CAIRO, 3 November 2003 — Egyptian President Hosni Mubarak is to visit Damascus today for talks with his Syrian counterpart Bashar Assad on Israel’s “threats against Syria,” a diplomatic source said here yesterday.
They will also discuss “the means to avoid escalating the tension” between Syria and Israel, as well as the situation in the Palestinian territories and Iraq, the source said.
In an interview with London’s Sunday Telegraph on Oct. 26, Syrian Foreign Minister Farouq Al-Shara said: “If we are attacked again our people will not stand for it and we have to carry out the will of the people.
“We have many cards that we have not played. Don’t forget there are many Israeli settlements in the Golan,” he was quoted as saying.
On Oct. 5, Israel bombed what it said was a training camp near Damascus used by the Palestinian group Islamic Jihad, which had claimed a devastating bombing in the northern Israeli town of Haifa.
Damascus insisted the attack, Israel’s first air raid deep into Syria in three decades, had targeted a civilian area.
The Mubarak-Assad talks will also come on the heels of a Damascus meeting held yesterday by the foreign ministers of Iraq’s neighbors and Egypt to discuss the growing instability in the war-torn country.
