While smoke rises across the Middle East, another part of the Northern Hemisphere burns. Two thousand miles from the U.S.-Israeli attack on Iran, South Sudan is spiraling out of control, spreading panic across the world’s youngest country and stoking fears that a full-blown war — on a continent that cannot afford another — may be next.

As many as 178 are dead after Sunday’s pre-dawn killing spree, a terrifying three-hour attack that started when dozens of young gunmen stormed Abiemnom while people were asleep in their beds, setting the village ablaze and mowing down children, women, the elderly, policemen — anyone in their path. Ruweng Administrative Minister James Monyluak Mijok described a chaotic scene where the government’s forces were “outnumbered,” watching helplessly as “assailants set fire to homes and markets.” Key senior officials were killed in the ambush, including the local county commissioner and executive director.

While response teams eventually managed to drive the militants out, the scope of the damage is devastating in a country that just declared its independence from its equally volatile neighbor, Sudan, in 2011. More than 1,000 locals ran, trying to find shelter at a nearby U.N. mission, leaving behind a bloody scene of bodies, carnage, and ash. Late Sunday, families rushed to bury the victims in a mass grave, worried that another raid could happen at any moment.

People on the ground demanded an end to the violence, which was sparked by a fierce ethnic divide between the military, who is loyal to the current president, Salva Kiir, and rebels allied with the suspended vice president, Riek Machar. Eight years ago, the two men signed a peace agreement to end a five-year civil war that killed 400,000 people, and part of that deal was to install Machar to his leadership position as part of a new “unity government.” Since then, the tension between the two rivals has become unsustainable, and “a U.N. inquiry has found that South Sudan’s leaders are ‘systematically dismantling’ that agreement.”

By last September, the situation became even more explosive when Machar was removed from office and charged with murder, treason, and “crimes against humanity.” His supporters claim the trial is a “political witch-hunt” intended to destroy the 2018 truce, while Kiir’s camp insists that Machar was planning a coup. Since then, the fighting has become widespread, displacing 280,000 South Sudanese and leading to fears that whatever fragile stability the country had is over.

Adding to the drama, not once in the nation’s15-year history has the country held elections, despite three attempts. Kiir has been in power since South Sudan’s independence in 2011, and any progress toward a constitution has “stalled.”

The entire situation is complicated by the deep corruption scheme of several top government officials, which the U.N. believes has siphoned off billions of dollars of oil revenue from the nation — leaving the South Sudanese people without critical services, infrastructure, food, education, medicine, and security. Yasmin Sooka, chair of the commission reporting on the plunder, said corruption had become the “engine of South Sudan’s decline.” “Billions meant for healthcare and schools are disappearing through opaque deals and shell companies,” she warned.

Then, of course, there are the barbaric attacks to the north in Sudan, where the Rapid Special Forces (RSF) are massacring civilians by the thousands — making the entire area completely unsafe. Families, who might otherwise flee north, have nowhere to turn.

“Our peacekeepers will continue to do everything within their capabilities to protect civilians seeking refuge at our base,” Kiki Gbeho from the local U.N. mission vowed. But the violence, she argued, “must stop immediately.”

Other aid groups, like Doctors Without Borders, have had to shut down their operations in the terror of the last several months. On February 3, a local hospital in Lankien was hit by an airstrike from the government’s forces and later “burned and looted” by the rebels on the ground. “I ran for my safety once I heard the shooting,” one of the group’s nurses described later. “I am separated totally from my family, my wife, and my children. I do not know where they are. I do not know if they are still alive or not. ... I am totally distressed, because I do not know where my kids are.”

The hospital had evacuated, but this nurse watched his house burn and his belongings stolen. “He fled into the forest on February 4, carrying only a small bag containing fortified peanut paste, biscuits, and his documents. He walked for five days through remote areas, avoiding armed men, before reaching safety.” Twenty-six workers for Doctors Without Borders went missing in the attack, the organization reported. “We are also seriously concerned that some of our colleagues may be facing other very difficult conditions that prevent them from communicating with us. Many were forced to flee alongside their families and are sheltering in remote areas with little access to food, water, or basic services.”

The situation, which would have received scant attention in the best of circumstances, now risks becoming a buried footnote in global headlines dominated by the Iran and Ukraine wars. But this “forgotten conflict,” as many call it, is at a dangerous point. “Civilians are bearing the brunt of a spike in indiscriminate attacks,” U.N. Human Rights Council High Commissioner Volker Türk warned on Friday, “including aerial bombardments, deliberate killings, abductions and conflict-related sexual violence,” he said. On both sides, he lamented, “military discipline appears to have collapsed,” evidenced by the “near total disregard for civilian protection.”

And while neither leader is perfect, experts say, Kiir has attempted to lead a fractured country through literally decades of war, American Association of Evangelicals Fellow Faith McDonnell tells The Washington Stand. He’s made mistakes, she agrees, “but I believe he is a good man. He wanted the best for his nation, but he has many bad advisors.”

After tracking the situation for years and to Sudan, McDonnell, who also serves as director of advocacy for Katartismos Global, has “very strong suspicions that this is all part of a plan orchestrated by Khartoum, Sudan many years ago — to sign a Comprehensive Peace Agreement, ‘allow’ South Sudan to be born, and then find multiple ways to sabotage it and get back control.”

Second, following the coverage, “it seems to me a very imperialist attitude to treat the fairly and honestly elected leader of South Sudan and his former ‘second’ (three times now!) as if they are both warlords fighting over turf,” she stresses. “Only one of them is a warlord, and it is not President Kiir.”

Finally, and most importantly, she wants people to know, “Nothing will save South Sudan but Jesus! The people have chronic PTSD, and it has crippled them and the whole nation. Satan does not want South Sudan to be the nation that God created it to be, and he wants to punish them for how they sacrificed millions of their people to stop the spread of Islamist supremacism and Caliphate further south, which was the goal of the Islamists in Khartoum [Sudan’s capital].” South Sudan is roughly 60% Christian as a result. “I pray all the time for revival in South Sudan — like a new East African Revival, like the great one that touched many nations in the 1940s for decades.”

These people need our prayers, and they desperately need the world’s attention. There’s a warning system for human rights in these fraught times, Türk cautioned somberly, and it’s “flashing red for South Sudan.”