US to send two envoys to Syria: Hillary

The United States will send two envoys to Syria, Secretary of State Hillary Clinton said yesterday.
"We are going to be sending two officials to Syria," Clinton said.
"There are a number of issues we have between Syria and the United States as well as the larger regional concerns that Syria obviously poses."
The officials are Jeffrey Feltman, undersecretary of state for the Middle East, and Daniel Shapiro, a senior official from the White House. The pair are currently travelling with Hillary Clinton and will leave for Damascus when the secretary leaves Israel on Wednesday.
The pair will "explore with Syria some of these bilateral issues".
"We have no way to predict what the future of our relations concerning Syria might be," she said. "We don't engage in discussions for the sake of having conversations.
"There has to be a purpose to them, there has to be a perceived benefit for the US."
Hillary Clinton exchanged a few words with her Syrian counterpart Walid Muallem during an international conference on Gaza reconstruction in Egypt on Monday.
US-Syrian ties were especially tense under president George W. Bush's administration, which accused Damascus of supporting terrorism and of turning a blind eye to the flow of arms and supplies to insurgents in neighbouring Iraq.
Relations deteriorated sharply after the February 2005 assassination of Lebanese ex-premier Rafiq Hariri in a Beirut bombing widely blamed on Syria. Damascus has repeatedly denied any involvement.
But US President Barack Obama has promised to pursue "principled and sustained" engagement with all Middle Eastern states, including Syria.
And earlier this month several leading US Congressmen including Senator John Kerry visited Damascus for talks with President Bashar al-Assad.