More Arab kings and presidents have joined the list of leaders staying away from an Arab summit hit by a campaign to punish the Syrian hosts for backing the Lebanese opposition.

The Yemeni vice president will represent his country and Jordan will send only its permanent representative at the Arab League to the annual two-day meeting which opens on Saturday - more snubs to an event Syria had hoped would dispel the impression that it is isolated in the region.

The Lebanese government is boycotting the event, and its closest allies - Saudi Arabia and Egypt - announced earlier this week that they would send low-level delegations. Bahrain, which is close to the Saudis, sent a deputy prime minister.

Syrian Foreign Minister Walid Al Moualem said the US had put pressure on Arab leaders to stay away to try and foil the summit.

'Unfortunately they did their best to prevent this summit but I can tell you they failed because tomorrow you will see a very successful summit with convenient leaders present and also with important resolutions,' he told reporters.

Diplomats and commentators agreed with the Syrian view that Washington had been the driving force behind the campaign to dissuade Arab leaders from going to Syria, which prides itself on its resistance to US and Israeli policies.

'The Americans have been working on ensuring low-level representation in the run-up to the summit. We are seeing now a snowball effect,' said one diplomat in the Syrian capital.

Another diplomat noted that Saudi Arabia made its decision shortly after US Vice President Dick Cheney visited the kingdom last week.

Veteran Syrian journalist Thabet Salem said Syria still aimed to show it was a 'no surrender' country whose policies were in line with popular Arab sentiment.

'The United States has been working non-stop to weaken the summit, which confirms the emergence of two axes in the Arab world. Syria is virtually alone on one side,' Salem said.

The longstanding political dispute in Lebanon has dominated preparations for the summit, which would normally concentrate on the Israeli-Palestinian conflict, an Arab peace initiative first launched in 2002 and the problems in Iraq and the Darfur region of western Sudan.

But this year conservative Arab leaders tried to use the threat of a poor turnout at the summit to put pressure on Syria to give the green light to the election of a new Lebanese president on terms acceptable to the Lebanese government and parliamentary majority, diplomats say.-Reuters