UNITED NATIONS – The Security Council will meet this afternoon for an emergency session at the request of United Nations officials who are warning of an imminent outbreak of hostilities in Burundi, which could drag the whole region into an all-out war.

One U.N. official told The New York Sun that after last Friday’s massacre of 160 Tutsis at a refugee camp in Burundi, and after this week’s threats by the governments of Burundi and Rwanda to send troops to the region, some in the peacekeeping department believe that “war could break out within 24 to 48 hours.”

The crisis overshadowed a regional meeting yesterday in Dar es Salaam, Tanzania, where African leaders endorsed a power-sharing compromise between Tutsis and Hutus in Burundi. The conference was convened as part of peace efforts that for a while seemed to end a tribal war in the region, which in the last decade killed at least 300,000 and displaced hundred of thousands more.

Earlier this week, Secretary-General Annan asked, in a report distributed for Security Council members, to beef up the number of peacekeepers stationed in the Democratic Republic of Congo from the current 10,800 troops to 23,900. In his briefing today, the undersecretary general for peacekeeping operations, Jean Marie Guehenno, is expected to reiterate the call, pointing to the current regional crisis, officials told the Sun.

“We have only 3,100 troops,” the spokeswoman for the U.N. mission in Burundi, Isabelle Abric, told U.N. Radio yesterday. The peacekeeping department hopes that peacekeepers stationed in the DRC will be able to be dispatched anywhere in the immediate region, which is suffering from chronic outbreaks of tribal wars and atrocities, reaching genocide proportions more than once.

Since last Friday’s massacre in the countryside near Burundi’s capital, Bujumbura, the U.N. has increased its patrols, with helicopter reconnaissance flights and patrol near the Congolese border, Ms. Abric said. She added that the U.N. immediately started its probe into the events that led to the hacking and burning that left dead 160 Tutsi refugees, most of them women and children.

A Hutu rebel group in Burundi, the National Liberation Forces, known as FNL, has taken responsibility for the massacre. In the African summit, some demanded that the Security Council would declare the FNL a terrorist group, but a spokesman of the organization said they did not mind being called terrorist.

Regardless, Rwandan and Burundian officials doubted the FNL claim of responsibility, warning that if the government of Congo could not stop such groups from crossing the porous border – or worse, encourage them to commit atrocities – they would send their own forces to protect civilians in the region.

To make matters worse, the pact endorsed yesterday in Dares Salaam was not accepted by at least 10 Tutsi opposition groups in Burundi, who said Tutsis lost out in the power-sharing agreement. With heightened tensions after the massacre and all regional powers up in arms and distrustful of one another, the prospects for a peaceful election in Burundi this fall seem dim, a U.N. official said yesterday.