Senior diplomats from the 11 members of the International Contact Group on Somalia will gather in Nairobi on Thursday to urge the two sides to go ahead with a third round of talks in Sudan at the end of the month, they said.
They are to meet with Somalia's transitional President Abdullahi Yusuf Ahmed and Ibrahim Hassan Addow, the foreign affairs coordinator for the Supreme Islamic Council of Somalia (SICS), the officials said.
"The contact group wants to see the major actors in the Somalia conflict," said one European envoy who will attend the meeting, which comes as tensions have soared between the government and the increasingly dominant Islamists.
"The group will reaffirm its commitment to finding a lasting solution through peace talks and not the use of force," the envoy said.
The US embassy in Nairobi confirmed that Washington's Assistant Secretary of State for African Affairs Jendayi Frazer would attend.
The identities of representatives from other Contact Group members - the United Nations, European Union, African Union, Arab League, the regional east African Inter-Governmental Authority on Development, Britain, Italy, Norway, Sweden and Tanzania - were not immediately clear.
The planned one-day meeting in the Kenyan capital comes amid growing uncertainty over prospects for the next round of Arab-mediated peace talks between the government and the Islamists set for October 30 in Khartoum.
The embattled government, which controls only a speck of the country including its temporary seat in Baidoa, has threatened to boycott the Khartoum talks, accusing the Arab League of bias toward the Islamists.
Meanwhile, the Islamists have also threatened to boycott unless the international community presses Ethiopia to withdraw troops it has allegedly sent to Somalia to prop up Yusuf's administration.
Both the government and Addis Ababa have denied the deployment of Ethiopian troops on Somali territory despite persistant eyewitness accounts of their presence in the country.
Two previous rounds of talks in Khartoum, held since the Islamists seized Mogadishu from warlords in June, have resulted in interim accords between the two sides that both sides claim are being violated by the other.
The Contact Group was formed at the behest of the United States, which supported the Mogadishu warlords outed by the Islamists, some of whom Washington accuses of links with al-Qaeda.
Somalia has been without a functioning central government since 1991 and the government, formed in Kenya in 2004, has been wracked by infighting and unable to deal with the challenge posed by the rise of the Islamists.
Source: AFP, Oct. 19, 2006