Arab League to discuss suspending Syria: delegate (Reuters)

CAIRO (Reuters) – Arab foreign ministers will discuss whether to suspend Syria from the regional body at a meeting Sunday, but some states oppose such a move, a permanent delegate to the League said.

“The emergency meeting will consider suspending Syria’s membership,” the delegate told Reuters, on condition of anonymity. “Some Arab states clearly oppose suspending Syria’s membership.”

Syrian President Bashar al-Assad has intensified a military crackdown to crush protests demanding his resignation. The United Nations says the repression has killed 3,000 people.

Arab governments were silent for months while Assad’s troops tried to put down the uprising with tanks and machineguns. But the country is now in danger of descending into a civil war that could destabilize its neighbors.

Thousands of Syrian troops backed by armor opened fire in the resort town of Zabadani on the border with Lebanon on Sunday, a day after heavy fighting in the area between army defectors and loyalist forces, residents and activists said.

Arab states have demanded an end to the bloodshed and called for political reforms but do not agree on how to achieve that and have stopped short of expelling Syria from the Cairo-based regional body.

Gulf states called the emergency meeting of foreign ministers to discuss the humanitarian situation in Syria and study ways “to stop the bloodshed and machine of violence,” the Gulf Cooperation Council (GCC) said last week.

The permanent delegate said the League was calling on Syria’s government to set out a timetable for pulling out of Syrian towns and to stop killing civilians.

A group of 121 civil society groups urged Arab leaders to protect Syrians from a government they accuse of trying to stir sectarian tension and provoke a civil war.

“The continued failure to respond to the mounting crisis in Syria will fundamentally delegitimize Arab leadership across the region,” they said in an open letter to Arab League Secretary General Nabil Elaraby.

They called for the economic and diplomatic isolation of Syria’s government, an arms embargo and support for United Nations efforts to investigate alleged human rights violations.

In a consultative session ahead of their main meeting at the League Sunday, ministers agreed to call again for an end to the bloodshed but “disagreed on the mechanism to achieve that,” an unnamed diplomat told Egyptian state news agency MENA.

“They agreed on the refusal of any foreign intervention and the need to implement a clear road map for the required political reforms to guarantee a peaceful transition of power,” MENA cited the source as saying.

(Reporting by Marwa Awad and Tamim Elyan; writing by Tom Pfeiffer; editing by Andrew Roche)

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