Sudan's chief of general staff General Arabi Abdulla Ahmed "expressed reservations" on the prevailing situation in Somalia in a meeting with Kenya's National Security Minister John Michuki here, said an official in the ministry.

In March, eastern Africa grouping InterGovernmental Authority on Development (IGAD), asked Uganda and Sudan to deploy an initial batch of peacekeepers to help the President Abdullahi Yusuf's government, currently exiled in Kenya, to relocate home.

"Ahmed expressed reservations about security, but said Sudan would deploy when it improves," the official told AFP, requesting to remain unnamed.

Early this month, the Ugandan government cited insecurity as one of the reasons behing the delay in the deployment that should have happened by the end of April and did not give a new date for the likely deployment.

Last week, Somali warlords warlords insisted peacekeepers from IGAD, comprising of Djibouti, Eritrea, Ethiopia, Kenya, Sudan, Uganda and nominally Somalia, were not welcome in the shattered nation.

Hardline Islamic clerics, who wield considerable influence in the country, have vowed to oppose the whole deployment with militants warning that they would attack the forces.

The divided Somali parliament, itself sitting in the Kenyan capital last week, approved the deployment.

It also approved a government motion to relocate to the regional towns of Baidoa and Jowhar, instead of Migadishu, but met fierce opposition from powerful warlords.

There has been no national governing authority in Somalia since 1991, when dicatator Mohamed Siad Barre was ousted, plunging the country into anarchic bloodletting .

There followed 13 years of factional bloodletting that turned Somalia into the archetypal "failed state" and prompted botched military and humanitarian intervention by the United Nations and the United States in the early 1990s.

Eighteen US special forces and at least 140 UN peacekeepers perished in Somalia in the wake of interclan fighting.

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