UNITED NATIONS, Dec 4: A joint military team will visit Darfur next week to study whether the United Nations should take over efforts to bring order to Sudan’s lawless west, UN officials and diplomats said on Sunday.

Led by the African Union, the mission, from Dec. 10 to Dec. 20, will include experts from the United States, the European Union as well as the United Nations.

Under discussion is folding the African Union’s existing Darfur peacekeeping operation into a UN Sudan mission established last March to support a peace agreement between Khartoum and former rebels in the south of Sudan that ended two decades of war.

But it might take until September to deploy such an expanded mission, and it is uncertain whether the African Union would agree to wind up or combine its own operation into a UN-led force, the envoys said.

Sudan also would have to consent to non-African troops, which could number up to 10,000 and, like the African Union, would have to scramble to get enough soldiers for what one envoy called “a robust and mobile” force.

“For now there has to be further support for the African Union,” one Security Council diplomat said, speaking on condition of anonymity. “In the longer term, there is going to be a need for a sustained peacekeeping force. So the African Union and the United Nations have to begin now to look at what is feasible in 2006.”

About 6,000 African Union troops and police are trying to stop escalating violence in Darfur, but those in charge say they lack the vehicles and communications equipment needed to operate effectively in the desert region the size of France.

In Abuja, Nigeria, Festus Okonkwo, the military head of the union’s mission told Reuters, “If you are supposed to move people with 20 vehicles and you are moving them with six vehicles, you can understand the problems. “It’s affecting everything.”

The rebels are involved in peace talks with the government in Abuja, but militia allied to Khartoum are still raping and harassing civilians herded into camps in what Annan has called a descent into complete lawlessness.

Tens of thousands of Sudanese have been killed since a revolt in Darfur began in early 2003 by non-Arab villagers who accused the government of neglect and repression. More than 2 million people have been forced out of their homes.

Okonkwo, a Nigerian, said he hoped the 10-day assessment mission would address the African Union’s problems.—Reuters