Word: assad
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...official photograph of Syrian President Bashar Assad is extremely stern. The photos and murals of his father and predecessor Hafez Assad, still festooned throughout Syria, are leavened by the confident gaze and beneficent smile possible only for a dictator in total control. Bashar, however, stares off into the middle distance, working hard to convey vision and strength but avoiding direct eye contact with his subjects. Indeed, the younger Assad, an ophthalmologist by trade who became heir apparent only when his older brother was killed in an automobile crash, remains something of a mystery to just about everyone. "The question...
...Amin Gemayel: Syria says, ?We will withdraw when the Lebanese government asks us to withdraw.? On 1 September 1983, I sent a letter to then President Hafez Assad calling on the Syrian army to withdraw. Syria did not respond. The situation was more complex. We were in the middle of the Cold War and the Soviet Union was still there, with the balance of power. Maybe (U.S. support) was only words and good intentions. Everybody knows that the Syrian military presence in Lebanon had the blessing and the cover of the United States. It's very clear in the memoirs...
...TIME: Should the U.S. give guarantees of support to President Bashar Assad to help Syria absorb those dramatic effects...
...Syrian military officers went to Fallujah to assist insurgents before the U.S. assault on the city last fall. The official says it is "implausible" that the Syrian government was unaware of the officers' activities. In January, former U.S. Deputy Secretary of State Richard Armitage traveled to Damascus and gave Assad a list of 34 former Iraqi Baath officials allegedly supporting the insurgency from Syria that the U.S. wanted the regime to round up. A senior U.S. official tells TIME that the U.S. has pressed Syria to arrest Sulayman Khalid Darwish, a Syrian who Washington charges is not only the chief...
...officials say the harsh rhetoric last week was mainly intended to get Assad's attention, as were hints that the U.S. might authorize its troops in Iraq to conduct "hot pursuit" of insurgents across the border into Syria. The U.S. teamed up with France, long an influence in Lebanon, last fall to push through a U.N. Security Council resolution calling for all "foreign forces"--meaning Syria--to quit Lebanon. Damascus ignored it. French President Jacques Chirac, a personal friend of Hariri's, consoled the family in Beirut last week and may be more inclined to put real muscle behind...