Word: assad
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Dates: during 1980-1989
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...seized by Muslim Shi'ite terrorists 62 days earlier in one of Beirut's southern suburbs. Having somehow escaped, he had fled to the right place: the hotel is a heavily guarded sanctuary of Lebanon's Druze community, which is closely aligned with the Syrian government of President Hafez Assad...
...series of spectacular terrorist acts. They released Osseiran and his bodyguard-driver a week later, but kept Glass captive. Significantly, Glass's abduction was the first since Syrian troops had arrived in February in an attempt to restore order. The kidnaping was thus a personal affront to President Assad, who had vowed that the Muslim half of Beirut would henceforth be secure from such outrages...
...Syrians had been angered by Glass's abduction, they were shocked by last month's incident in Saudi Arabia at the holy city of Mecca, where thousands of Iranian Shi'ite pilgrims staged a bloody riot against Saudi authority. This, in turn, caused other Arab leaders to urge Assad to stop supporting Iran in the gulf war -- a step that would cost him his right to buy Iranian oil at heavily discounted prices. According to Syrian diplomats, Damascus has warned Iran against widening the war to include any other Arab states...
Until now, the Shi'ite rulers of Iran have been successful in exporting their revolution to Lebanon. Assad welcomed Khomeini's Revolutionary Guards when they arrived in Lebanon in 1982 to help fight off the Israeli invasion. Some 2,000 stayed on after the war to assist Hizballah in the Shi'ite strongholds in the Bekaa Valley and southern Lebanon. Assad was still delighted when Lebanon's militant Shi'ites unleashed their ferocious fighting power against the Israeli occupation forces in the south and against the U.S.-led multinational peacekeeping force in Beirut. By that time Shi'ite political power...
Tehran's ties with Hizballah have put it into conflict with its friends as well. Though Syria depends on Iran for much of its oil, relations between the two countries have deteriorated recently over events in Lebanon. Hizballah fought Syria's forces after Syrian President Hafez Assad sent troops into Beirut last February to restore law-and-order. Now Hizballah-set bombs explode almost nightly near Syrian military posts in the Lebanese capital. Hizballah's most serious provocation came in June, when the group kidnaped U.S. Journalist Charles Glass near a Syrian checkpoint that was supposedly guarding the area...