LONDON (IRNA) -- The close relationship between Damascus and Tehran is ‘very important’ to the Middle East, according to Syrian Ambassador to the UK Sami Khiyami.

“The relations are very strategic,” Khiyami said. “It is not because Iran has blue eyes but because they are positive to the region,” he said.
“Iran is of great stability in the Middle East,” he said. Syria, he said, was seeking to convince its Arab brothers to open a better dialogue with Iran.
The ambassador was speaking in an interview with IRNA in which he rejected reports that the latest attempts by the West and Israel to improve their relations with Syria were allegedly aimed to isolate Damascus from Tehran.
Such claims, he said, were ‘all the imagination of the media, who don’t like Syria and Iran’.
Recent re-engagements with Damascus by the West ‘had nothing to do with Iran’. “Syria decides its own foreign relations,” Khiyami emphasized.
“At no point were any discussions about Syria keeping distance from Iran,” he said.
On the contrary, he suggested that French President Nicolas Sarkozy asked Syrian President Bashar al-Assad openly to improve dialogue with Iran.
“President Assad promised to make the Iranian position clear to the West to help remove misunderstandings,” the ambassador also added.
Recent talks with David Miliband also indicated that the British foreign secretary wanted to know the ‘real intentions of Iran’, he further said.
He went as far as speculating that the UK may be wanting a dialogue with Tehran in future.
He believed the reason for the rapprochements, were that the British, French and others ‘understood the failure’ of trying to create a siege around Syria.
The West has to find a solution to Israel’s occupation of territories in the Middle East, Khiyami told IRNA.
The region, he suggested, was ‘at a crossroads’.
He said there were two options in the Middle East based upon confrontation or negotiations. There was ‘no way to defend the existence of Israel’ if people become frustrated and hearts and minds would move in support of resistance and the Palestinians.
The ambassador also adamantly dismissed claims that indirect talks with Israel were aimed at isolating Damascus from Tehran as alleged by Israeli President Shimon Peres.
Contacts were about the return of the occupied Golan Heights and the ‘main one issue was to identify the line’ for Israel’s withdrawal, he said.
“Why should Syria sacrifice something that has nothing to do with relations” between Damascus and Tehran, Khiyami rhetorically asked.
“Why create a problem where there is no problem?”
He said, “The return of the Golan would make a new situation” in the Middle East,” adding that he did not think Israel was ready for peace, criticizing its arrogance.
On relations with Washington, the ambassador criticized the recent American attack on Syria near the Iraqi border, saying ‘sometimes the U.S. acts if it has no plan at all in the region’.
He said he did not know what level of clearance was made for the attack but that Washington did not want to apologize, though he believed that there had been an assurance from the Iraqi government not to repeat such mistakes.
With regard to the election of president-elect Barack Obama, Khiyami said the he had no information on what his policies would be only that he had promised to open a dialogue with both Syria and Iran.
“We hope he is a man of peace, a man of dialogue,” he said, but added that he did not know if Obama would be strong enough to stand up to the Zionist and other lobbies in the U.S.