Sudan and Ethiopia signed an agreement Tuesday to deploy joint forces along their border to prevent weapons smuggling and sporadic skirmishes between armed groups from both sides, state media said. The setting up of a joint border protection force comes after a series of high-level talks between officials from the neighboring countries over several months. Security officers from both countries regularly complain about weapons smuggling and cross-border crimes along the frontier. Sudanese farmers often accuse their Ethiopian counterparts of occupying vast agricultural lands in some areas along the Sudanese border state of Gadaref. Ethiopian media, meanwhile, claims that on several occasions weapons allegedly smuggled from Sudan into Ethiopia have been caught by security forces inside Ethiopian territory.

Source: Ethiopian News March 13, 2019 00:22 UTC