Saudi Says Will Pull Observers from Syria Mission

Saudi Foreign Minister Prince Saud al-Faisal said on Sunday Riyadh was pulling its observers from the widely criticized Arab League observer mission to Syria because Damascus had not kept its promises.

Saudi Arabia "is withdrawing from the mission because the Syrian government has not respected any of the clauses" in the Arab plan aimed at ending the crisis there, he said according to the text of a statement he made at a ministerial meeting of the 22-member body in Cairo.

Prince Saud also urged Arab nations to "seriously respect the decisions taken by the council of the Arab League to impose sanctions on Syria, in order to cause it to respect its commitments" to stop the violence.

In November, the League slapped strong sanctions on Syria, the first time such severe measures had been taken against one of its own members, freezing commercial transactions with the government and its accounts in Arab states.

"These sanctions are still valid, and we have not decided to lift them," Prince Saud said.

Riyadh's move came as foreign ministers of the pan-Arab body met to hear the recommendations of a League panel that the organization extend its monitoring mission to Syria by a month.

The panel was briefed earlier on the first month of the monitoring mission by its chief, General Mohammed Ahmed Mustafa al-Dabi of Sudan.

Dabi wants his mandate to be strengthened, not scrapped, a League official had said.

The Dabi report blames both sides in Syria, the government and opposition, for the bloodshed, according to an Arab diplomatic source.

It recommends extending the monitoring mission while cautioning that its observers would not be deployed indefinitely.

The United Nations says that at least 5,400 people have been killed in a Syrian government crackdown since mid-March last year, when protests erupted against the regime of President Bashar al-Assad.