Syria withdraws 2,000 troops

ABOUT 2,000 Syrian troops have pulled out of eastern Lebanon over the past week, a senior Lebanese security source said yesterday, bringing Syria a step closer to ending its 29-year military domination of Lebanon.

The source said small units in the eastern Bekaa Valley were going home, leaving behind a division of the Syrian army as well as scores of intelligence agents.

A Syrian-Lebanese military committee is due to meet next week to set a timeline for withdrawing the 8,000 remaining forces. UN Secretary-General Kofi Annan has said he expects Syria to complete the pull-out before general elections which are due in May.

Facing immense international pressure and popular Lebanese protest, Syria has promised to withdraw all the military personnel, intelligence agents and equipment it poured into Lebanon early in the country's 1975-1990 civil war.

Damascus has completed the first stage of a two-phase withdrawal plan, pulling back to the Bekaa Valley and withdrawing more than a third of the 14,000 troops which it maintained in its tiny neighbour.

It pulled troops out of about a dozen positions in the Bekaa last week.

On Sunday, it left its two largest and last anti-aircraft positions, the sources said.

Witnesses said soldiers in Mashghara and nearby areas on the southwestern edge of the Bekaa were packing up equipment on Monday. Trucks were being brought in to load the hardware.

A senior Lebanese Foreign Ministry official left for New York to attend Security Council deliberations over a new resolution setting up an international probe into last month's assassination of Lebanon's former prime minister Rafik al-Hariri.