Iranian President Mahmoud Ahmadinejad said yesterday that resistance to the West is on the rise across the Middle East, after meeting his Syrian counterpart Bashar al-Assad.
Their brief meeting at Damascus airport in the presence of Syrian Foreign Minister Walid Muallem came just two days after US President Barack Obama’s special envoy sought support in Damascus for Washington’s latest peace push.
“The front of resistance is increasing in the region, (and) the people of the region support the policy” pursued by the Iranian and Syrian governments, Ahmadinejad said.
“We have achieved a great victory because we were able to defeat the enemy plans to change” the political map of the Middle East, the Iranian hardliner told reporters before departing the Syrian capital.
Before leaving Tehran, he had told reporters that Iran’s relations with Syria were “solid and strategic with a unified view on all issues”.
Last Thursday, US Middle East envoy George Mitchell said in Damascus that Washington was interested in a comprehensive resolution of the regional conflict that also included peace between Syria and Israel.
Mitchell said that for Washington a Middle East peace deal meant an “agreement between Israel and the Palestinians, between Israel and Syria and between Israel and Lebanon and the full normalisation of relations between Israel and its neighbours”.
“There are some who are determined to disrupt this process. But we are determined to see it through,” the US envoy stressed.
Despite a 1949 armistice agreement, Syria and Israel remain technically in a state of war. The Golan Heights has been at the core of the Syrian-Israeli conflict since it was seized by the Jewish state in the 1967 Six-Day War and annexed in 1981 in a move not recognised by the international community.
Ahmadinejad last visited Syria last February, soon after US Secretary of State Hillary Clinton underlined Washington’s desire to see Syria move away from Iran.
Ahmadinejad and Assad responded by signing a visa-scrapping accord that signalled even closer ties.
An Iranian diplomatic source said earlier yesterday that during their meeting, Ahmadinejad and Assad reaffirmed their strong ties and “commitment to continue consultations... in areas of interest”.
They expressed the need “to raise the level of economic cooperation, particularly in the fields of oil, gas, railways and tourism,” according to Syria’s official SANA news agency.