Somalia urgently needs international peacekeepers to enable its fledgling government to function properly and help train its own security forces, the country's foreign minister said on Saturday. "The security situation in Somalia is still precarious," Foreign Minister Abdullahi Sheekh Ismail told Reuters on the sidelines of an African Union (AU) meeting in Sudan. "There is a great need for the international community and the region to take into account Somalia's call for the deployment of a peace and stabilisation mission until we manage to put in place our security forces," he said. "There is an overall general agreement by all continental and regional actors to come to our help. From here on we will be moving towards the U.N. Security Council to request them to lift the arms embargo," Ismail said.
