New Sudan prime minister Abdalla Hamdok will head to South Sudan for peace talks between the ruling sovereign council and rebel leaders, the information minister said on Tuesday.
Faisal Saleh told reporters after the cabinet’s first meeting that Hamdok, in his first foreign visit, would join five members of the ruling sovereign council in the South Sudanese capital Juba on Thursday.
Sudan’s transitional government has made peacemaking with rebels fighting Khartoum one of its main priorities as it is a key condition for the country’s removal from the United States’s sponsors of terrorism list.
Thousands of people have been killed in Sudan’s civil wars, including the conflict in the western Darfur region, where rebels have been fighting against then-President Omar Hassan al-Bashir’s government since 2003.