EU offers Somalia extra EUR 124 m in aid

(BRUSSELS) - The European Commission said Monday it is providing another 124 million euros for the African Union security mission in Somalia as the country recovers from years of bloody conflict.

The Commission, the EU's executive arm, said the new funding for the African Union Mission in Somalia (AMISOM) will "be critical" to its UN mandate "to carry out active peace support operations across Somalia."

EU foreign affairs head Catherine Ashton said recent developments showed that it was possible to "move beyond the misery of civil war and destitution."

An international conference next Monday in Brussels will approve a New Deal Compact to help Somalia "continue on the path to re-building a fragile state and healing a divided nation," Ashton said in a statement.

The new EU funding will run to the end of this year and brings the overall EU contribution to AMISOM to almost 600 million euros, it added.

AMISOM, comprising some 17,000 troops and launched in 2007 with UN Security Council approval, props up the weak central government in Mogadishu and fights alongside its army, seizing a string of towns from the Islamist Shebab.

But the authorities have been dealt a number of setbacks in recent months, including several deadly Shebab attacks.

As well as a military training mission in Somalia, the EU runs an anti-piracy operation off the Somali coast, where attacks on shipping have fallen steadily in the past year.

In January, President Hassan Sheikh Mohamud won formal US recognition of the Somali government for the first time since 1991 when the overthrow of dictator Mohamed Siad Barre plunged the country into bloody civil war.

His government came to power last September after more than a decade of transitional rule.