Syria denies Al Shara'a criticised Saudi Arabia

Damascus: Syria has said that recent comments by the country's vice-president reputedly criticising Saudi Arabia were misreported, an attempt to quell growing tension over the remarks.

Saudi Arabia lashed out at Syria on Thursday after Vice-President Farouk Al Shara'a reportedly said the kingdom - the Mideast's key Sunni power player - had become semi-paralysed and was to blame for Palestinian infighting.

But Syria's official Sana news agency quoted an unnamed official on Saturday as denying Al Shara'a criticised Saudi Arabia. Instead, he stressed his country's desire to heal the rift with Riyadh.

"The brotherhood between the Syrian and Saudi people is a real one that has withstood different crises ... and Syria is aimed at reviving Arab solidarity and strengthening it to serve the national and pan-Arab interest," the official was quoted as saying.

Relations between the kingdom and Damascus have grown increasingly worse, with the two deeply divided over Syria's ties to Iran and the Shiite Hezbollah group in Lebanon.

The relations in particular soured after Syrian President Bashar Al Assad, in a speech following last summer's Israel-Hezbollah war, described leaders of Saudi Arabia, Egypt and Jordan as half-men for their failure to act to stop the violence.

Saudi Arabia was markedly absent from a key regional meeting earlier this month of a newly created security committee on Iraq that took place in Damascus.

Meanwhile, a Syrian former vice-president turned opposition leader said in remarks published on Sunday that his successor's criticism of Saudi Arabia was part of Damascus's policy of cutting links with Arabs and moving closer to Iran.

"(Vice-President) Al Shara'a's remarks are part of the policy pursued by the ruling clique, which aims at severing Syrian links with the Arab world and tying it further to Iran's regional strategy," Abdul Halim Khaddam told the Saudi daily Al Watan from his Paris exile.

Khaddam, who resigned as Syrian vice president in 2005 to join the opposition, said that the Damascus regime's "campaign against Saudi Arabia" should be seen in the context of Iran's regional strategy and Syria's role in it.

This is because Saudi Arabia "constitutes one of the main barriers to Iranian hegemony in the region, be it in the Gulf, Iraq, Palestine or Lebanon," he said.

Khaddam, a powerful and wealthy figure of the Baathist regime which has ruled Syria with an iron fist for more than four decades, was commenting on the row sparked by Shara'a's criticism of the kingdom.