Word: assad
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Dates: during 1980-1989
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...last week, after another prolonged period of anarchy in the Lebanese capital, Syrian President Hafez Assad took one of the biggest gambles of his 16 years in power. He sent 7,500 Syrian troops into West Beirut to try to restore order there -- a task that several countries, including the U.S., France, Israel and Syria itself, had previously tried without success. Was Assad about to become the latest victim of Lebanon's endless civil war, or could he restore peace to the troubled land...
...last time Assad sent in his army was in 1976. At that time the Syrians were trying to save the Maronite Christian forces from total defeat at the hands of an alliance of leftist Lebanese Muslims and the Palestine Liberation Organization, thereby disrupting the country's delicate balance of power. The Syrians ended up fighting the Christians they had come to save, suffered heavy casualties, and had to pull out of the Beirut area in a hurry after the Israelis invaded Lebanon...
...beat him brutally and then shot him to death. Over the next two weeks the masked hijackers, reinforced by fellow terrorists, threatened to blow up the aircraft, while they gradually released all but 39 of the original 153 passengers. The remaining captives were set free after Syrian President Hafez Assad intervened...
Stung by such signs of opprobrium, Syrian President Hafez Assad evidently embarked on a damage-control campaign by addressing the one issue that could restore some of Syria's image in the West: the 20 foreigners held hostage by Shi'ite extremists in Lebanon. As he has in the past when it served his purposes, notably in the release of TWA passengers hijacked to Beirut in 1985, Assad asserted his authority with the Shi'ite groups and apparently arranged for at least a token hostage release. Waite, whose patient efforts to end the hostage crisis were well known to Syria...
There was some speculation that Waite's negotiations this time involved hostages other than Americans, and perhaps went beyond Lebanon. According to a knowledgeable Israeli source, Assad was attempting a "multinational swap," a kind of coordinated release involving not just U.S. hostages but possibly those from Britain, France and Italy, and even an Israeli airman held in Lebanon. In Israel, the counterpart would presumably be the freeing of some or all of 108 Shi'ites being held in southern Lebanon by the Israeli-backed South Lebanon Army militia. It was not clear whether a grand swap would also involve other...