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UN Secretary-General Ban Ki-moon seeks to appoint veteran Nigerian diplomat Ibrahim Gambari, who recently served as top envoy to Myanmar, as the new head of the joint African Union-United Nations peacekeeping mission in Darfur. A release by the United Nations Information Centre in Accra said Mr. Gambari's appointment as the Joint Special Representative of the mission, known as UNAMID, would be effective on January 1, 2010. He also served as Special Adviser on the International Compact with Iraq and other political issues since March 2007, the same year he was appointed Special Envoy to Myanmar. The release said prior to that, Mr. Gambari was the Under-Secretary-General for Political Affairs. He was also the Special Adviser on Africa and headed the UN mission in Angola. From 1999 to 2002, he served as Nigeria's Ambassador to the UN. UNAMID has been in place in Darfur since the start of last year to try to quell the fighting and humanitarian suffering that has engulfed the region since 2003. At least 300,000 people are estimated to have died from the conflict and another 2.7 million people remain displaced from their homes. At full deployment, the mission - the UN's largest - is expected to have some 26,000 troops and police officers, but as of late October, only 19,000 uniformed personnel have been deployed. The release said earlier this week, a senior UN peacekeeping official warned that the security situation in the war-ravaged Sudan region continued to be unstable, voicing his "extreme concern" over the fate of two abducted UNAMID staff members. "Car jacking and attacks on humanitarian workers have continued," Assistant-Secretary-General for Peacekeeping Operations Edmond Mulet told the Security Council, reminding the 15-member body that the international staff members, who were kidnapped over three months ago, were still in captivity. Mr. Mulet noted that the opening of a new round of UN-backed talks on November 17, in the Qatari capital of Doha, aimed at bringing peace to Darfur, coincided with an escalation of armed clashes involving rebel militia in the region. He said a number of groups in Darfur, including the rebel Justice and Equality Movement (JEM) and SLA/AW, continued to express concern over the holding of national elections, slated for April 2010, before a peace agreement was reached.