On Monday morning it was a busy South Sudan hospital. By Tuesday night it was a bombed-out shell
Exclusive: An 80-bed MSF facility was bombed, burned and looted as civil conflict grows. The Guardian visited to witness first-hand the impact of the ‘trend of violence’ against healthcare in the country
The single-engine Cessna Caravan is flying over Nyirol county, in South Sudan’s Jonglei state. Its five passengers stare intently at the landscape streaking past below as the plane approaches the town of Lankien. On this hot day in late April, a team from Médecins Sans Frontières (MSF) is back for the first time since shutting down their hospital there, 10 weeks earlier.
They know what had happened shortly after the hospital’s closure: a bomb was dropped on it by a government plane on 3 February, followed by a ground invasion that turned Lankien into a ghost town. But discovering the level of destruction first-hand is shocking, even to humanitarians accustomed to war zones.