A slew of international crises will take center stage
this week as the UN General Assembly gathers in New York -
Syria's bloody civil
war, the possible appearance of Sudan's president despite an arrest warrant for
alleged genocide, and outrage over a massive US cyber spying program.
There are also some hopes for good news. Many
of the 193 UN member states are looking for signs of a thaw in relations
between arch-enemies Iran and the United States.
US officials say a meeting is possible between
President Barack Obama and Iran's newly elected centrist President Hassan
Rouhani, and if it happens, it would be the first meeting of U.S. and Iranian
government heads since before the 1979 revolution. That would mark a big change
from the annual rants in recent years against Israel and the United States by
Iran's former president, Mahmoud Ahmadinejad.
UN Secretary-General Ban Ki-moon said the top
agenda item will be Syria's 2-1/2-year civil war, which the United Nations says
has killed more than 100,000 people and displaced millions, who have been
forced to flee the country.
No one expects a breakthrough in the crisis
this week, though there may be approval of a UN resolution backing a US-Russian
plan to rid Syria of chemical arms.
The resolution to be considered by the UN
Security Council would back the U.S.-Russian plan to remove Syria's chemical
weapons by June 2014 to avoid U.S. air strikes.
That plan was agreed to as UN inspectors
confirmed sarin nerve gas was used in an Aug. 21 attack near Damascus that
killed over 1,400 people, many of them children, according to US estimates.
Reactions:
Russian President Vladimir Putin
warned ex-Soviet allies on Monday that Islamist militancy fuelling the war in
Syria could reach their countries, some of which have Muslim majorities.
Putin told leaders of the six-nation
Collective Security Treaty Organisation (CSTO) that militants fighting Assad
could eventually expand attacks beyond Syria and the Middle East.
"The militant groups (in
Syria) did not come out of nowhere, and they will not vanish into thin
air," Putin said.
"The problem of terrorism spilling
from one country to another is absolutely real and could directly affect the
interests of any one of our countries," he said, citing the deadly
attack on a shopping mall in Nairobi as an example.
This comes after Turkey's
President Abdullah Gul said his country will not "tolerate"
al-Qaeda-linked groups emerging in the Syrian conflict following fighting
between rebels and jihadists last week.
"We will not allow any
formation beyond our borders that would threaten Turkey and the entire
region," Gul was quoted as saying by a Turkish newspaper.
On the field:
An Al-Qaeda group in Syria says one of its top commanders in Syria was killed in an ambush by rival, Western-backed rebels in a northern province.
It was the latest in rising infighting among rebel groups in northern Syria, where the opposition controls large parts of territory captured from President Bashar Assad's troops earlier this year.
The group known as the Islamic State of Iraq and the Levant says its commander in Idlib province, Abu Abdullah al-Libi, was ambushed by members of the Free Syrian Army near a border crossing with Turkey.
The statement says the attackers sprayed the car with bullets on Sunday, killing al-Libi. The name is a nom de guerre.
The statement could not be independently confirmed but it was posted on a commonly-used militant website.
REUTERS