WASHINGTON, Sept 17: The United States has stepped up its war of words against Syria, blaming Damascus for a new string of suicide bombings in Iraq and threatening ‘serious consequences’ and unspecified international action if Syrian authorities failed to crack down on militants using their territory as a staging base.
“Innocent people are getting blown up in Iraq because Syria is allowing its territory to be used by terrorists bent on sowing murder and mayhem in Iraq and they’re not going to succeed,” State Department’s spokesman Adam Ereli told reporters on Friday.
He went on to insist that the international community ‘is not going to let this continue to happen’, but did not say whether a US complaint to the UN Security Council was in the offing.
The spokesman added the international community was going to act ‘because Syria, more and more, is being recognized as a destabilizing element in the region’.
Nearly 200 people have been killed in Iraq since Wednesday in a fresh wave of suicide bombings.
In one of the most direct attempts to date to blame Damascus for mayhem in Iraq, Mr Ereli argued that the bombings could happen primarily because the Syrian government was failing to put an end to movements of radicals through its territory.
“Syria and Syrian territory and activities in Syria... that the Syrian government can do something about that are directly connected to the insurgency in Iraq,” he stated.
The State Department official rejected suggestions the situation could be resolved through more diplomatic contact with Damascus, arguing that enough top level US officials have broached the subject with the Syrians over the past years — without any tangible result.
“There certainly seems to be an unwillingness to take actions to stop it. And that’s not because we haven’t engaged with them,” Mr Ereli insisted. “It’s because the Syrian government, for one reason or another, has decided that they don’t want to do it.”
He urged the Syrians to reconsider their stance ‘because the choice you make, whether it’s to do something or not to do something, has consequences and serious consequences’.
On Thursday, the Syrian Embassy here strongly denied having anything to do with the bombings in Iraq and said Damascus was willing to cooperate with Washington and Baghdad on sealing the Syrian-Iraqi border.
The statement expressed readiness ‘to do whatever it takes’ to achieve this goal.
But the US spokesman made clear that the list of US grievances went beyond Iraq.
He accused Damascus of maintaining what he called ‘a residual presence’ in Lebanon that did not contribute to the well-being and welfare of the Lebanese people or the sovereignty of Lebanon.
Syria withdrew its troops from the neighbouring country in late April, bowing to strong international pressure in the wake of the Feb 14 assassination of former prime minister Rafiq Hariri in a car bomb blast.
Mr Ereli also insisted that in the Gaza Strip and West Bank, Syria continued to have association ‘with terrorist elements that are bent on sabotaging the peace process’.
The warning dovetails a crescendo of complaints about Syria from top US administration officials that culminated on Tuesday with President George Bush warning that Damascus faced growing isolation because of its failure to stop foreign fighters entering Iraq.—AFP
