By Frank Nyakairu

KAMPALA, June 24 (Reuters) - The Nigerian military has sent a reconnaissance team to Somalia and is expected to deploy troops there soon as part of an African peacekeeping force, a spokesman for the force said on Tuesday.

The African Union had planned to send 8,000 soldiers to the capital Mogadishu to support the U.N.-backed interim government, which faces an insurgency by Islamist rebels.

But deployment of the full force has been repeatedly delayed since last year as lack of funds and unrelenting violence in the city led several nations, including Nigeria, to re-examine offers to provide troops.

A smaller contingent of 1,600 Ugandans and 600 Burundians has been unable to stem the chaos. Major Barigye Ba-hoku, the Ugandan spokesman for the AU force, said a Nigerian military team visited Mogadishu last month.

"We are informed that Nigerian peacekeepers will join the mission anytime," he told Reuters in an interview in Kampala. "This would be good news for a Somali nation that is desperate for peace."

The AU force, known as AMISOM, is meant to replace Ethiopian troops whose presence has inflamed the insurgency since they helped Somalia's government oust an Islamist movement at the start of 2007.

But shorn of support, the peacekeepers have been restricted to securing the capital's air and sea ports, as well as the rubble-strewn city's strategic K4 junction.

They also guard President Abdullahi Yusuf, other senior government officials and visiting delegates.

Fighting in the Horn of Africa nation has killed thousands of civilians and uprooted nearly a million more since early last year, worsening a humanitarian crisis already sown by drought, high food prices and rampant inflation.

Talks hosted by the United Nations in Djibouti earlier this month produced a tentative peace deal between Yusuf's government and some members of the opposition.

But it has had little impact on the ground.

Ba-hoku said that agreement provided a "very viable option" to return calm to the country, and that AMISOM officials were encouraging other factions to join the truce.

But what was really needed was more peacekeepers, he said.

"The Somalia mission was designed to have up to 8,000 troops. We're just over 2,000," he said.

"That is a quarter of the force, so we find ourselves only achieving a quarter of our objectives." (Writing by Daniel Wallis; Editing by Giles Elgood) (For full Reuters Africa coverage and to have your say on the top issues, visit: http://africa.reuters.com/)

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