KUEK, South Sudan — ‘‘It was death,’’ says Charlie Chiong, tracing his fingers over the jagged stones that once served as his cage. ‘‘I thought this is my end of life, this is really the end of me.’’

Two years ago, the shy, lanky son of a South Sudanese army commander was abducted by rebel forces amid the country’s civil war. He said he was held for a month in a roofless, mud-filled compound before escaping through a hole he dug between its bricks.

The 20-year-old hangs his head. This is the first time he’s been back to the place where he was held prisoner. The northern town is now under government control and the jail has become a church.

‘‘It makes me sad,’’ Chiong said. ‘‘I don’t want to be here.’’

More than four years into South Sudan’s civil war, fighting between President Salva Kiir’s government forces and opposition troops loyal to former vice president Riek Machar shows no signs of ending. Many on both sides and those trapped in the middle are weary of the conflict. Millions of others have fled.

Border towns like Kuek have exchanged hands multiple times, with hundreds killed and thousands of civilians displaced in what many soldiers call a ‘‘dirty game.’’

‘‘The warring parties continue to believe they can win militarily and the international community has taken no meaningful action to take the military option off the table. It’s therefore a context where there’s no incentive for political compromise,’’ said Payton Knopf, coordinator of the South Sudan senior working group at the US Institute of Peace.

That has emboldened South Sudan’s government, he said, and until the international community changes its balance of power ‘‘I’m very skeptical that the war will end.’’

After Chiong was captured, he says, the rebels couldn’t agree on his fate.

They knew his father was a commander and Chiong says many wanted him dead because his father ‘‘had killed their men.’’

‘‘He is notorious for killing people,’’ opposition spokesman William Gatjiath Deng says of Chiong’s father, Colonel James Gatjiath.

But the rebels let Chiong live, cramming him into a room with 30 other prisoners.

South Sudan’s northern war is complex. Gatjiath, the army commander, blames neighboring Sudan for supplying the opposition with weapons and refuge, saying the men who kidnapped his son were based there.

Sudan has denied arming the rebels.

The opposition accuses Gatjiath of waging a brutal offensive. ‘‘We will get him one day,’’ says a spokesman, Nyagwal Ajak DengKak.