Annan in Syria

UN Secretary-General Kofi Annan began talks with Syrian officials yesterday to seek Syria's help in bolstering a truce between Israel and Lebanon's Hizbollah.

Before arriving in the Syrian capital Damascus, Mr Annan renewed from Jordan his calls for Israel to lift its blockade of Lebanon swiftly and to withdraw fully from the country as soon as 5,000 UN peacekeepers are in the south.

"I expect - and I did make this clear to the Israeli authorities - that when the international forces have reached 5,000 and are deployed to the south with the Lebanese (army), it is time for them to withdraw and withdraw completely," Mr Annan told a news conference after talks with Jordan's King Abdullah.

He said in a radio interview he hoped the UN peacekeepers, part of an expanded UNIFIL force to be led by France, would be in place "within a week or 10 days".

Mr Annan met Syrian Foreign Minister Walid al-Moualem in Damascus later in the day and is expected to hold talks with President Bashar al-Assad today.

"The need to preserve the ceasefire and withdrawal of the Israeli forces from southern Lebanon was affirmed during the meeting... as well as the need for the United Nations to work on securing a just and comprehensive peace in the Middle East," the official Syrian news agency said.

Syrian leaders have been angered by an Israeli demand for international troops to deploy on the Lebanese-Syrian border to stop arms smuggling to Hizbollah.

Lebanon, which has sent 8,600 soldiers to patrol the border, says it has no plans to ask UN troops to join them.

Italian Prime Minister Romano Prodi, whose nation is set to be UNIFIL's biggest contributor, said Israeli Deputy Prime Minister Shimon Peres had told him that Israel would begin pulling out its troops once 5,000 UN troops were in place.

But Mr Peres' spokesman Yoram Dori, commenting on Mr Prodi's remark, said: "Israeli troops will withdraw if the UN troops deploy in every place that ensures the implementation of Security Council Resolution 1701." Israeli troops have been gradually withdrawing for the past two weeks and the army said it held less than a third of the land it occupied during the war. "The rest of the territory was handed over to UNIFIL and the Lebanese army," a spokesman said.

Lebanese troops, accompanied by UN peacekeepers, took up posts on the border with Israel for the first time in decades.

A Reuters reporter saw soldiers in two armoured troop carriers and four trucks deploy in the frontier Majidiyeh village in the eastern sector of south Lebanon, a day after Israeli forces pulled out of the area.