World leaders meet to discuss war-hit countries
World leaders kick off three days of talks at the Munich on war-hit countries.
MUNICH - World leaders, ministers and top military brass kick off three days of talks at the Munich Security Conference later on Friday with the spotlight on Syria, Mali and Iran.
US Vice President Joe Biden will be among the line-up and kicked off a three-nation European tour warning Iran that the opportunity for talks with the West over Tehran s contested nuclear programme was not open-ended.
A day after meeting Chancellor Angela Merkel in Berlin, freshly-inaugurated Biden is due to address participants in Munich on Saturday and turn his attentions to Syria amid fears the conflict may spill over the country s borders.
He is scheduled to meet Russian Foreign Minister Sergei Lavrov and Syrian opposition chief Moaz al-Khatib, and also see UN-Arab League envoy to Syria Lakhdar Brahimi in the southern German city, the White House said.
US Secretary of State Hillary Clinton said Iran is stepping up support for the Syrian regime and that Russia is still arming it, heightening concerns after Damascus threatened to retaliate over a reported Israeli air raid.
"What we would like to see from other countries, including Russia, is an acknowledgment that (Syrian President) Bashar al-Assad must go and that there needs to be a transition within Syria to a new government," said Ben Rhodes, a White House national security adviser.
NATO s plan to withdraw the bulk of its 100,000 combat troops from Afghanistan by the end of 2014 as well as developments in the Muslim and Arab world two years after the Arab Spring revolts are also set to be themes here.
German Finance Minister Wolfgang Schaeuble joins a discussion on the euro crisis later Friday, when energy issues are also a focus.
Iranian Foreign Minister Ali Akbar Salehi is expected to attend the Munich talks as well as EU foreign policy chief Catherine Ashton, who represents the so-called P5+1 group of the United States, China, Russia, Britain, France and Germany in talks on Iran s nuclear ambitions.
"President (Barack) Obama has made clear that containment is not an option. We will prevent Iran from getting a nuclear weapon," Germany s Sueddeutsche Zeitung daily quoted Biden as saying.
"We think there is time and space for diplomacy -- accompanied with economic pressure. But this window will not be open for an unlimited time," Biden, who also attended the Munich conference in 2009, said in remarks published in German.
Iran and the six world powers held three rounds of talks last year aimed at easing the standoff over Iran s nuclear activities, which Tehran insists are entirely peaceful, but the last round ended in stalemate in June in Moscow.
Another round of talks was initially expected to be held in December or January but a date and a location have still not been set amid indications that neither side is prepared to change substantially its position.
Mali, where France launched an offensive on January 11 as Islamists who had ruled the country s north for months advanced south towards the capital Bamako, is also set to focus minds in Munich.
Germany, which has offered three transport planes to help in the Mali mission, has faced questions at home and abroad over why it has failed to match its economic might as Europe s effective paymaster with military commitments.
Wolfgang Ischinger, the former German diplomat in charge of the Munich conference, said expectations on Germany had grown as it was perceived globally as a European leader.
"We cannot, on the one hand, want to significantly determine the future economic and financial fate of Europe and, on the other, stand in the second row on security policy decisions," he told the online edition of the Frankfurter Allgemeine daily.
