U.S. concentrating forces near Syrian border

<!********************Cut and Paste Article Below********************>The United States has bolstered its military presence near the Iraqi- Syrian border.

U.S. officials said Central Command has ordered a buildup of assets in western Iraq. They said the buildup is centered at Al Rutba and includes M1A1 main battle tanks, AH-64A attack helicopters and A-10 ground-support fighter-jets.

The U.S. move aims to prevent the escape of Iraqi leaders and nonconventional military assets to Syria. They said U.S. forces will also ensure that Arab foreign volunteers based in Syria will be captured as soon as they enter Iraq.

Officials have assured Syria that the military buildup is not meant against the regime of President Bashar Assad. But Coalition forces have already attacked Iraqi targets within 10 kilometers of the Syrian border.

Officials said Syria has been harboring hundreds of regime leaders and insurgents connected to Saddam. One of them, they said, is Farouq Hijazi, an Iraqi intelligence agent and said to have led a plot to kill the father of President George Bush, who was also president, after the 1991 Gulf war.

Officials said the U.S. deployment near the Syrian border has been enhanced by cooperation from Iraqi tribes. They said U.S. special operations units are now located along such key routes as Highway 10, Highway 11 as well as around the northwestern town of Al Qaim. On Tuesday, an Iraqi army unit located near Al Qaim and said to have contained 16,000 troops formally surrendered to U.S. forces.

"We have forces that are located in a number of places along the Syrian border with Iraq," Brig. Gen. Vincent Brooks, deputy operations chief at U.S. Central Command said on Tuesday. "We have vehicle checkpoints that are located along some of the key routes. In the northwest area, Al Qaim is an important area for us. We have a presence there, at that very important crossing point. We are located in other areas as well that I would not want to be too specific about at this point."

"We have concerns about Syria," U.S. Secretary of State Colin Powell said. "We have let Syria know of our concerns. But there is no list, there is no war plan right now to go attack someone else, either for the purpose of overthrowing their leadership or for the purpose of imposing democratic values."

Earlier, Powell raised the prospect that the United States would impose sanctions on Syria for its help to the regime of Iraqi President Saddam Hussein.

So far, the United States has shut down the Iraqi-Syrian oil pipeline, which produced revenues of about $1.2 billion a year for the Assad regime.

Since 2000, the pipeline had brought up to 250,000 barrels of Iraqi oil per day to Syria, which were then sold abroad.

"We have been told that they have shut off a pipeline," Defense Secretary Donald Rumsfeld said. "Whether it's the only one, and whether that has completely stopped the flow of oil between Iraq and Syria, I cannot tell you. We do not have perfect knowledge. We do know that they were instructed to shut it down, and they have told us that they have."

But Rumsfeld refused to discuss details of any plans to pressure Syria to surrender Iraqi weapons of mass destruction scientists. He said such decisions would be discussed by President George Bush and Powell.

"I don't have anything else to add on that," the defense secretary said. "The president's spoken on it. Secretary Powell has spoken on it. I'll leave that to them."

In an unrelated development, the United States has begun to withdraw more than 1,000 troops from Turkey. The Turkish military General Staff said in a statement on Tuesday that 1,166 U.S. soldiers would be flown out of the Incerlik air force base in southern Turkey by Wednesday.

The U.S. soldiers were part of a support effort for coalition air attacks on neighboring Iraq. They also helped establish supply routes to northern Iraq.

The Turkish statement said U.S. military equipment and supplies will be shipped out of the Turkish port of Iskenderun between April 15-23. U.S. officials said the no-fly zone in northern Iraq has also been discontinued. They said up to 50 U.S. combat jets deployed at Turkey's Incerlik air base have been redeployed.

"We have shut down Operation Northern Watch," Rumsfeld said. "The assets that were there for that purpose have been redeployed. We have not made final decisions with respect to the footprint of the United States in that part of the world, and won't for some months."

The fulll article is as follows

By Irwin Arieff

UNITED NATIONS (Reuters) - Syria, seeking to shift world attention from itself to Israel, asked the U.N. Security Council on Wednesday to help transform the Middle East into a zone free of all weapons of mass destruction.

Syria denies U.S. charges that it is developing chemical weapons, and accuses Washington of ignoring Israel, which is widely assumed to have nuclear weapons.

A draft resolution introduced by Syria in the 15-nation Security Council would welcome all initiatives aimed at establishing a "a zone free of weapons of mass destruction, in particular nuclear weapons," in the Middle East.

The draft calls on the council to take a central role in countering the spread of nuclear, biological and chemical weapons in the region and calls on all Middle Eastern governments to ratify a series of arms control treaties, including the 1993 Chemical Weapons Convention.

Israel has signed the convention but never ratified it, while Syria has neither signed nor ratified.

Syria's U.N. ambassador, Mikhail Wehbe, said Syria would ratify it if all other governments in the region did so.

Wehbe introduced the resolution during a closed-door council session after getting a green light the day before from representatives of the Arab group of countries at the United Nations (news - web sites).

The Arab envoys gathered after top U.S. officials accused Syria of developing chemical weapons, giving sanctuary to fleeing Iraqi officials and assisting Saddam Hussein (news - web sites) in his effort to defend Iraq (news - web sites) against the U.S. invasion.

Wehbe said it was "very clear to everybody" that the U.S. charges aimed to shift attention from the U.S.-led invasion of Iraq and "the Israeli killing of the Palestinian people."

U.S. Ambassador John Negroponte said Washington also wanted all Middle Eastern nations including Israel to get rid of all their weapons of mass destruction.

But he said the most pressing concern for the United States right now was to rid Iraq of all such arms. The United States has yet to find any weapons of mass destruction in Iraq.

He said Washington had expressed to the Damascus government its concerns about what he described as Syria's "ongoing weapons of mass destruction programs." Negroponte said that the United States believed that Syria had tried to acquire the materials needed to make chemical weapons.

Council diplomats said it was unclear where the Syrian draft would go from here -- or how fast -- now that it had been introduced.

Council members agreed to consult their governments on the measure and discuss it again at the expert level on Thursday.

Numerous governments have accused Washington of a double standard in threatening to crack down on Syria as well as Iran and North Korea (news - web sites) on the issue of weapons of mass destruction while ignoring Israel, which is believed to have some 200 nuclear warheads.

Israel declines to discuss its nuclear activities.

U.S. officials have said they hoped the example of Iraq's defeat at the hands of the U.S. military would persuade countries such as Syria, Iran and North Korea to give up their ambitions for weapons of mass destruction.

That has led to speculation -- denied by Washington -- that the United States, with hundreds of thousands of troops in neighboring Iraq, might invade Syria next.

U.S. concentrating forces near Syrian border

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