ACCRA, August 18 (IslamOnline.net & News Agencies) - Liberia’s warring factions are poised to sign a deal to form an interim government in this Ghanaian capital on Monday, August 18, a week after former President Charles Taylor was forced to resign and go into exile.

"There will be last minute talks in the morning and we expect the agreement to be signed at 6:00 pm (1800 GMT)," said Sunny Ugoh, a spokesman for the Economic Community of West African States (ECOWAS), which is brokering peace talks here.

On Monday, Kabineh Ja'neh, who has been leading the team sent by the main rebel movement Liberians United for Reconciliation and Democracy (LURD) at the peace talks said: "Everything is on board. We are signing the treaty and we hope everybody will respect it."

Discussions between the caretaker government of President Moses Blah, who took over from Taylor last week, and two rebel groups - LURD and the Movement for Democracy in Liberia (MODEL) - began on Thursday, August 14, but ran into serious trouble at the weekend when LURD threatened to resume war if one of its number did not get the vice-chairman's job.

LURD had claimed it had been promised the post of vice-chairman and that of parliamentary speaker, Agence France-Presse (AFP) reported.

But ECOWAS officials denied this, saying it had been agreed that nobody from any of the warring factions would get the posts of president, vice president, speaker and deputy speaker in the new government.

On Sunday, the rebels succumbed to intense international pressure and dropped their demand for the vice presidency, salvaging the talks.

However, they insisted that the speaker's job should be open to everybody and not limited to political parties, a condition the ECOWAS mediators accepted.

The two key posts of chairman and vice-chairman, corresponding to the presidency and vice-presidency, would be open only to political parties and civil groups, not to the rebels or Blah's government, Ugoh insisted.

"The posts have been renamed as it is an interim administration," he said.

After the pact is signed, the rebels and Blah's caretaker government will choose the leader and number two in the new government from a list of candidates put up by political parties and civil society groups.

Jacques Klein, the top U.N. official for Liberia, said a peace deal for Liberia was "very close".

But Klein added that he clearly fed up with the hiccups at the talks and said the main mediator in the parleys - former Nigerian ruler General Abdulsalami Abubakar - was being too soft.

"I told the mediator he has been very patient," he told reporters, adding: "Those negotiating here are too comfortable."

Klein also warned that he would recommend that U.N. peacekeepers be deployed in Liberia with a mandate to open fire if they felt the peace process was threatened.

"We are moving on ... we are going to the U.N. (to ask to) send in troops and then get a Chapter Seven resolution."

In the meanwhile, the United Nations said on Monday it was seeking to bring much needed food into Liberia by road through neighboring Sierra Leone and had sent a team to assess whether this was possible.

"Four members of our team will travel up to Tubmanburg to make an assessment of the road. The idea is to see how we can open up the road to Sierra Leone," U.N. special humanitarian coordinator Ross Mountain said.

Tubmanburg, a rebel-held town, is about 60 kilometers (37 miles) from Monrovia and halfway on a key highway linking the Liberian capital to the western border with Sierra Leone.

Ships began bringing desperately needed aid into the Liberian capital Monrovia by sea on Thursday, the day the LURD relinquished control of the city, which is also the country's main seaport, to west African peacekeepers.

Since then, aid has continued to arrive by ship in Monrovia's deep water harbor, a major gateway for food and other aid supplies to the starving capital where 450,000 people are living on the edge amid an acute shortage of food, water and medicines.

Meanwhile, life has begun returning to normal in Monrovia, which was besieged by the LURD for more than two months amid fierce battles that saw mortars and shells rain down on the city, killing hundreds of civilians.

Shops and drugstores reopened, as snaking queues of customers gathered outside. Street vendors were once again plying their wares, and taxis and buses were back on the roads.

International money transfer service Western Union was due to re-open its offices in Monrovia later Monday.

The signs of a return to normalcy came ahead of the signing of the key peace deal.

Aid agency World Vision meanwhile said in a statement that a cargo of non-food aid that it had loaded onto a ship in Sierra Leone was expected to dock in Monrovia on Monday morning.

On board were 15,000 blankets, 4.8 tons of laundry soap, 1,200 plastic buckets, 4,000 jerry cans and 1,200 mats for approximately 21,000 displaced people in the city.