LODWAR, Kenya, July 3 (Xinhua) -- Fourteen people have died and several other people sustained injuries in violent clashes between two South Sudan's rival clans in a refugee camp in northwestern Kenya's Turkana County, officials said Wednesday.
Edwin Chabari, the manager of the Kakuma refugee camp, said that the clashes between the clans of Nuer and Anyuak led to the deaths and displacement of civilians in the past four days.
"The altercation between the two clans over a piece of cloth escalated to deadly confrontation. At Least 14 lives have been lost and several other people injured and there are many families displaced," Chabari said.
He noted that Kenyan security forces have been deployed to the second-largest refugee camp in the country to restore order and prevent further loss of lives and destruction of property.
In addition, Chabari said that local officials have initiated dialogue between the warring clans to avert violence as medical teams provide treatment to the injured refugees from South Sudan.
An official from the United Nations High Commissioner for Refugees (UNHCR) expressed concern over the violence in the refugee camp and called for a thorough probe into perpetrators.
The refugee camp was established in 1992 and hosts currently 288,000 refugees from nine countries, including South Sudan, Ethiopia, Burundi and the Democratic Republic of the Congo, according to UNHCR statistics in June 2024. ■