According to several internationally reputed sources, Christians are massacring each other over power and control of the new country in South Sudan. Pictured above, South Sudan is known to be a majority Christian nation which ceded from the populous north earlier this year.

Several sources have condemned the Christian populous nation for its infighting during the last week, the BBC UK reports:

World Christian leaders have called for a ceasefire in South Sudan, where the population is mainly animist or Christian.

The Vatican and the Archbishop of Canterbury, Justin Welby, issued a joint statement calling for the country’s weak and poor to be “spared the trauma of conflict”. “Let us not yield to fratricidal tendencies in the name of our ethnic differences (which is what God created us to be),” they said.

The UN according to another article by the BBC UK, has declared that thousands may already be dead due to the violence:

Thousands of people must have been killed in the past week of violence in South Sudan, the top UN humanitarian co-ordinator there has told the BBC. Toby Lanzer, who is in Bentiu in northern Unity state, said it had been “a devastating week for South Sudan”.

The UN also said on Tuesday that it had reports of at least three mass graves. One was in Bentiu in the north, and two in the capital, Juba. Mr Lanzer told the BBC’s Newshour programme: “I think it’s undeniable at this stage that there must have been thousands of people who have lost their lives.

“When I’ve looked at the hospitals in key towns and I’ve looked at the hospitals in the capital itself, the range of injuries, this is no longer a situation where we can merely say it’s hundreds of people who’ve lost their lives.” Mr Lanzer also said that the number of people seeking shelter from the fighting was “tens of thousands if not hundreds of thousands”.