Syria and the US, differences

The BBC correspondent in Damascus said that traces of differences in the view points between Syria and the news US administration concerning priorities in debating the files carried by the US secretary of state Colin Powell to the region have surfaced with the arrival of Powell to Damascus on Monday.

The correspondent said that Syria considers the file of the Golan over which negotiations were frozen by the beginning of 2000 is presumed on top of the talks between President Bashar al-Assad and the US secretary of state, while the American statements listed the question of peace in the second file. A matter which raised Syria's fears, whose leadership is intending to underline the importance of concentrating efforts to establishing peace in the Middle East instead of confining these efforts to Iraq and the question of establishing relations between Iraq and the Arab states.

A Syrian official has considered the American and British air strikes against Iraq as a game to divert the attention from the Israeli practices against the Palestinians.

However, diplomats in Damascus see that the American giving up the peace question is in contradiction to Syria's position, especially in the light of the statement of the US state department that Powell will not propose an American formula to continue the peace process.

The correspondent added that its is expected that President Bashar al-Assad will raise with Powell the question of the two-standard policy pursued by the US administration and that observers expect Powell to raise the question of Hizbullah and the Israeli prisoners during his talks in Syria.