South Sudan: Witness “heartbroken” by bombing

“All I could hear were guns firing and people screaming. When it finally went quiet, I took the boat to the hospital. l met our watchman at the gate. It was completely shattered, bullets were everywhere.”

The pharmacy was on fire by the time Kahindi reached it. “Members of the team and the community were fetching water with buckets. We were afraid if the fire continued, our fuel tanks a few metres away would explode. I thought we had a chance to save some of the medications inside, but it quickly became clear whoever bombed the hospital wanted the pharmacy to completely burn down. It took about five hours before we could put the fire out.”

Kahindi walked into the hospital wards where two patients had been the night before but found only bullet holes in the ground and blood on the floor. “I was worried. I didn’t know what had happened or where the patients had gone.”

In the emergency room, team members were stabilising and treating 20 patients who had arrived from town—some had been shot in the head, the chest and the abdomen. “We did everything we could, but we had no supplies other than what had been on the ward. Most of the patients were women, but there were also children, just 15 years old.”

The team evacuated the patients by speedboat to a safe village about an hour away. “We kept the patients in a tent and gave them what medication we had been able to bring with us. The next day, the patients were evacuated by air to a hospital in Akobo for further treatment.”

About 10,000 people fled to the same village and by morning it had become clear “we didn’t have enough supplies to run a health facility that could provide this many people any type of medical care. We called urgently for help from the team in Juba [the capital] and with the support of the United Nations airlifted in 350 kilograms of supplies. We hope we don’t receive any more wounded, but we continue to receive information about bombing in other areas.

“I am heartbroken. The hospital had been in Old Fangak for more than 10 years and was a lifeline. Hospitals should never be the targets, and I utterly condemn this bombing. It was a 35-bed hospital that had an outpatient department, inpatient wards, maternity—and we were able to refer severe cases to higher level facilities. Now, there is nothing left.”