Iranian foreign minister Ali Akbar Salehi criticized the proposed suspension (Photo: AFP - Fayez Nureldine)
Foreign ministers at a meeting of the Organisation of Islamic Cooperation (OIC) agreed on Monday to suspend Syria from the international body, an OIC source said, further isolating President Bashar al-Assad.
"The session just ended. The ministers adopted the resolutions, including the suspension of Syria," the source told Reuters.
The move by the OIC, a body comprising 56 member states plus the Palestinian Authority that aims to represent Muslim interests on the world stage, is its response to Assad's suppression of a 17-month uprising.
It will have more symbolic than practical implications for the Assad government which has never put emphasis on religion and which will continue to enjoy support from Iran which opposed the decision to suspend Syria at the OIC.
Earlier Iran had been the lead critic of the suspension, saying it would only increase Assad's isolation.
"I'm openly against the suspension of the membership of any country, any organization," Iranian Foreign Minister Ali Akbar Salehitold reporters in Jeddah, seat of the 57-strong OIC of which allies Iran and Syria are members.
"By suspending membership, this does not mean that you are moving toward resolving an issue. This means that you are erasing the issue. We want to really resolve the issue," he said.
"Every country, especially OIC countries must join hands to resolve this issue in such a way that will help the peace security and stability in the region," he added on the eve of an OIC summit in Saudi Arabia.
The ministers were holding preparatory talks before a two-day OIC summit in Mecca starting on Tuesday where heads of government will take the formal decision on Syria, probably on Wednesday.
Syrian official in China
A special envoy to Syria's president will hold talks in China on Tuesday, a day after rebels claimed to have downed a government plane for the first time.
Foreign Ministry spokesman Qin Gang said Assad's envoy, Buthaina Shaaban, will meet with Foreign Minister Yang Jiechi.
Qin said China is also considering inviting members of Syrian opposition groups to visit.
China and Russia have been at odds with the United States and other Western countries over UN Security Council resolutions that might have opened the door to foreign intervention in Syria.
China says it wants to promote a political solution between the Syrian government and opposition to end the fighting.
Earlier the US Pentagon deplored what it said was an increasing use of air power by Syrian President Bashar al-Assad's government against rebels, after a plane was downed in eastern Syia.
The comments came just days after US Secretary of State Hillary Clinton said the United States and Turkey were looking at all measures to help Syrian rebels overthrow Assad, including establishing a no-fly zone.
Asked about the use of Syrian air power at a briefing with reporters, Pentagon spokesman George Little said: "We've seen a very troubling and despicable uptick in attacks from the air, perpetrated by the Syrian regime."
"This is yet another example of their depraved behavior. This needs to stop as does the violence they continue to pursue against their own people," Little said.
Little did not comment on the possibility of establishing a no-fly zone, which would mean using force to stop Syrian warplanes from operating over all or part of Syria's territory.
While the Pentagon has done basic contingency planning on a range of options in Syria, putting in place a no-fly zone - even if the allies agree to do so - could take weeks or months.
Monday's Pentagon comments came the same day rebels in eastern Syria said they had captured the pilot of a government fighter jet after shooting down his aircraft - a rare event for the lightly armed rebels battling Assad's superior weaponry.
The state news channel Syria TV said the plane crashed due to technical problems during a "regular training mission."
(Al-Akhbar, AFP, Reuters)
"The session just ended. The ministers adopted the resolutions, including the suspension of Syria," the source told Reuters.
The move by the OIC, a body comprising 56 member states plus the Palestinian Authority that aims to represent Muslim interests on the world stage, is its response to Assad's suppression of a 17-month uprising.
It will have more symbolic than practical implications for the Assad government which has never put emphasis on religion and which will continue to enjoy support from Iran which opposed the decision to suspend Syria at the OIC.
Earlier Iran had been the lead critic of the suspension, saying it would only increase Assad's isolation.
"I'm openly against the suspension of the membership of any country, any organization," Iranian Foreign Minister Ali Akbar Salehitold reporters in Jeddah, seat of the 57-strong OIC of which allies Iran and Syria are members.
"By suspending membership, this does not mean that you are moving toward resolving an issue. This means that you are erasing the issue. We want to really resolve the issue," he said.
"Every country, especially OIC countries must join hands to resolve this issue in such a way that will help the peace security and stability in the region," he added on the eve of an OIC summit in Saudi Arabia.
The ministers were holding preparatory talks before a two-day OIC summit in Mecca starting on Tuesday where heads of government will take the formal decision on Syria, probably on Wednesday.
Syrian official in China
A special envoy to Syria's president will hold talks in China on Tuesday, a day after rebels claimed to have downed a government plane for the first time.Foreign Ministry spokesman Qin Gang said Assad's envoy, Buthaina Shaaban, will meet with Foreign Minister Yang Jiechi.
Qin said China is also considering inviting members of Syrian opposition groups to visit.
China and Russia have been at odds with the United States and other Western countries over UN Security Council resolutions that might have opened the door to foreign intervention in Syria.
China says it wants to promote a political solution between the Syrian government and opposition to end the fighting.
Earlier the US Pentagon deplored what it said was an increasing use of air power by Syrian President Bashar al-Assad's government against rebels, after a plane was downed in eastern Syia.
The comments came just days after US Secretary of State Hillary Clinton said the United States and Turkey were looking at all measures to help Syrian rebels overthrow Assad, including establishing a no-fly zone.
Asked about the use of Syrian air power at a briefing with reporters, Pentagon spokesman George Little said: "We've seen a very troubling and despicable uptick in attacks from the air, perpetrated by the Syrian regime."
"This is yet another example of their depraved behavior. This needs to stop as does the violence they continue to pursue against their own people," Little said.
