Word: assad
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Dates: during 1980-1989
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Shultz is reporting to Assad that the U.S. plan for Middle East peace talks ran into a dead-end in Israel and Jordan...
DAMASCUS, Syria--Secretary of State George P. Shultz yesterday met with President Hafez Assad to report on the Moscow summit and the faltering U.S. plan to set up Arab-Israeli peace negotiations...
...extending Syria's security role beyond the western part of Beirut, Assad reinforced his position as Lebanon's leading power broker. At the same time, he managed to preserve a relatively cordial relationship with Iran, which had given its blessing to Hizballah's negotiators. Iran's cooperation may have been motivated in part by the battlefield losses it has suffered recently in the eight-year-old gulf war with Iraq. Last week Iraqi troops recaptured Iranian-occupied territory east of the Shatt al-Arab waterway, beyond the battered southern port city of Basra...
Iranian acceptance of the Syrian army's entry into the Beirut suburbs was thus perhaps a gesture of gratitude for the support Assad has given Iran throughout the conflict in the gulf. Iran could also claim that the peaceful solution prevented certain Hizballah defeat in Beirut had Syria used force, as it threatened to several times...
Some diplomats suggested that the Syrians' expanded security role in Beirut could improve prospects for the release of foreign hostages, including nine Americans, believed held by pro-Iranian militants in the Shi'ite neighborhoods. In his desire to regain respectability following Western charges of Syrian involvement in international terrorism, Assad would like to reap credit for seeing the hostages freed. A Western diplomat in Damascus described the security plan for the suburbs as "a move in the right direction...