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Ammon News - AMMONNEWS - The United Arab Emirates is expected to resume airstrikes that it suspended after a Jordanian pilot was executed after being shot down over Syria last month, according to senior State Department officials.

UAE Foreign Minister Abdullah bin Zayed told Secretary of State John F. Kerry during a meeting Friday with Gulf diplomats that an announcement would be made within a few days, the officials, who spoke on condition of anonymity due to the sensitivity of the talks, said.

The officials said they believe the decision was based in part on the “outrage” the six Arab diplomats expressed over a video showing Lt. Muath al-Kaseasbeh caged and drenched in fuel before he was burned alive.

Before the UAE suspended its airstrikes, it was conducting them as part of a coalition fighting Islamic State militants in Syria and Iraq. Prior to the capture of the Jordanian pilot, coalition members had said they were concerned that U.S. search and rescue aircraft and troops in Kuwait were too far away to make a timely rescue and asked that they be placed in northern Iraq. In the case of Kaseasbeh, U.S. officials said they had immediately dispatched rescue aircraft to the crash site, but he no longer was there.

This week, U.S. officials said they had moved some search and rescue assets to the northern Iraq city of Irbil, addressing the concerns.

The UAE foreign minister did not say exactly why the country had changed its mind, the State Department officials said, but they believed the pilot's execution had played a role because the six Arab diplomats attending all expressed deep anger.

“There was outrage around the table about what had happened to pilot,” one of the officials said. “It was a unifying factor.”

Kerry spoke with the diplomats from the Gulf Cooperation Council — Bahrain, Oman, Qatar, Saudi Arabia, the UAE and Kuwait — shortly after he completed a two-hour meeting with Iranian Foreign Minister Mohammad Javad Zarif. Many of Iran’s neighbors, including the Gulf states, are concerned that Iran is on the threshold of developing nuclear weapons. The United States and five other world powers are negotiating with Tehran about reducing its nuclear capacity in exchange for easing economic sanctions. The Obama administration wants to have the major elements of a deal in place by late March.