Despite a brief truce, hopes for peace have crumbled in South Sudan as its civil war hits the three-year mark with ethnic violence only getting worse and no end in sight.
The international community, which strongly backed the country’s drive to independence in 2011, has been powerless to stop the worsening violence, with the UN issuing stark warnings of potential genocide and ethnic cleansing.
Both sides have been recruiting new soldiers - sometimes by force and including children - and are preparing for full-on war, while diplomats struggle with how to prevent it.
There’s no actual peace process or political plan right now. The international community has more less accepted that more fighting is about to break out.
War broke out on December 15, 2013 when President Salva Kiir accused his former deputy and political rival, Riek Machar, of plotting a coup.
A peace agreement signed two-and-a-half years later raised hopes of an end to a conflict marked by atrocities which has left tens of thousands dead and more than 3mn displaced.
The deal’s implementation, however, lasted just over two months.
Machar returned to the capital Juba in late April to form a government of national unity with Kiir, but violent clashes broke out in July, leaving hundreds dead.
Machar was forced to flee through the jungles of the Democratic Republic of Congo, and is now exiled in South Africa - isolated but still the bellicose leader of the rebellion.
After its outbreak in Juba the war was largely restricted to the northern states of Unity, Upper Nile and Jonglei but has in recent months expanded into the southern Equatoria region surrounding Juba.
As the rains draw to a halt and the traditional fighting season is set to start, Kiir on Wednesday called for a “national dialogue” in a speech to parliament, urging an end to hostilities and calling for forgiveness “for any mistakes I might have committed”.
However he made no mention of his foe Machar and it is unclear how his call would be received by the rebels.
Ethnic killings have intensified in recent months, particularly in and around the southern town of Yei, pushing tens of thousands of people to seek refuge in neighbouring Uganda.
These atrocities have drawn the attention of the international community with UN experts in early December reporting “ethnic cleansing” in several parts of South Sudan.
Weeks earlier the UN Special Adviser on the Prevention of Genocide, Adama Dieng, warned of “a strong risk of violence escalating along ethnic lines, with the potential for genocide.”
That view is widely held. What is happening now, there is clear ethnic targeting and if it grows, if it becomes massive, it will not be different to the 1994 genocide in Rwanda.
Neither government nor rebel sides seem able to win militarily or to turn battlefield gains into political ones.
International pressure forced the South Sudanese government to accept the proposed deployment of an additional 4,000-strong UN “protection force”, but months later it remains on paper only and the fighting continues.
The key to peace lies with South Sudan’s neighbours, if they can find common ground. The problem is that their interests are often competing.

The international community has more less accepted that more fighting is about to break out