Sudanese officials have welcomed the decision by the African Union to extend its peacekeeping mandate in the troubled region of Darfur until the end of the year.

The announcement comes as the President of Sudan, Omar Hassan al-Bashir, vowed he would never allow UN peacekeepers into Darfur and accused the West of wanting to dismember his country in order to help Israel.

|PIC1|The latest compromise deal will see AU troops prolong their stay in the region beyond the end of the month - when their mandate was originally due to end and was reached at a summit meeting of the AU's 15-member Peace and Security Council (PSC) meeting on the sidelines of the UN General Assembly in New York.

Reacting to the AU's decision to stay, Sudan's Foreign Minister Al-Sammani Al-Wasila Al-Sammani told AFP news agency that the force was preferable to a UN force proposed by the Security Council.

But he said a six-month extension to the mandate would have been better.

"It is easier for the international community to assist financially and technically an AU force which is already on the ground rather than starting from scratch with other forces like those of the UN," he insisted.

Meanwhile Sudanese presidential adviser Majdhub al-Khalifah said the AU decision would give an impetus to Khartoum and signatory rebel movements to implement the Abuja peace agreement on the ground, the BBC reported.

More than 200,000 people have been killed and 2.5 million residents of Darfur have been displaced since fighting broke out between rebels and government-backed Muslim militias in 2003.

The international community was deeply alarmed by the prospect of the planned departure of the AU peacekeepers on 30 September, so much so that the UN's humanitarian affairs chief, Jan Egeland, warned that humanitarian groups would pull out of the region and thus catapult what the UN already calls the world's worst humanitarian crisis into even sharper decline.
AU troops will now remain in Darfur until 31 December.