Britain is prepared to send up to 5,000 troops to the Darfur region of Sudan if required, the head of the army, General Sir Michael Jackson, said.
"If need be, we will be able to go to Sudan," Jackson said in an interview with BBC News 24. "I suspect we could put a brigade together very quickly indeed."
Asked how many troops that would entail, he replied: "Five thousand."
Prime Minister Tony Blair dismissed as "premature" on Thursday a report that he had drawn up plans to dispatch soldiers to the troubled western region of Sudan.
Unconfirmed reports estimate that as many as 30,000 people died in the past 15 months of conflict in Darfur, and a million have been displaced. The United Nations has declared the situation in the region the world's worst humanitarian crisis but has not called it a genocide, which would force it to take action. (albawaba.com)
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