Rival leaders of South Sudan have agreed to form a unity government as they seek to end a six-year-old civil war that has devastated the world's youngest nation.
President Salva Kiir and opposition leader Riek Machar separately announced the deal Thursday after talks in the capital, Juba. President Kiir said he will appoint Machar as his first vice president on Friday, and officially form the new government on Saturday, the deadline set by the two rivals to meet the terms of a peace deal they signed in September 2018.
Kiir and Machar have missed two previous deadlines because they failed to resolve disputes, including the integration of rebel forces into the national army and an agreement on the number of states in the nearly nine-year-old nation. Kiir says any remaining issues will be resolved after the new government is formed, including security arrangements for Machar and other opposition leaders.
But he guaranteed that Machar will be protected while those terms are ironed out.
A power struggle between Kiir and Machar, the president's former deputy, led to the civil war that left hundreds of thousands of people dead and forced millions to flee to other countries or U.N.-run protection sites within the nation.
Thursday a United Nations commission accused rival fighters of systematically starving the people of South Sudan and diverting millions of dollars in government funds, the Associated Press reports. There was no immediate reaction from South Sudan's government to the report by the Commission on Human Rights in South Sudan.