U.N. Peacekeeping

Since World War II, U.N. peacekeepers have been dispatched to 69 conflicts — civil wars, border disputes and failed states. But now they are confronting an unsettling new threat: al-Qaeda.

Last year, the UN deployed more than 100,000 uniformed peacekeepers to African countries, twice as many as the decade before. The U.S. pays for more than a quarter of this mission's $7.87 billion budget, and recently the commanding general of U.S. Army Africa said he would continue growing partnerships and exercises across the vast continent.

Burkina Faso has notified the United Nations that it will withdraw soldiers deployed as peacekeepers in Sudan's troubled Darfur region by July next year, the foreign minister said late on Friday.The West African nation, which has a battalion of 850 soldiers serving in the nearly 14,000 troop strong U.N.-African Union hybrid mission, has suffered a series of deadly attacks at home amid a rise in Islamist militant violence.

The inquiry investigating the response of UN peacekeepers to at attack on the Terrain Hotel Compound in Juba in July, found that a lack of leadership on the part of key senior mission personnel culminated in a chaotic and ineffective response to the violence. In response, Nairobi said it would withdraw its over 1000 troops from the mission and disengage from the peace process in South Sudan.