"We are ensuring that there is a progressive and commensurate improvement in the capacity-building of the Sierra Leone police and the military forces," military spokesman Major Onyema Nwachuku told AFP.

"We have a national handing-over ceremony slater for October in Freetown, which will be a wrap-up ceremony to climax the full turnover of security to the local enforcement agencies."

Local police in the eastern town of Kenema, which was a hotspot for the fighting that raged from 1991-2001 in the tiny country, officially assumed control over the diamond-mining district on Wednesday.

Kenema is the latest strategic area to be reverted to local control, following the eastern Kono district last week and the northern area of Makeni and southern Bo district in the past several months.

The formal handovers are all part of the drawdown of UN forces as they prepare Sierra Leone to stand alone for the first time in more than a decade.

At its peak, UNAMSIL was the world's largest peacekeeping mission with 17,000 troops.

But after five years and countless extensions, most recently in March, the UN is preparing to wrap up its operations. A contingency force of 3,250 Ghanaian, Pakistani and Nigerian troops will be put in place come December to ensure security for at least six more months.

British rapid-response troops, known as IMATT, will also remain in Sierra Leone for an extended period of time.

There are roughly 10,000 peacekeepers still in Sierra Leone, many of whom are involved in the training of local law enforcement and security agencies including the newly-reconfigured national army.

Despite assurances from UN and Sierra Leone officials that there will be no security vacuum when UNAMSIL finally pulls stakes, citizens are wary about the challenges that will be confronting their as-yet untested law enforcement agencies.

Of particular concern is the border regions and the diamond-mining areas that have been a lure not only for Sierra Leone's own insurgents but also groups such as Hezbollah and al-Qaeda, documents collected by western intelligence agencies show.

"There are 36 crossing points existing in Kono district, linked with Guinea and Liberia, most of them unmanned and used by illegal migrants to enter the district," said Ansumana Lahai, a Freetown taxi driver who fled diamond-rich Kono for the capital at the height of the civil war.

"Do the police and army have the logistics to keep a watchful eye on people?"

WAR.WIRE