Among the more ambitious hopes for Pope Francis' visit to South Sudan this week is that it will give a jolt to a peace process aimed at ending a decade of conflict that has cost hundreds of thousands of lives.
The resulting war was fought along largely ethnic lines. Kiir comes from South Sudan's largest ethnic group, the Dinka. Machar comes from the second largest, the Nuer.
By one estimate in 2018, the previous five years of war caused about 400,000 deaths, either as a direct result of conflict or indirectly from factors like disease or reduced access to health care. There are 2.2 million internally displaced people in South Sudan and another 2.3 million have fled the country as refugees, according to the United Nations.
The accord called for a unity government, the integration of Machar's forces into the national military and accountability for crimes committed during the war.
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