Reading arabic text from sql server using php results in question marks "?????"
===

I've been working around with this issue for a while now I have searched all related topics here and else where but no use, it seems to be an encoding problem. 
I am performing a data migration from sql server to mysql. I have some arabic data stored in sql server 2005 with the collation SQL_Latin1_General_CP1_CI_AS, the data fields are stored as nvarchar and nText. I have created a PHP application to read the data and then store them in mysql. I have tried first to echo the read data, the result was always question marks "?????" - I have set the charset for the web page to be UTF-8. In order to figure out the encoding of the data I have used mb_detect_encoding() function and the result was ASCII, I even tried some encoding conversion but no use. 
here is a snap shot of my code.

    echo $row['nid'] . " , " .iconv("windows-1252", "UTF-8", $row['title']); 
	echo $row['nid'] . " , " .iconv("CP1256", "UTF-8", $row['title']);
	echo $row['title'];
	echo mb_detect_encoding($row['title']);
	$data = mb_convert_encoding($row['title'], 'windows-1252', 'UTF-8');
	echo $data;
	echo "<br> بسم الله";


The result of the above code is question marks ?????? except for the last arabic text and the nid field which is stored as a number.
How can I solve this problem. any help appreciated. 
ps. I am using mssql php extension to connection to sql server.



