Powell ends Mid-East tour

Assad called on Powell to play a "effective and neutral" role in region

US Secretary of State Colin Powell has ended his tour of the Middle East, in which he has been trying to convince Arab leaders to maintain economic and political pressure on Iraq's leader Saddam Hussein.

Mr Powell's last stop was Syria, which joined the Gulf War coalition against Baghdad but reopened its borders with Iraq three years ago.

Mr Annan is cautious, but says he has hope

A Syrian presidential spokesman said President Bashar al-Assad had called during the meeting for an "effective and neutral" US role in the Middle East peace process and stressed that peace would ensure security and stability in the region.

Mr Powell is heading for Brussels, where he is expected to raise the revision of sanctions against Iraq with Nato foreign ministers on Tuesday.

Retargetting sanctions

The BBC correspondent travelling with Mr Powell says US officials have expressed satisfaction with the responses received in private during the Middle East trip - despite less supportive public statements from some regional leaders.

Our correspondent says Washington hopes to rebuild support for sanctions against Iraq by retargetting them, tightening restrictions on the leadership while easing those on the Iraqi people.

Al-Sahaf: Iraq wants the sanctions dropped

Shortly before Mr Powell's arrival from Saudi Arabia, Syria's official media criticised his tour for focusing more on Iraq than the Arab-Israeli conflict.

Mr Powell was expected to ask President Assad to halt his country's imports of Iraqi oil, which the US says is being made at 100,000 barrels a day without UN approval.

Mr Powell stopped over briefly in Saudi Arabia, whose air bases are essential to the air exclusion zones imposed by the US and Britain over northern and southern Iraq.

Saudi Arabia joined in wider Arab condemnation of the raids carried out earlier this month on targets near Baghdad.

Mr Powell's tour coincides with the first significant United Nations discussions on Iraq in two years.

UN Secretary-General Kofi Annan is holding talks with an Iraqi delegation in New York on the possibility of lifting UN sanctions.

Air strikes

Many critics of the existing sanctions say they have damaged the health and welfare of ordinary Iraqis without restraining Saddam Hussein.

There will be no return for any inspectors to Iraq. Even the sanctions are totally lifted - because Iraq had implemented all the requirements of resolution 687

Iraqi Foreign Minister Mohammed Saeed al-Sahaf

International support for sanctions was further eroded by the latest air strikes.

Iraq wants the sanctions - in force since the Gulf War - to be lifted.

But the UN insists that arms inspectors, who left Iraq in 1998, should be allowed to return, to ensure Iraq has no weapons of mass destruction, nor the capacity to build them in the future.

No weapons inspectors

Iraq's foreign minister said Baghdad will not accept the return of UN weapons inspectors even if the sanctions against it are lifted.

Mohammed Saeed al-Sahaf, who heads the Iraqi delegation at the talks with Mr Annan, indicated that Baghdad might co-operate with a looser form of weapons monitoring, only if that was also applied to Israel's nuclear programme.

"There will be no return for any inspectors to Iraq. Even if the sanctions are totally lifted - because lifting the sanctions should be implemented without any further conditions. Iraq had implemented all the requirements of resolution 687, therefore there shouldn't be any additional conditions," Mr Sahaf said.

The BBC's New York correspondent, Mark Devenport, says Mr Annan can listen to these Iraqi arguments, but in practice he has little power to respond.

Three of the permanent members of the UN Security Council - France, Russia and China - are sympathetic to the notion that the UN's sanctions should either be lifted or dropped.

But the remaining two permanent members, the US and Britain, are not likely to be impressed by talk of despatching weapons monitors to Israel.