LONDON, December 26 (IslamOnline.net & News Agencies) - British Prime Minister Tony Blair has ordered the military to prepare to deploy up to 3,000 soldiers to Sudan’s troubled region of Darfur, a leading British newspaper reported on Sunday, December 26.

The deployment would be discussed next month with senior military officials, reported the Independent.

“When you decide to make an intervention you have got to be able to move fast,” one minister told the daily.

Any deployment by Britain would be undertaken as part of a new European Union rapid reaction force, said the daily.

Blair, according to the paper, has waved aside concerns that the Army is already too committed in Iraq and Afghanistan to make a significant contribution to a peace-keeping mission in Africa.

Around 1,000 peacekeepers are on the ground in Darfur, as part of an African Union force dispatched to help monitor a ceasefire between rebels and government troops.

The deployment report came a few days after US President George W. Bush signed a bill on slapping sanctions against Khartoum over the situation in Darfur.

Sudanese Charge d'Afaires in Washington Khidir Haroun said the bill sends a “harmful message” to government negotiators currently engaged in talks with Darfur rebels, reported the independent Al-Rai Al-Aam.

Haroun said the “unfair” bill would only “prolong the current war and fuel more fires.”

The three Darfur states have been embroiled in conflict since February 2003, when two rebel movements - the Sudan Liberation Army and the Justice and Equality Movement - took arms against the government.

They claim that government-backed Arab militias had marginalized and persecuted the region's Muslim black African tribes.

Meanwhile, a senior official in North Darfur state accused Western churches of using humanitarian cover to proselytize the distressed population of Muslim-majority Darfur, reported Agence France-Presse (AFP)

The Sudanese official news agency, SUNA, on Saturday, December 25, quoted Al-Nur Mohammed Ibrahim, as lambasting “missionary campaigns being launched by some Western church organizations under the cover of humanitarian action.”

The local social and cultural affairs minister said the authorities had devised an urgent plan to stem the phenomenon and confront the missionary drive.

The plan would promote “comprehensive enlightenment and virtuous values while demonstrating the danger of the suspected church organizations' practices and monitoring their performance,” Ibrahim said.

The official charged that such churches had focused missionary activities on camps sheltering hundreds of thousands of people who have been displaced by the conflict.