Sudan: Sudan completes pullout of troops from South

(SomaliNet) While a southern official said roughly 1 000 remained but were expected to trickle north over the next two days, Sudan said on Wednesday that it had pulled all troops out of the country\'s semi-autonomous south.

\"The armed forces completed a final 100 percent redeployment to north of the 1956 border in accordance with the Comprehensive Peace Agreement,\" state news agency SUNA said, referring to the north-south boundary line at Sudan\'s independence.

Roughly 1 000 northern troops remained south of the boundary line, but he expected them to leave shortly, major General James Hoth of the southern army said.

\"Almost 90 percent of the soldiers have gone,\" Hoth told Reuters. \"Some, due to transport problems, will return (to the north) tomorrow or the next day.\"

Meanwhile, the redeployment of thousands of northern troops is part of a 2005 peace deal that ended more than two decades of north-south Sudanese civil war, which is separate from the ongoing conflict in the western Darfur region.

Two million people died and about 4 million were displaced in the north-south conflict, fought over ethnicity and ideology and fuelled by oil.

Northern troops had initially been slated to leave the south by July 9, 2007, and hand control of southern oil fields to joint patrols, but Khartoum missed that deadline.

In October, southern ministers walked out of a national coalition government saying Khartoum was failing to implement measures of the peace deal.

The current troop movement appeared aimed to come close to meeting the latest January 9 deadline for withdrawal, after two subsequent deadlines in December set after crisis talks were missed. The new deadline is also the third anniversary of the north-south peace deal.-Reuters