OIC members set to suspend Syria

RIYADH/ALEPPO—Leaders of Muslim countries are expected to suspend Syria’s membership of the Organisation of Islamic Cooperation at a summit in Mecca on Wednesday, despite the vocal objections of President Bashar Assad’s main ally Iran.

The decision by the 57-member organization, which requires a two-thirds majority, will expose the divisions within the Islamic world over how to respond to civil war in a country that straddles the Middle East’s main sectarian fault line.

In an apparent conciliatory gesture, Saudi state television showed King Abdullah welcoming leaders to the summit with Iran’s President Mahmoud Ahmadinejad at his side. Abdullah and Ahmadinejad were shown talking and laughing together.

“It was a message to the Irani- an nation and, I assume, to the Saudi people, that we are Muslim and we have to work together and forget about our differences,” said Abdullah al-Shammari, a Saudi political analyst.

Syria’s mainly Sunni Muslim rebels are backed by Sunni-ruled Arab states such as Saudi Arabia and Qatar as well as Turkey, while Shi’ite Iran supports Assad, a member of the Alawite minority sect, an offshoot of Shi’a Islam.

Those divisions have stymied diplomatic efforts to halt the bloodshed in Syria, where opposition sources say 18,000 people have been killed, and have raised the prospect of Syria becoming a proxy battlefield for outside powers.

Assad’s former prime minister, Riyad Habib, a Sunni who defected this month, made his first public appearance on Tuesday since he fled, telling a news conference in Jordan that Assad controls less than a third of Syria and his power is crumbling.

“The regime is collapsing, spiritually and financially, as it escalates militarily,” he said. “It no longer controls more than 30 percent of Syrian territory.”

Hijab was not in Assad’s inner circle, but as the most senior civilian official to defect, his defection after two months in the job was a blow to the president.

Hijab did not explain his estimate of the territory still controlled by Assad, whose military outnumbers and outguns the rebels fighting to overthrow him. The Army is battling to re- gain control of Aleppo, Syria’s biggest city, after retaking parts of Damascus that were seized by insurgents last month.

Curbs on media access make it hard to know how much of Syria is in rebel hands, but most towns and cities along the country’s backbone, a highway running from Aleppo in the north to Deraa in the south, have been swept up in the violence, and Assad has lost swathes of land on Syria’s northern and eastern border.