Sudanese Prime Minister Abdalla Hamdok will travel to South Sudan this week for peace talks between the ruling sovereign council and rebel leaders. In his first foreign visit, Hamdok will travel to Juba on Thursday and return the next day. He will be accompanied by five members of the ruling sovereign council.
“He will be accompanied by a delegation including the ministers of interior, foreign affairs, energy and mining, and commerce and industry,” Information Minister Faisal Mohamed Saleh informed reporters after the Cabinet’s first meeting on Tuesday, reported Reuters.
One of the main priorities of Sudan’s newly formed transitional government is to make peace with rebel groups fighting Khartoum as it is a key condition for the country’s removal from the United States’s list of terror-sponsoring countries. Thousands of people have been killed in Sudan’s civil wars. In the western Darfur region, rebels have been fighting against then-President Omar Al-Bashir’s government since 2003.
Under a mediation initiative by President Salva Kiir, South Sudan is currently hosting negotiation talks between Sudan’s Sovereign Council and leaders of armed groups in Sudan’s Darfur, South Kordofan and Blue Nile regions. Mohamed Hamdan Daqlu, deputy chairman of Sudan’s Sovereign Council, is leading the council’s negotiating delegation to the talks with the armed groups.
On Tuesday, Sudan’s ruling Sovereign Council announced that it is closer to reaching a comprehensive peace deal with the armed groups during the talks in Juba.
“The two parties to Juba talks have agreed on most of the outstanding issues between them,” said the council in a press release.
Earlier this week, Lt Gen Mohamed Hamdan ‘Hemeti’ a member of Sudan’s Sovereign Council and commander of the Rapid Support Forces (RSF) militia, also arrived in the South Sudan capital of Juba to meet with delegations of the Sudan Revolutionary Front (SRF) and the Sudan People’s Liberation Movement-North faction led by Abdelaziz El Hilu.
