Word: assad
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Dates: during 1970-1979
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...struggles involving Moslems are more complicated than that intransigent doctrine. Arab leaders like Egypt's Anwar Sadat and Syria's Hafez Assad are not encouraging the rhetoric of holy war. Arabs are not theologically blinded to the larger secular issues of international power. In Lebanon, for example, a tangled social history has preceded what might seem at first glance an essentially religious struggle. The roots lay in the creation by the French in 1920 of a greater Lebanon from the remnants of the defeated Ottoman Empire. This Lebanon combined a predominantly Maronite Christian area, which...
...patch up their differences. The Prime Ministers agreed to stop hostile propaganda against each other, to resume full diplomatic relations, to form a joint commission for working out a strategy toward Israel, and to arrange a summit conference between Egyptian President Anwar Sadat and Syria's Hafez Assad...
...leader of the Lebanese left, Kamal Jumblatt, were under pressure to come to an accommodation. Beirut remained under Syrian siege, its food and gasoline supplies severely depleted, its hospitals filled with the victims of continuing sporadic fighting between right and left. If the end was not in sight, Assad's pressure gamble appeared to be making slow headway. "Middle East crises have a habit of zigging and zagging unexpectedly," cabled TIME Middle East Correspondent Wilton Wynn from Damascus, "but for the moment Assad seems to be ahead of the game...
Cease-Fire. In many ways, however, Syrian President Hafez Assad's decision to force a solution in Lebanon gave the conflict a potentially more dangerous dimension than it had had during the 14 months of fighting between Lebanese leftists, who are allied with the Palestinians, and Christian rightists. The Syrian incursion openly brought several Arab regimes into an arena in which they had all along been playing covert and opposing roles. There was thus the danger that Lebanon would remain a theater of quarrels between the moderate and radical Arab states now directly intervening in the country. The rightist...
...latest developments really originated in the occupation by Assad's forces of the center of Lebanon's strategic Bekaa Valley earlier this month (TIME, June 14). That move, at first conducted with limited forces, firmly convinced the Lebanese left that Syria's sympathies lay with Lebanon's hard-pressed Christian rightists. For the bulk of Yasser Arafat's P.L.O., it seemed incontrovertible proof that Damascus was intent on emasculating the fedayeen in their last haven in the Arab world, as part of a more subtle movement toward an eventual wider settlement with Israel...