Late last year, South Sudan's president, Salva Kiir, accused his former vice president, Riek Machar, of attempting a coup d'état amid accusations of rampant corruption within the government. Infighting immediately broke out within the presidential guard, sparking what has now become a brutal tribal and civil war that has pitted Machar's ethnic Nuer loyalists against the majority Dinka, who have sided with Kiir. Machar narrowly escaped assassination, fleeing to the deep bush as Kiir's troops razed his home and killed his bodyguards. And now the world's newest sovereign nation is in imminent danger of becoming a failed state.
