UNITED NATIONS – America ratcheted up diplomatic pressure on Damascus yesterday, urging Syrian forces to leave Lebanon, a neighboring nation occupied since 1979.

“The time has come for the Syrian military to withdraw from Lebanon,” said the American ambassador in Beirut, Vincent Battle. It is time for Lebanon to “exercise its sovereignty on the ground of its own interests,” he told the local daily An-Nahar.

The Bush administration has been disappointed with Bashar al-Assad’s government for not cooperating with antiterrorism effort as well as the role Syria is playing in Iraq. A report yesterday in the Washington Times increased suspicion that Syria helped smuggle weapons of mass destruction out of Iraq prior to the war.

According to the report, guards stationed on the border between the two countries were replaced on the eve of the war by Saddam’s own intelligence officers.

The maneuver, discovered by the Iraq Survey Group, which was formed by Washington to discover what happened to Iraq’s suspected weapons, could have been designed to oversee smuggling weapons into Syria.

A boost in the activity of truck convoys traveling between Syria and Iraq was observed by surveillance satellites on the eve of the war, according to both Israeli and American sources. As of yet, no proof has been made public that those trucks carried illicit weapons.

The London-based Al Hayat newspaper reported last month that during Prime Minister Allawi’s recent visit to Syria, the Iraqi leader showed documents proving the existence of up to $800 million of Iraqi money in Syrian banks, according to the Middle East Research Institute.

The ambassador’s call for Syria to withdraw from Lebanon was also made by a Congressional delegation headed by Rep. Christopher Shays, a Republican of Connecticut, which met over the weekend with Lebanon’s president, Emile Lahoud, and Mr. al-Assad.

Also, a former American public delegate to the United Nations, Walid Maalouf, told An-Nahar that Lebanon’s foreign policy is controlled by Syria. “At the U.N., Lebanese diplomats do not take the slightest initiative but simply wait for the orders of Syrian diplomats,” Mr. Maalouf, who is of Lebanese descent, told the paper.

Sanctions were imposed on Syria by Mr. Bush after Congress passed the Syrian Accountability Act, which demanded that Damascus quit its pursuit of weapons of mass destruction, end support for terrorists, and withdraw its forces from Lebanon.

Syria has occupied Lebanon since the 1979 TAIF accord, reached with the help of the Arab League, called on its troops to help enforce the end of the civil war. Damascus conditioned its troop withdrawal on Israel’s, but in 2000 the U.N. affirmed Israel’s complete withdrawal from Lebanon.