Syria vows full withdrawal from Lebanon before elections

Syrian Foreign Minister Faruq al-Shara made the vow in a letter to UN Secretary General Kofi Annan, which also angrily rejected a UN report last week on the assassination of former Lebanese prime minister Rafiq Hariri.

Shara outlined "the full withdrawal of those forces, which it will undertake before the next election in Lebanon," according to AFP's translation of the Arabic original.

Syrian UN ambassador Fayssal Mekdad said that Damascus was "definitely" committed to the pull-out of the troops, first sent during Lebanon's brutal 1975-1990 civil war, with a timetable to be set in the coming days.

"When we entered into Lebanon, we entered to stop the civil war, to stop the division of the people, to stop the killing. These are issues that during the past many years we have achieved," Mekdad told AFP.