IGAD Summit Kicks Off, Regional Challenges on Table

An extraordinary emergency summit of "IGAD" kicks off today in Djibouti with an agenda tackles 4 crises, led by developments in Tigray.

The recent rift between Kenya and Somalia, Ethiopia and Sudan, the old conflict between Eritrea and Djibouti, in addition to the Tigray region crisis, will be on table of the  the summit of the The Intergovernmental Authority on Development (IGAD) of East African Countries.

This summit is taking place few days after the Tigray region, in northern Ethiopia, turmoil has reportedly come to an end.

The operation ended with the defeat of the Tigray Liberation Front at the hands of federal forces, before another border conflict between Sudan and Ethiopia surfaced.

The Kenyan-Somali dispute, which ended with the cutting of diplomatic relations between the two countries, also imposes itself on the summit, which will be the first difficult test for the Sudanese presidency of these files and challenges that engulf the organization in light of its hopes for a breakthrough in these files.

Sudanese Prime Minister Abdullah Hamdok, president of the current session, and heads of state of Djibouti, Kenya and Somalia, as well as South Sudanese Vice President Rebecca Garang, and Ethiopian Prime Minister Abiy Ahmed, will participate in the summit, which is expected to present a report on the Tigray process.

In addition to those main issues, the Djibouti summit addresses the progress of the peace process in the State of South Sudan, and the positive developments in Sudan, on top of which is the removal of his name from the list of states sponsoring terrorism.

The IGAD is a sub-regional organization established in 1999, and headquartered in Djibouti, and includes the countries of the Horn of Africa (east), namely, Djibouti, Ethiopia, Kenya, Somalia, Sudan, South Sudan, Uganda and Eritrea.