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Rebels enter Chad's capital, fight around palace
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"We are really, deeply preoccupied by the situation today in Chad," Jean Ping, the new chairman of the AU Commission, told reporters on the sidelines of the summit in Ethiopia.
Iran's foreign minister, Manouchehr Mottaki, told reporters at the summit that the leaders of Chad and Sudan had been invited to Tehran for talks.
Chadian Foreign Minister Ahmat Allam-mi accused Sudan's government of launching the latest Chadian rebel offensive in a bid to block the deployment in eastern Chad of the EU peacekeeping force, which has a United Nations mandate to protect thousands of refugees from the conflict in Darfur.
"Since this (EU) force was announced, the Sudanese government has stepped up its attacks," he told RFI in Addis Ababa on the sidelines of the AU summit.
Allam-mi said Khartoum wanted to stop the European force from focusing international attention on what he called the "genocide" in Darfur, where Sudanese government forces and allied militia have fought rebels for five years.
International experts say some 200,000 people have died in Darfur and 2.5 million have been uprooted from their homes. Khartoum says the West is exaggerating the conflict.
Chadian officials say Sudan has repeatedly backed offensives by several Chadian rebel groups, which have fought a hit-and-run guerrilla war for years against Deby.
Khartoum accuses Chad in turn of backing Sudanese insurgents in Darfur.
(Additional reporting by Daniel Wallis in Addis Ababa and Pascal Fletcher in Dakar, Writing by Pascal Fletcher)
