DAMASCUS: Syrian Foreign Minister Walidal-Moualem said resuming peace talks with Israel would be useless without a commitment by the Jewish state to withdraw from the Golan Heights. Responding cautiously to an Israeli offer to open the talks without preconditions, Moualem reiterated Syrian calls for an Israeli commitment to restore the Golan and described it as "not a precondition but a requirement for peace". "If Israel does not honour these requirements then there is no point of conducting useless negotiations," Moualem said. "Negotiations will be futile if there is no true Israeli will to make peace and no U.S. involvement. We will not go back to wasting time," he told Syrian state television.
BAGHDAD: Nearly 500 U.S. Army combat engineers who specialize in clearing roads of explosives started shifting to southern Afghanistan."We are probably going to be the beginning of the influx you are going to see to Afghanistan," Lt. Col. Kevin Landers, commander of the Fort Carson, Colo.-based 4th Engineer Battalion, said as crews packed crates and cleaned vehicles for the flight to Kandahar.Obama has ordered 17,000 more U.S. soldiers and Marines to Afghanistan to bolster the 38,000 American troops already battling the resurgent Taliban."We are going to take this footprint out of Iraq," said Landers, whose battalion received word of its reassignment last month just after taking command of clearing roads in Baghdad of bombs and debris.
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