Word: amman
(lookup in dictionary)
(lookup stats)
Dates: during 1970-1979
Sort By: most recent first
(reverse)
...fortified their strongholds round the refugee camps. Countless snipers took up positions on rooftops and at windows throughout the city. Once Hussein's armored units had battled their way into the capital, the fighting turned into a street-by-street encounter. Caught in the middle of the battle, Amman's 600,000 residents endured a week of agony. Most took refuge in their cellars, but many were buried alive when artillery began to pound the city. Quickly, electricity failed and the water supply was cut off. Though city dwellers were running out of food, Majali threatened that anyone...
Grimly the army's Bedouin soldiers stalked the streets, seeking guerrillas and occasionally looting shops. Many had their faces blackened, a traditional means of preventing identification and forestalling later feuds with the families of their victims. Amman became a city of sordid sounds-the crumbling of limestone buildings under the artillery barrage, the snap of rifle fire and the whoosh of shells, the cries of the wounded, and the wailing of women who had seen their families slain. In two of the biggest camps for Palestinian refugees, guerrillas insisted that at least 7,000 people had been killed...
Even as the street fighting continued in Amman, Hussein's generals turned their attention to a different kind of war in the countryside. Three days after the fighting began, a force of armored vehicles crossed the border from Syria at Ramtha, moving at night. The Syrians insisted that the force, numbering close to 5,000 men and including almost 250 tanks, belonged to the guerrillas' Palestine Liberation Army. Indeed, the vehicles did bear the red and olive-green emblems of the P.L.A. Actually, the emblems had been hastily painted, and most of the equipment and troops belonged...
Strange Departure. At week's end Sudan's Numeiry and the six-man delegation that accompanied him to Amman to arrange a truce finally got both sides to agree to a ceasefire. As the truce was going into effect, word reached Amman that Jordan's Premier Brigadier General Mohammed Daoud, who was named to that post only two weeks ago when Hussein set up an all-military Cabinet, had abruptly resigned. Daoud, in Cairo to attend the Arab summit, disappeared from his Nile Hilton hotel room, leaving a note for Hussein explaining that he was making...
...trapped in the Jordan Intercontinental Hotel (see THE PRESS) told of seeing Bedouins shooting a wounded fedai to death. Both army riflemen and fedayeen snipers fired on ambulances, and on one occasion guerrillas stole two Red Cross vehicles and converted them into ammunition carriers. The fedayeen lobbed mortars at Amman airport as planes landed to evacuate wounded Jordanians as well as U.S. and British women and children...