Archbishop of Canterbury Justin Welby, spiritual leader of the world’s Anglicans, prayed on Wednesday with South Sudanese refugees in northern Uganda, home to a nearly million people fleeing a four-year civil war in the world’s youngest nation.

Around 1.8 million people have fled South Sudan since fighting broke out in December 2013, sparking what has become the world’s fastest growing refugee crisis and largest cross-border exodus in Africa since the 1994 Rwandan genocide.

Most have fled south to Uganda, whose open-door refugee policy is now creaking under the sheer weight of numbers in sprawling camps carved out of the bush.

“The Bible tells us that the refugee is specially loved by God,” Welby, leader of the 85-million strong Anglican Communion, said as he joined in prayers in a camp in the northern district of Moyo.

The Archbishop added: “Which means you who are refugees are specially loved by God, that Jesus himself was a refugee and he loves you and he stands with you and the suffering that you have is the suffering that he knows. So I pray for you, I will advocate for you.”

Officials from the United Nations UNHCR refugee agency say $674 million is needed to pay for the basic needs of the refugees this year, but so far only 21 percent of those funds have been secured.

The total number of refugees is due to pass a million in the next week, UNHCR officials said. Nor is there any sign of a let-up in the stream of desperate civilians.

Some days it is only hundreds. On others, it is thousands.

In the camps, refugees are already on half their standard food rations of 12kg of maize a month, and now critical services such as health and education are facing cut-backs, UNHCR officials said.

In Bidi-Bidi, the largest of the refugee camps, 180 South Sudanese died in the first six months of the year, nearly half of them small children.

“We came here to hide ourselves from death,” said 31-year-old Moro Bullen, standing next to a row of 16 freshly dug graves, mounds of rust-red earth arranged in three neat rows. Half of the graves were only a meter long. “We did not come here to die. We came here to be rescued.”

Although the roots of the war lie in the animosity between President Salva Kiir, who hails from South Sudan’s powerful Dinka ethnic group, and his former deputy, Riek Machar, a Nuer, it has splintered into a patchwork of overlapping conflicts.

Machar is under house arrest in South Africa, having fled there last year to seek medical attention, but there has been little let-up in the levels of conflict, especially in the Equatoria region abutting Uganda.

Refugees have told Reuters of towns and villages emptied by government forces, dominated by the Dinka, with men, women and children summarily executed, and their bodies mutilated.

Rights groups have also reported widespread rape and looting that the United Nations says indicates ethnic cleansing. It has also warned of a possible genocide in a country that only came into being in 2011, when South Sudan split from Sudan.

The government has denied the reports, and said its troops are merely conducting operations against rebel militiamen.

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At least six people were killed in an attack on a bus convoy traveling between Juba, the capital, and Nimule, on the country’s southern border with Uganda.

Four civilians and two national security service members escorting the convoy were killed, a spokesman for the Sudan People’s Liberation Army (SPLA) said.

The Juba-Nimule road is a major lifeline linking the South Sudanese capital with the East Africa region, via Uganda. The road carries most goods that South Sudanese traders import from Uganda.

Wednesday’s incident was the fifth deadly attack this year along the 200-kilometer stretch of road between Nimule, on the banks of the Nile River, and Juba.

​The SPLA spokesman, Brigadier General Lul Ruai Koang, said one of the buses was hit by a rocket-propelled grenade, and that the attackers also had heavy weapons. He blamed rebels loyal to former First Vice President Riek Machar for the raid, but a spokesman for Machar’s SPLA-In Opposition group denied any involvement.

“The attackers were repulsed,” Koang said. He indicated government forces inflicted an equal number of casualties on the raiders who opened fire on the buses, but details were unclear.

A passenger aboard one of the two buses heading for Juba said ‘a very serious ambush’ broke out after the convoy passed Moli town in Eastern Equatoria province, less than halfway along the route to Juba.

The passenger said he saw three people who had been shot to death, one woman and two men, before the buses turned around and headed back to Moli. Several people with gunshot wounds were taken for treatment to Nimule.

Brig. Koang told VOA he was convinced that rebels loyal to Machar were responsible for the attack. However, the deputy military spokesman for Machar’s SPLA-IO, Colonel Lam Paul Gabriel, was equally certain that his fighters were not involved.

“We do not know exactly who is responsible for that, but we have sent an MI [military intelligence] team in search for the culprit,” Gabriel told South Sudan in Focus. “We are advising our civilians to be careful while traveling on this road.”

He said SPLA-IO forces had received ‘strict orders’ from Machar, making it ‘very clear that civilian vehicles should not be attacked’.

Before Wednesday’s ambush, the most recent attack on the Nimule-Juba road was in June, when 10 people including two senior army officers were killed in a raid on another convoy. That assault was believed to have been carried out by Machar loyalists.

South Sudan has been mired in civil war since the young nation’s first president, Salva Kiir, dismissed his deputy Riek Machar four years ago. After a peace accord was signed in April 2016 and backed by the United States and other Western nations, Machar returned to the capital to share power with Kiir, but the deal fell apart less than three months later, and Machar and his supporters left Juba.

Nearly 2 million residents have fled South Sudan since 2013, in Africa’s largest cross-border flood of refugees since the 1994 Rwandan genocide. The exodus from South Sudan has become one of the world’s worst humanitarian crises, according to aid groups.

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