With South Sudan marking its first anniversary on July 9, Samaritan’s Purse UK has launched an urgent appeal to provide vital food and water supplies for 170,000 refugees who it says are facing “a full-blown emergency”.

Over the past year, continued bombing has forced a mass exodus of refugees to flee the Nuba Mountains and Blue Nile State in Sudan, leaving them trapped across the border, in South Sudan, between violence and starvation. 

Samaritan’s Purse UK executive director, Simon Barrington, says: “The plight of the refugees is getting worse day by day and is slipping from crisis to disaster.  We’re hearing of people dying of dehydration and starvation because of food and water shortages.

“The infrastructure is fragile, the country is fragile, the financial situation is fragile and the food situation for the whole of the country is fragile.  So we’re appealing for everyone to help us save lives while there’s still time.”

Speaking from the Yida refugee camp, David Phillips, Samaritan’s Purse country director for South Sudan said: “The thing that really breaks our hearts is that the situation hasn’t changed in the Nuba Mountains where these people are fleeing from.

“They’re still being persecuted and bombed by their own government. There’s still no humanitarian access into that place and so the people who are fleeing to find safety in the refugee camps are literally arriving like walking skeletons.” 

He added: “They have to immediately be taken into our therapeutic feeding programmes, or given emergency food rations in order to try to sustain them. So we’re seeing an increase of the need here in a very drastic way with new arrivals of up to 700 refugees a day in immediate need of assistance.”