U.S. President George W. Bush said on Friday that the situation in Sudan's Darfur region may need to double the number of international peacekeepers there.

"I'm in the process now of working with a variety of folks to encourage there to be more troops, probably under the United Nations," Bush said in Tampa, Florida, after talks with NATO Secretary-General Yaap de Hoop Scheffer.

"But it's going to require, I think, a NATO stewardship, planning, facilitating, organizing -- probably double the number of peacekeepers that are there now," he said.

Efforts of the peacekeeping forces from the African Union (AU) were "noble but didn't achieve the objective," he said.

Some 7,000 peacekeepers from the AU were deployed in Darfur in 2004, but they have been suffering from a shortage of fund and inadequate resources to stop the war, which broke out in February 2003 and has left up to 300,000 people dead and an estimated 2.4 million displaced.

Source: Xinhua