ADDIS ABABA
The African Union (AU) summit has unanimously approved the deployment of multinational forces to Nigeria to combat the Boko Haram militant group, the AU Peace and Security Council Commissioner said Saturday.
"The council will meet in two days in Cameroon to authorize and finalize the concept of operation in the fight against Boko Haram," Ismail Chergui told a press conference on the sidelines of the 24th African Union summit in Ethiopian capital Addis Ababa.
He added that the meeting would take place in Cameroon before the commission went to the United Nations to get a resolution sanctioning the deployment of the troops.
On Friday, the AU Peace and Security Council approved the deployment of 7,500 troops to Nigeria to fight Boko Haram, a decision that was welcomed by UN Secretary-General Ban Ki-moon.
Chergui and other African leaders said Boko Haram was also expanding to the West African region.
However, the AU Peace and Security Council Commissioner said funding for the new operation was still a "challenge."
It was expected that the UN would cover some of the costs required for operationalizing the task force.
"We will explore all possibilities as the continent is decide to scale up its support to fight terrorism," Chergui said.
He added that the UN has a command force exercise in Tanzania and South Africa to avail immediate response to security problems in the African continent.
For the last five years, Nigeria has battled a fierce Boko Haram insurgency that has ravaged the country's volatile northeast and claimed thousands of lives.
The year 2014 proved to be the insurgency's bloodiest year, with increasingly frequent attacks, higher death tolls and a deluge of displaced persons.
A seemingly emboldened Boko Haram recently stepped up its militant activity, seizing several areas of Nigeria's Adamawa, Yobe and Borno states, where it has since declared an "Islamic caliphate."
The attacks displaced over 1.5 million people in 2014, according to a recent report by the Borno State government.
Chergui, meanwhile, said the AU Peace and Security Council would convene in the following few days to discuss means of scaling up operations in Somalia, where the Qaeda-linked Al-Shabaab movement has been fighting against government troops for several years now
He expressed hopes that some progress would be made in the country together with military measures taken to fight Al-Shabaab.
"And very soon, we will have a government that will really deal with Al-Shabaab's occupation of our brothers in Somalia," Chergui said.
He noted that the situation in Libya posed "a big" challenge for Libyan and the international community as well.
"We are optimistic [about Libya]," Chergui said, adding that the exercise of finding peace was "difficult."
He said Libya's government and opposition had accepted a proposal put forward by the International Contact Group on Libya, even as he did not mention the content of the proposal.
Libya has been in turmoil since a bloody uprising ended the autocracy of longstanding ruler Muammar Gaddafi in 2011.
