Uganda’s defence minister said Friday its troops would remain in Somalia, despite growing uncertainty over the future of the African Union mission, under a pre-existing bilateral agreement.
Somalia has been battling Al-Shabaab terrorists for around two decades.
Uganda has roughly 4,500 troops in the country under the African Union Support and Stabilization Mission in Somalia (AUSSOM), the leading force supporting the Somali army, and a further 2,000 under a bilateral agreement, a military source told AFP.
However, the future of AUSSOM has been thrown into doubt after Washington announced it would end payments to the UN Support Office in Somalia (UNSOS), which provides crucial logistics to the mission, by the year’s end.
‘Arrangement to evolve’
On Friday, the Ugandan Defence Minister Kiryowa Kiwanuka told AFP that “Uganda is going to remain in Somalia”, declining to give further details but indicating its presence would be outside AUSSOM.
“The arrangement that we are going to have on how we remain in Somalia is going to evolve, but… we already have a force there on bilateral arrangement with Somalia,” he said.
