Dubai: Arab troops should be deployed to Syria to stop the killing there, Qatar’s Emir Shaikh Hamad Bin Khalifa Al Thani has told in an interview to US broadcaster CBS.
To a question whether he favoured Arab nations intervening in Syria, Shaikh Hamad said on Friday, “For such a situation to stop the killing...some troops should go to stop the killing.”
Shaikh Hamad is the first Arab leader to publicly suggest foreign intervention in Syria, where the uprising against President Bashar Al Assad is now in its tenth month.
Speaking about his own influence on the uprisings in the Arab world, he said: “We are supporting the people of those countries ... [who are] asking for justice and dignity.
Qatar Emir’s comments in a programme “60 Minutes” to be broadcast on Sunday came even as 28 people were killed on Friday in a crackdown by government forces against pro-democracy protesters across Syria, according to opposition activists.
The dead included children aged between 11 and 14, killed during a protest in the area of Hayeth, near the restive province of Hama, added the opposition.
More than 5,000 people, including at least 200 children, have been killed in the Syrian government’s crackdown on protests since they started in March, according to the United Nations.
In Washington, senior US officials told AFP that Iran is supplying munitions to aid Syria’s protest crackdown as part of a plan that saw Al Assad welcome Tehran’s revolutionary guards chief to Damascus.
Qasem Soleimani, commander of the Iranian Revolutionary Guards Corps elite Quds force, was in the Syrian capital this month, the official said, in what Washington sees as the most concrete sign yet that Iranian aid to Syria includes military hardware, the officials said.
Meanwhile, Lebanese officials said a man was killed by a bullet coming from the Syrian side of the border.
The officials say Lebanese citizen Hassan Obaid, 17, died in a clinic where he was rushed after being hit in the stomach in his northern hometown of Bkarha near the border with Syria.
Several Lebanese and Syrian citizens have been killed in border areas in Lebanon since an uprising in Syrian.
