AU planning to send ‘several thousand’ troops to Darfur

NAIROBI, Sept 29 (AFP) — The African Union (AU) is planning to send “several thousand” more troops to Sudan’s troubled Darfur region, where it has already deployed military observers and a modest protection force, an AU source told AFP on Wednesday.

“We are going to send several thousand soldiers,” the AU
official said, adding that the deployment would be conducted with the agreement of all parties concerned, notably the government in Khartoum.

The AU already has 156 military observers monitoring a shaky
ceasefire in Darfur, where an armed rebellion and a brutal response by government-backed militias has spawned what the United Nations describes as the world’s worst current humanitarian crisis.

Also, 310 AU troops, from Rwanda and Nigeria, have been deployed as a “protection force” in Darfur.

Speaking to AFP in Nairobi from the AU’s headquarters in Addis
Ababa, the official explained that the mandate of the planned
“substantially reinforced” mission would be determined at a meeting
of the AU’s Peace and Security Council in the coming weeks.

“The AU is going to move forward very quickly,” he said, without
specifying a date for the troops’ deployment.

Earlier Wednesday, UN special envoy for Sudan Jan Pronk said the
enlarged AU force should deploy “possibly starting in October”.

“That’s not possible,” said the AU source. “We have to be
realistic.”