Syria Vows to Quit Lebanon Before Polls

In a letter to UN Secretary General Kofi Annan, Syrian Foreign Minister Farouq Al-Shara said Syria will withdraw forces from Lebanon before the May elections, according to Reuters Tuesday, March29 .

“The longtime close cooperation between Syria and Lebanon had enabled Syria to decrease its troop levels to10 , 000from40 ,000, coupled with the full withdrawal of these troops before the forthcoming elections in Lebanon,” read the letter.

Syria has been under mounting international pressure to pull out military forces from neighboring Lebanon.

Syrian President Bashar Al-Assad told parliament March 5 that Syria would withdraw all its troops in Lebanon to the eastern Bekaa valley and then to the borders.

Damascus has already completed the first stage of the two-phase withdrawal plan, pulling back to Lebanon’s eastern Bekaa Valley and withdrawing more than a third of the14 , 000troops it kept in its neighbor.

A Timetable

Syrian UN ambassador Fayssal Mekdad said that Damascus was “definitely” committed to the pullout of the military troops, adding a timetable is to be set in the coming days.

“When we entered into Lebanon, we entered to stop the civil war, to stop the division of the people, to stop the killing. These are issues that during the past many years we have achieved,” Mekdad told Agence France Presse (AFP).

A joint Syrian-Lebanese coordinating committee is due to meet before Saturday to set a timetable for the Syrian military withdrawal from its tiny Arab neighbor, he told Reuters.

Syrian forces entered Lebanon in 1990 under Taif agreement, which brought an end to the1975 – 1990Lebanese civil war.

A series of redeployments have seen Syrian troop numbers fall from a high of40 , 000after they first moved in to the current14 ,000.

Untrue

The Syrian letter was also sent to the UN Security Council, which is discussing a resolution, drafted by the Unites States and France, to authorize an international investigation into the killing of former Lebanese prime minister Rafiq Hariri.

Hariri was killed Monday, February14 , in a deadly blast that targeted his motorcade passing in a western Beirut area near St. George hotel.

In his letter, Shara said that any mention of the Syrian leader in the UN fact-finding mission report on Hariri’s killing should be pulled out in order to save the credibility of the United Nations, according to AFP.

“This reference would never be accepted because it is untrue and lacks any material evidence,” Shara said in his letter.

The report of a UN fact-finding mission investigating Hariri’s killing concluded that Syria had created a climate of tension in which the assassination occurred.

The report also cited numerous accounts of a meeting held between slain Hariri and the Syrian leader to convince Assad not to support the extension of Lebanese President Emile Lahoud.