South Sudan, Juba: According to a current socking UN report, South Sudanese army soldiers were allowed to rape women as a ‘reward’ for fighting rebels. Some 1,300 women were raped last year alone in the oil-rich African state, it revealed.The UN said the army’s policy, which saw woman purposely targeted for murder and rape, amounted to war crimes.

The government have launched an investigation over the policy but denies the army deliberately targeted innocent people. A spokesperson for president Salva Kiir Ateny Wek Ateny said: “We have rules of engagement and we are following them.”

Permission to rape woman and girls is deemed the currency, the report says, as soldiers have come to a “do what you can and take what you can” understanding. UN High Commissioner for Human Rights Zeid Ra’ad Al Hussein said the level and the nature of sexual crimes taking place in South Sudan are among the most perverse human rights abuses in the world today. Soldiers raped a girl of 15 while her mother, whose husband had just been killed, watched on in horror. Girls were gang raped and civilians hacked to pieces by government a allied armed forces, the UN said.

Another report from Amnesty International found government forces suffocated more than 60 men and boys after imprisoning them in a shipping container. The bodies of the victims were then dumped in a field after they were put to death last October in Leer Town, Unity State, the report said.