BAGHDAD/BEIRUT: Neighbouring Iraq warned that Syria’s civil war is tearing the Middle East apart and Lebanon’s president urged his country’s Hezbollah movement yesterday to pull its fighters out of the conflict.
After two years of fighting that has killed more than 93,000 people, Syria’s turmoil is dragging its neighbours into a deadly confrontation between Shia Iran supporting President Bashar Al Assad and Sunni Arab Gulf nations backing the Syrian rebels.
The insurgents have suffered a series of setbacks on the battlefield and are besieged in the outskirts of Damascus facing a slow but steady advance by Assad’s forces, which have begun to regain the upper hand.
In a sign of the devastation being wrought by the war, the United Nations cultural agency UNESCO put the six World Heritage Sites in Syria on its danger list of imperilled monuments yesterday, urging international efforts to protect them.
Both Iraq and Lebanon have suffered growing violence at home as the Syrian conflict turns increasingly into a proxy war along confessional lines.
“Iraq is in the most difficult position in this regional turmoil and the conflict in Syria has become a regional conflict by all standards,” Foreign Minister Hoshyar Zebari told Reuters in an interview in Baghdad.
“We are doing our best to maintain a neutral position, but the pressures are enormous and for how long we can hold really is a matter of further developments in Syria.”
With Russia and Iran arming Assad’s government forces, and Lebanon’s Hezbollah fighters joining the war on his behalf, Western powers have agreed in the last week to step up aid to the mainly Sunni rebels, who were driven out of the strategic town of Qusair, north of Damascus.
Foreign ministers of the “Friends of Syria” group of nations backing the opposition are to meet in Qatar tomorrow to discuss assistance to try to help the rebel Free Syrian Army defend the key northern city of Aleppo.
Those countries include the United States, Britain, France, Saudi Arabia, Turkey, Egypt and Qatar.
Rebel prospects for reversing Assad’s gains in Damascus may now hinge on military support from Western and Arab backers.
“If the northern front were to receive enough material and non-material support quickly, it could soon be equivalent to thousands of men, or even tens of thousands,” a Western diplomat involved in the talks said.
In a further sign that violence is spreading in one of the most diverse countries in the Middle East, Islamist Arab rebels have clashed with Kurds in northeastern Syria, sources on both sides said. The death toll from fighting and assassinations in the last few days has reached at least 30 people, with dozens more held in tit for tat kidnappings.
REUTERS
