BEIRUT - Mock street signs have gone up on Beirut's airport road giving the thumbs down to UN Security Council Resolution 1559 which directs Syrian troops to pull out of Lebanon.
A "STOP" hangs over a "1559" sign, and the road is also dotted with several red-bordered warnings of avalanches ahead or dead end signs.
"Resistance - The True Way," reads one sign, referring to the Shiite Muslim movement Hezbollah, whose fighters won credit for the withdrawal of Israeli troops from south Lebanon in May 2000 after two decades of occupation.
Beirut motorists are also being advised: "No to Foreign Interference."
Washington and Paris sponsored Resolution 1559, passed last September, that calls for the withdrawal of all foreign troops and for militias such as Hezbollah's guerrillas to be disarmed.
Syrian Foreign Minister Faruq al-Shara in a letter to UN chief Kofi Annan on Tuesday pledged that Syria would pull its troops out before Lebanon's parliamentary elections due by the end of May.
On the roads of eastern Lebanon, the Syrian army continued Wednesday for an eighth consecutive day to dismantle positions in the Bekaa Valley as it pressed on with a troop pullout.
Dozens of military trucks and vehicles were seen heading for the border.
Some 10 trucks loaded with files and office furniture also left the Syrian headquarters in Lebanon in the border town of Anjar, where the powerful military intelligence chief, General Rustom Ghazele, is based.
Syria, whose troops were first deployed in Lebanon in 1976 to serve as a buffer between warring sides, has said it is pulling out under an accord which ended the 1975-1990 civil war, and not under international pressure.
But pressure has been piled on Damascus since the February 14 assassination of Lebanon's former premier Rafiq Hariri in a Beirut bomb blast which the opposition blamed on the government and its Syrian backers.
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