Lack of food and medical supplies has prompted hundreds of opposition fighters in southern Sudan to leave training camps set up to register and train them under an agreement to end the war in that country, authorities said.
The process of gathering fighters in camps to form a unified army of 83,000 troops is aimed at one of the pillars of a peace agreement reached in September 2018.
But the operation has been delayed and underfunded, hampering troop readiness.
This is a major obstacle as the 12 November deadline for President Salva Kiir and his rival, Riek Machar, and other militia leaders to form a power-sharing government.
In one of the largest opposition gathering sites in the village of Bantit near the northern town of Aweil, hundreds of soldiers sleep under trees and have to resort to sleeping with local people with their mud huts, known as "tukol" when it rains.
The official in charge of the camp, General Nicodemus Dingding, told AFP that they had not received food supplies for more than two months. "We ran out of food and now we have no food left," he said, adding that about 700 registered soldiers had left the camp because of the circumstances.
"We live on the food of the local people, go farming with them and collect peanuts from their farms as a way to survive."
Under the peace deal, half of the 83,000 troops will be barracks, trained and deployed by September 2019.
Last week, the Joint Monitoring and Evaluation Committee charged with overseeing the implementation of the peace agreement reported that 24 out of 25 sites designated for the opposition gathering were operational, and of the 10 barracks for government forces, only six of them were operational, however, registration continued and training had not yet begun.
Despair and anger
For his part, the head of the ceasefire monitoring William Gallagher - Agence France-Presse during the visit Bantit - that the troops have been registered there. "Unfortunately, many of the soldiers who have been registered have since fled because of unacceptable living conditions," he said.
"It is a very serious problem that thousands and thousands of soldiers and their families are now facing all over South Sudan at the assembly sites. They are without food, most without water, and all of them lack all forms of medicine and are desperate and angry and see no solution to the problem."
Japan and China donated money to bring water and rice to the gathering sites, but Western donors have refused to fund the operation. Diplomats fear it will be used for recruitment and because of a lack of financial transparency in Juba.
At the same time, the situation in the barracks has put pressure on communities that themselves find it difficult to survive.
"There are soldiers here, they don't have water to drink, they don't have containers to collect water, but we are the hosts as well.
The war, which erupted after two years of secession from Sudan in 2011 after a dispute between Salva Kiir and Machar, has killed nearly 400,000 people and displaced nearly 4 million.
The International Committee of the Red Cross (ICRC) said last week that despite improved food security, more than half of the population remained hungry and millions were dependent on food aid.
Machar arrived in Juba on Saturday for another round of talks with Salva Kiir in an attempt to salvage the peace deal, resolve the security issue and the thorny issue of determining the number and limits of states.