"They were killing each other with stones and knives," said a colleague before making a cut-throat gesture. A third man, Dabeer, spoke of one attacker whom he had seen chopping the hands from victims.
The men said at least 16 people had died, many of them ordinary South Sudanese out of uniform. On their way to the airstrip in Unity town they had seen scores of scorched huts. "There were more than 20 burned to the ground," said Ali.
One week on from a dispute in South Sudan's presidential guard that escalated into street fighting in the capital and accusations of a coup, thousands of foreign nationals have crowded the airport to escape with British and United States air force flights, while oil companies scramble to evacuate personnel.
Unity state, which provides much of the crude on which South Sudan's fledgling economy relies, has become the centrepiece of a power struggle between government forces and an emerging armed opposition.
A stream of defections by senior military officers has split the Sudan People's Liberation Army, with Major General James Koang Choul, commander of the division that controls the state, emerging as the latest to turn his back on President Salva Kiir yesterday. Heavy fighting between ethnic Dinka, who hail from the same tribe as the President, and the Nuer kinsmen of the fugitive former Vice-President Riek Machar have been struggling for control of the oil which is pumped by Chinese and Malaysian companies.
Outside Juba's squalid airport snaking lines of hundreds of Chinese oil workers tried to hide from the sun by putting garments over their heads. Song Liu had been waiting for nearly four hours for his company to get him out via Dubai to Beijing.
"There are some people who have died up there," he said of the fields in Unity. "We are all leaving."
Nearby, Saeed Mansour spoke of emergency shutdowns at four oil facilities in Unity state while fighting raged around them.
