Wau

Wau is a city in northwestern South Sudan on the western bank of the Jur River, capital of the Western Bahr el Ghazal region, about 400 miles northwest of the national capital Juba, with a population of 320,752 as of 2022. French forces built a garrison called Fort Desaix there during the Marchand Mission in the nineteenth century, and the city remained a significant military post through the Second Sudanese Civil War, seeing extensive fighting in the 1980s and again in the spring of 1998. A municipality since 2012, Wau functions as a trading hub linking Darfur, Bahr al Ghazal and Equatoria, with several commercial banks, the University of Bahr El-Ghazal and an airport serving regional commerce.