JUBA
Rebels loyal to sacked South Sudanese vice-president Riek Machar have attacked a town in the north of the country, killing 14 people, a local official said Monday.
"Machar's forces attacked two areas in the south of the town on Sunday and killed 14 civilians during the assault," Renk County commissioner Lual Deng Chol told Anadolu Agency.
Machar's camp is yet to comment on Chol's allegations.
Renk is strategically important as it is located near the Upper Nile State, which is responsible for about 80 percent of South Sudan's oil production.
South Sudan has been shaken by violence since last December, when President Salva Kiir accused Machar of plotting to overthrow his regime.
Hundreds of thousands of South Sudanese have since been displaced in fighting between the two rivals, leading to an increasingly dire humanitarian situation for large swathes of the country's population.
In recent months, the warring camps have held on-again, off-again peace talks in Addis Ababa under the auspices of the Inter-Governmental Authority on Development (IGAD), a Djibouti-based regional bloc.
In August, the two sides reportedly signed the "cessation-of-hostilities matrix" – covering security, social and economic arrangements, as well as political and constitutional issues – in hopes the agreement would lead to a permanent peace deal.
The rebel camp, however, says it never signed onto the agreement, but rather had merely recommitted to a January 23 cessation-of-hostilities deal.
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