"We don't take them as a threat of military action against Syria," said Bussaina Shaaban, head of the ministry's information department, referring to US warnings for Syria to stay out of the war in neighbouring Iraq.

Both US Secretary of State Colin Powell and Defense Secretary Donald Rumsfeld have issued such warnings over the past week, amid mounting Syrian opposition to the US-led war in Iraq.

"Sometimes, the statements are coming from US officials against Syria, sometimes from Israeli officials, ... to target Syria because of its fair and objective stand, but Syria doesn't change its choices," Shaaban told reporters.

"The choice of Syria is to be for peace, with peaceful solutions for every issue in the region," she said, speaking in English.

The foreign ministry official said Syria's relations with the United States would remain strong, despite what she described as Israeli efforts to wreck such ties, and reiterated that Syria's position on the war would remain unchanged.

"Syria has always worked for good relations with the USA, and will always work for good relations. The vision of Syria is that there is no contradiction in interests between the USA and Syria in the region," said Shaaban.

"We believe that this aggression that is taking place against Iraq is in the long run not in the interest of the US people nor in the interest of the

Rumsfeld on March 28 accused Syria of allowing military supplies to transit across its territory into Iraq, and called this a "hostile act", while Powell later urged Damascus not to support Baghdad.

Syrian Foreign Minister Faruq al-Shara shot back Monday that he hoped US and British forces would be defeated in Iraq.

And President Bashar al-Assad charged in an interview in an Austrian daily that the United States had no real interest in a Middle East peace and instead wanted to "remodel" the region.

"The current American government gives no particular importance to the peace process," Assad told Der Standard in reference to efforts to revive peace talks between Israel and the Palestinians after the war in Iraq.

"They sometimes make proposals... but Israel rejects them. Israel does not want peace ... and the Americans have no vision," he said.

By waging war on Iraq, the United States has shown that it really "wants oil and to remodel the entire region," he said. "It will cause trouble around the entire world, not only here."

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