Assad heads for Tehran despite renewed talks with Israel

Syrian President Bashar Assad is expected to head east next weekend for a brief two-day visit in neighboring Iran – Iranian news agency FARS reported on Thursday.

Assad is to meet with ally and counterpart, President Mahmoud Ahmadinejad, and the agenda will likely center on Tehran's nuclear ambitions and the recently resuscitated peace negotiations between Damascus and Jerusalem.

Assad will land in Iran next Saturday to considerable stately fanfare. Ahmadinejad himself will head out to meet the Syrian president at the airport upon arrival.

He will also meet with Iranian police top brass on various security matters pertaining to the two countries shared region. Estimates indicate Assad will share details of his meetings with French President Nicolas Sarkozy with his hosts. France, which maintains close ties with its former colony, is keen on extracting Syria from its alliance with Tehran and bringing it closer to the international community.

Earlier this week Syrian Foreign Affairs Minister, Walid al-Muallem, paid a visit to Tehran and also met

with Ahmadinejad. The Iranian president pledged he would work to strengthen the relationship between the two nations, to the discontentment of Israel and the United States.

Hosting his guest in Tehran, Ahmadinejad emphasized that he had no intention of letting any outside factor impact the strategic alliance between Iran and Syria.

"The deeper our regional cooperation is, the more beneficial this will be to the nations in the area and the more this will impair our enemies," he said.

But despite the strongly-worded rhetoric from his host, Al-Muallem was quoted by the IRNA news agency on the sidelines of a conference in Tehran for the Non-Aligned Movement as saying that Syria "is doing everything in its power to ensure the success of our talks with Israel."

Meanwhile a fresh round of indirect peace talks between Israel and Syria concluded on Wednesday. Mediated by Turkey, a fifth round of the talks is expected sometime in August, a senior source close to the negotiations said.