LONDON, June 23: US Secretary of State Condoleezza Rice won support from the world’s richest nations over Syria on Thursday, as Washington stepped up a campaign to isolate Damascus on the international stage.
Ms Rice repeatedly accused Syria of fomenting instability in Lebanon, doing too little to stop guerillas crossing into Iraq and supporting anti-Israeli militant groups.
Top US military leaders charged on Thursday that Damascus is a key node in the movement of foreign fighters into Iraq, and one said it has to be assumed that the Syrian government has some knowledge of it.
Gen Richard Myers, chairman of the Joint Chiefs of Staff, told a Senate hearing that the Syrian government’s involvement in the traffic of foreign fighters is ‘pretty murky’.
“It’s a pretty tightly controlled country, so you have to assume that they have some knowledge of what’s going on in their capital and in their land. And I think that’s inexcusable. It disrupts stability in Iraq, and it contributes toward killing of coalition men and women,” he said.
Ending a week-long trip to the Middle East and Europe, Condoleezza Rice pushed the issue of Syria at a Group of Eight (G8) gathering in London, said diplomats.
Ms Rice repeatedly accused Syria of fomenting instability in Lebanon, doing too little to stop guerillas crossing into Iraq and supporting anti-Israeli militant groups.
“We call on Lebanon’s neighbours, in particular Syria, to cooperate in ensuring full compliance with (a UN resolution) and to contribute actively to regional security and stability,” the G8 said in a statement after the meeting.
Ms Rice said Syria had pledged to curb guerillas entering Iraq, but the United States wanted results.
“Let’s have action,” she said at a news conference with her counterparts at the end of the G8 meeting. “If they are prepared to do it, they should just do it.”
Syria said it would ask the interim government in Baghdad to provide evidence behind US accusations that Damascus was letting Arab militants cross into Iraq to fuel the resistance there and vowed to prove it false.
“We will counter any accusation by evidence and facts and take this to the highest level,” Syrian Foreign Minister Farouq al Shara told reporters in Damascus, adding Syria would ‘very soon’ reopen its Baghdad embassy.
Ms Rice told reporters before the London meeting she and French Foreign Minister Philippe Douste-Blazy discussed Syria and ‘expressed concern ... about the need for Syria to make certain all of its forces are withdrawn from Lebanon’.
Douste-Blazy said: “We must not allow that country to destabilize Lebanon.”
Syria expressed “strong astonishment” that US officials were still saying it had personnel in Lebanon.
“Syria is assuring again and again that these claims are baseless,” said Ammar Alarsan, spokesman for the Syrian embassy in Washington.
“We in Syria completed the return of all of our forces and intelligence agencies attached to them on April 26 and we consider it as a ‘closed file’.”
