As fighting continued to rage across South Sudan on Thursday, a new estimate raised the death toll in the conflict significantly and a senior American official questioned the government’s insistence that a coup attempt was responsible for setting off the violence and instability there. The International Crisis Group said Thursday that the number of dead from the conflict was close to 10,000 people, a major increase from earlier estimates by the United Nations. “Given the intensity of fighting in over 30 different locations in the past three weeks, we are looking at a death toll approaching 10,000,” said Casie Copeland, an analyst at the International Crisis Group , a research and advocacy institution. The United Nations special representative for South […]