figures earlier this month in Doha, Qatar, Al-Sharaa accused Israel of using imagined threats to justify aggressive actions.
“All countries support an Israeli withdrawal” from Syria to the lines prior to Assad’s ouster, he said, adding that it was the only way for both Syria and Israel to “emerge in a state of safety.”
Syria’s myriad problems
The new leadership in Damascus has had a multitude of challenges since ousting Assad.
Al-Sharaa’s government has been unable to implement a deal with local Kurdish-led authorities in northeast Syria, and large areas of southern Sweida province are now under a de facto administration led by the Druze religious minority, following sectarian clashes there in mid-July with local Bedouin clans.
Syrian government forces intervened, effectively siding with the Bedouins. Hundreds of civilians, mostly Druze, were killed, many by government fighters. Over half of the roughly 1 million Druze worldwide live in Syria. Most other Druze live in Lebanon and Israel, including in the Golan Heights.
Israel, which has cast itself as a defender of the Druze, though many of them in Syria are critical of its intentions, has also made overtures to Kurds in Syria.
“The Israelis here are pursuing a very dangerous strategy,” said Michael Young, Senior Editor at the Beirut-based Malcolm H. Kerr Carnegie Middle East Center.
It contradicts, he added, the positions of Saudi Arabia, Turkiye, Egypt — and even the United States — which are “all in agreement that what has to come out of this today is a Syrian state that is unified and fairly strong,” he added.
Israel and the US at odds over Syria
In a video released from his office after visiting Israeli troops wounded in Beit Jin, barely 5 kilometers (3 miles) from the edge of the UN buffer zone, Israeli Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu said Israel seeks a “demilitarized buffer zone from Damascus to the (UN) buffer zone,” including Mt. Hermon.
“It is also possible to reach an agreement with the Syrians, but we will stand by our principles in any case,” Netanyahu said.
His strategy has proven to be largely unpopular with the international community, including with Washington, which has backed Al-Sharaa’s efforts to consolidate his control across Syria.
Israel’s operations in southern Syria have drawn rare public criticism from Trump, who has taken Al-Sharaa, once on Washington’s terror list, under his wing.
“It is very important that Israel maintain a strong and true dialogue with Syria, and that nothing takes place that will interfere with Syria’s evolution into a prosperous State,” Trump said in a post on Truth Social after the Beit Jin clashes.
Syria is also expected to be on the agenda when Netanyahu visits the US and meets with Trump later this month.
Experts doubt Israel will withdraw from Syria anytime soon — and the new government in Damascus has little leverage or power against Israel’s much stronger military.
“If you set up landing pads, then you are not here for short-term,” Issam Al-Reiss, a military adviser with the Syrian research group ETANA, said of Israeli actions.
Hamadeh, the laborer from Beit Jin, said he can “no longer bear the situation” after losing five of his family.
Israel, he said, “strikes wherever it wants, it destroys whatever it wants, and kills whoever it wants, and no one holds it accountable.”
