Somali govt welcomes US draft on peacekeepers

MOGADISHU, Dec 2: Somalia's interim government welcomed a US proposal at the UN Security Council to deploy east African peacekeepers in the violent state, as residents said today that rival Islamists had seized another town.

Washington's draft resolution would also ease a widely violated 14-year-old United Nations arms embargo on the Horn of Africa country to let the peacekeepers legally bring in their arms and train and equip local security forces.

The Somali government's information minister, Ali Jama Jangali, said he hoped the draft would be adopted quickly.

''Our position is very clear. We were the ones who requested this so that we can train our own forces. This is a move in the right direction,'' he told Reuters from the administration's seat in the provincial town of Baidoa.

In the latest reports of troop movements, residents said fighters loyal to the Somalia Islamic Courts Council (SICC) had taken over the town of Diinssor from government forces, some 120 km southwest of Baidoa.

Local resident Abukar Ali Jale said Islamists riding more than 30 ''technicals'' -- pick-up trucks mounted with heavy machine guns, rockets and artillery -- were now in the town.

There were no immediate reports of casualties.

AL QAEDA CHARGES

After routing US-backed warlords from the capital Mogadishu in June, the SICC seized much of the south -- directly challenging the authority of the Western-backed government.

The US says the SICC, which was born of a coalition of sharia courts, is harbouring al Qaeda operatives who threaten the region and elsewhere, a charge the Islamists deny.

Stressing that its only goal was to support peace and stability in Somalia through ''an inclusive political process'', Washington's draft resolution would call on the SICC to halt any further military expansion and to reject individuals ''with an extremist agenda or links to international terrorism''.

But it would also call for ''credible dialogue'' between the Islamists and the government. A third round of Arab League-sponsored peace talks collapsed on November 1 in Sudan.

The UN measure would exclude peacekeepers from bordering states like Ethiopia, which diplomats say has sent thousands of troops into Somalia to prop-up the administration in Baidoa.

Addis Ababa denies that, and says it has only sent in several hundred military trainers.

Word of the US initiative set off alarms this week when an influential Brussels-based think tank and European experts warned it could backfire by undermining the government, strengthening the SICC and leading to a wider, regional war.

REUTERS