Little did not comment on the possibility of establishing a no-fly zone, which would mean using force to stop Syrian warplanes from operating over all or part of Syria's territory.
While the Pentagon has done basic contingency planning on a range of options in Syria, putting in place a no-fly zone - even if the allies agree to do so - could take weeks or months.
Monday's Pentagon comments came the same day rebels in eastern Syria said they had captured the pilot of a government fighter jet after shooting down his aircraft - a rare event for the lightly armed rebels battling Assad's superior weaponry.
The state news channel Syria TV said the plane crashed due to technical problems during a "regular training mission."
(Al-Akhbar, AFP, Reuters)
'The Saudi king's harsh vendetta towards Assad is not unifying the region, it is souring it!'
"...Instead of yielding hope, its subsequent metamorphosis now gives rise to a mood of uncertainty and desperation - particularly among what are increasingly termed "'the minorities" - the non-Sunnis, in other words. This chill of apprehension takes its grip from certain Gulf States' fervor for the restitution of a Sunni regional primacy - even, perhaps, of hegemony - to be attained through fanning rising Sunni militancy [1] and Salafist acculturation.
At least seven Middle Eastern states are now beset by bitter, and increasingly violent, power struggles; states such as Lebanon, Egypt, Libya, Bahrain and Yemen are dismantling. Western states no longer trouble to conceal their aim of regime change in Syria, following Libya and the "non-regime-change" change in Yemen.
The region already exists in a state of low intensity war: Saudi Arabia and Qatar, bolstered by Turkey and the West, seem ready to stop at nothing to violently overthrow a fellow Arab head of state, President Bashar al-Assad - and to do whatever they can to hurt Iran.
Iranians increasingly interpret Saudi Arabia's mood as a hungering for war; and Gulf statements do often have that edge of hysteria and aggression: a recent editorial in the Saudi-owned al-Hayat stated: "The climate in the GCC [Gulf Cooperation Council] indicates that matters are heading towards a GCC-Iranian-Russian confrontation on Syrian soil, similar to what took place in Afghanistan during the Cold War. To be sure, the decision has been taken to overthrow the Syrian regime, seeing as it is vital to the regional influence and hegemony of the Islamic Republic of Iran." [2]
What genuine popular impulse there was at the outset of the "Awakening" has now been subsumed and absorbed into three major political projects associated with this push to reassert primacy: a Muslim Brotherhood project, a Saudi-Qatari-Salafist project, and a militant Salafist project. No one really knows the nature of the Brotherhood project, whether it is that of a sect, or if it is truly mainstream [3]; and this opacity is giving rise to real fears.
At times, the Brotherhood presents a pragmatic, even an uncomfortably accomodationist, face to the world, but other voices from the movement, more discretely evoke the air of something akin to the rhetoric of literal, intolerant and hegemonic Salafism. What is clear however is that the Brotherhood tone everywhere is increasingly one of militant sectarian grievance. And the shrill of this is heard plainly from Syria.[...all these projects, whilst they may overlap in some parts, are in a fundamental way, competitors with each other. And they are all essentially "power" projects - projects intended to take power. Ultimately they will clash: Sunni on Sunni. This has already begun in the Levant - violently. ...]
The joint Saudi-Salafist project was conceived as a direct counter to the Brotherhood project: the Saudi aim in liberally funding and supporting Saudi-orientated Salafists throughout the region has been precisely to contain and counter the influence of the Brotherhood [4] (eg in Egypt) and to undermine this strand of reformist Islamism, which is seen to constitute an existential threat to Gulf state autocracy: a reformism that precisely threatens the authority of those absolute monarchs.
Qatar pursues a somewhat different line to Saudi Arabia. Whilst it too is firing-up, arming and funding militant Sunni movements [5], it is not so much attempting to contain and circumscribe the Brotherhood, Saudi-style, but rather to co-opt it with money; and to align it into the Saudi-Qatari aspiration for a Sunni power block that can contain Iran...
Syria has become the crucible of these external coercions; with events in Syria [12] being defined by this hugely potent deployed Gulf power for the purpose of building their "new Middle East"; rather than being defined by some over-simplistic narrative of reform versus repression, which sheers Syria away from its all-important context.
Many Syrians see the struggle now not so much as one of reform - though all Syrians want that - but now as a more primordial, elemental fight to preserve the notion of Syria itself, a deep-rooted self-identity amidst fears that touch on the most sensitive, inflamed nerves within the Islamic world. Not surprisingly for many, security now trumps reform.
Undoubtedly the region is entering a profound and turbulent struggle to define its future, and that of Islam. But this phase may not prove as defining as some may think (or hope): Whilst the Gulf has pursued its objectives a outrance, it is also vulnerable.
The Saudi king may aspire to unify the Sunni world to his vision, but he is unlikely to succeed in this way: his harsh vendetta towards Assad is not unifying the region, it is souring it; and the recourse to militant Sunnism is fomenting civil, violent struggle in many states: in the Levant, and beyond, it is already pitting Sunni against Sunni.
Syrian self-identity, as for many others in the region, was never a sectarian one, but was rooted in a belonging to one of the great nations of the region with a "model of society" which had "more religious freedom and tolerance … than in any other Arab country". [13]
Syrians did not view themselves as primarily identified by sect.
Wahhabi-style sectarian intolerance is foreign to the Levant, even to Levant Sunnism. We are already witnessing, in Egypt, for example, push-back against movements seen to be motivated primarily by considerations of sect - even from those who see themselves as Islamist. They seek not another type of strait-jacket. The question is being asked: has the Brotherhood switched from "patience" to "domination"? There is a sense now of something fundamentally lost: with this authoritarian re-culturization - where now is any real reforming, revolutionary zeal?"
Uprooted Palestinian 
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