The Arab League has not received any official request or suggestion that it send Arab troops to Syria, an Arab representative to the Cairo-based League told Reuters Sunday.
Qatar's emir, Sheikh Hamad bin Khalifa al-Thani, said on Saturday Arab troops may have to step in to halt the bloodshed in Syria since the start of protests against President Bashar al-Assad in March.
The Arab League should consider sending troops to Syria as proposed by Qatar's emir, Amr Mussa, the bloc's former secretary general, said Sunday.
"There is no official suggestion to send Arab troops to Syria at the current time. There has been no Arab or a non-Arab agreement on a military intervention in Syria for the time being," the representative to the League said.
There is little appetite in the West for any Libya-style intervention in Syria, although France has talked of a need to set up zones to protect civilians there. Western nations have no immediate plans for military action to stop the repression of protests in Syria, British Foreign Secretary William Hague said Sunday.
It was far from clear if Arab countries would be willing to beef up the team of civilian monitors currently in Syria, let alone send in troops without broader international support.
It was also not clear if Qatar envisaged the troops playing a peace enforcement or other role. An earlier idea of asking the United Nations to provide technical support and experts to bolster the Arab monitoring team has, so far, made little headway.
The United Nations says more than 5,000 people have been killed since March. Syrian officials say 2,000 members of security forces have been killed by armed "terrorists."
Syria's President Bashar al-Assad has decreed a general amnesty for crimes committed during unrest in the country over the past 10 months, the official SANA news agency said yesterday.
Reuters - AFP