Saudi Arabia on Sunday urged the world to stop Syria's government from attacks on its people but didn't explicitly endorse a Western-led strike against Syrian President Bashar al-Assad's regime.
"We call upon the international community with all its powers to stop this aggression against the Syrian people," the country's foreign minister, Prince Saud al Faisal, told reporters in Cairo, where Arab foreign ministers are to meet later Sunday on the Syrian crisis.
Prince Faisal called for the question of Western intervention in Syria to be put to the Syrian people, without specifying who would speak for Syrians, or how. "They know their interests, so whatever they accept, we accept, and whatever they refuse, we refuse," he said.
Saudi Arabia for more than a year has been the loudest advocate internationally of action against Mr. Assad's regime. Still, Saudi Arabia hasn't publicly supported President Barack Obama's proposed U.S.-led air campaign in response to the Assad regime's alleged use of chemical weapons on Aug. 21. No Arab government has done so either, in a region historically reluctant to call for attacks on fellow Arab nations.
Mr. Obama's decision Saturday to postpone military action on Syria pending U.S. congressional debate appears to have thrown into disarray Arab leaders' plans to acquiesce, silently, to a U.S.-led strike. Administration officials have cited Mr. Obama's inability to build an international military coalition as one factor in the U.S. leader's decision to postpone.
The Saudi foreign minister spoke bitterly Sunday of the United Nations, where Russia and China, allies of Syria, are blocking any resolution on the use of force.
"There is no capacity in the Arab world to respond to this kind of crisis," Prince Faisal told reporters. "Therefore we look to the U.N. Security Council."
