MIDDLE EAST:TURKISH PRIME minister Recep Tayyip Erdogan met Syrian president Bashar al-Assad in Damascus on Saturday in an attempt to step up efforts to secure a peace settlement between Syria and Israel.
Mr Erdogan, who has been trying to mediate a deal for more than a year, said: "This round will start with lower-level [officials] and, if they are successful, a higher-level meeting would be held."
Dr Assad said Damascus wanted a written guarantee from Israel to withdraw completely from the Golan Heights, occupied by Israel in 1967, in line with understandings reached in the 1990s with the then Israeli premier, Yitzhak Rabin.
Since Dr Assad has been repeatedly rebuffed by the Bush administration when he has asked the US to broker direct negotiations, he has said such talks will have to wait until a new US president is inaugurated.
For the present, he remarked, "Turkey can carry on with indirect talks".
Suleiman Haddad, chairman of the Syrian parliament's foreign affairs committee, expressed hope that Israel was "serious" about making peace.
He observed that, during earlier negotiations, "80 per cent of the issues in dispute had been resolved".
In an interview with the Qatari daily, al-Watan, Dr Assad denied US reports that the Syrian facility that was bombed by Israel last September was a nuclear reactor capable of producing plutonium for weapons.
He said Damascus had no interest in building nuclear arms. "Where would we use them?" he asked. If Syria were to drop such bombs on Israel, they would kill Palestinians, he said.
Dr Assad said Iran, which is also accused by the US of seeking nuclear weapons, took a similar view.
Palestinian president Mahmoud Abbas praised Turkey for its efforts to play a regional peacemaking role and said a deal between Israel and Syria would not harm negotiations on the Palestinian-Israeli track.
