CAIRO, January 22, 2012 (AFP)
CAIRO, January 22, 2012 (AFP)
Saudi Foreign Minister Prince Saud al-Faisal said on Sunday Riyadh was pulling its observers from the widely criticized Arab League observer mission to Syria because Damascus had not kept its promises.
Saudi Arabia “is withdrawing from the mission because the Syrian government has not respected any of the clauses” in the Arab plan aimed at ending the crisis there, he said according to the text of a statement he made at a ministerial meeting of the 22-member body in Cairo.
Riyadh’s move came as foreign ministers of the pan-Arab body met to hear the recommendations of a League panel that the organization extend its monitoring mission to Syria by a month
The panel was briefed earlier on the first month of the monitoring mission by its chief, General Mohammed Ahmed Mustafa al-Dabi of Sudan.
Dabi wants his mandate to be strengthened, not scrapped, a League official had said.
The Dabi report blames both sides in Syria, the government and opposition, for the bloodshed, according to an Arab diplomatic source.
It recommends extending the monitoring mission while cautioning that its observers would not be deployed indefinitely.
The United Nations says that at least 5,400 people have been killed in a Syrian government crackdown since mid-March last year, when protests erupted against the regime of President Bashar al-Assad.
