Word: assad
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...firing from both sides went on into the weekend, as the diplomats labored to work out a halt. Christopher headed for Damascus on Saturday to talk with Hafez Assad, considered the linchpin to any solution: if he wants to, U.S. and Israeli officials believe, Assad can persuade Hizballah to stop shooting. But why should Assad play ball? His main objective is to regain possession of the Golan Heights, the portion of southwestern Syria that Israel captured in 1967. But exactly how he intends to get it back is unclear. "The Katyushas are a means of putting pressure on Israel," says...
Washington and Jerusalem both wonder whether Assad is really ready to make a serious deal. He agreed to a proposal for direct negotiations with Israel last year, but Peres suspended them in February after a wave of Palestinian suicide bombings made peace talks a political liability. Israelis and Syrians alike assumed the talks would begin again after the May 29 election, but the mess in Lebanon has raised doubts on all sides. Is Assad really interested in a peace agreement? If so, shouldn't he being keeping Lebanon quiet to avoid causing problems for Peres, who is more interested...
...necessarily. Western and Arab observers agree that it is not certain how well Assad controls Hizballah, even though it operates on his turf in Lebanon. The Shi'ite guerrilla force was founded in the early 1980s by radical Iranians. Assad, a secular politician who crushed his homegrown fundamentalists, did not publicly embrace Hizballah; he entrusted relations to his intelligence chiefs. The group has grown less extreme in recent years, sending delegates to the Lebanese parliament, but Hizballah is still closely tied to Tehran and remains as determined as ever to fight Israel. Yet it also seems to pay attention...
...Middle East peace process goes on--and not even the bloodshed in Lebanon stopped Peres and Palestinian leader Yasser Arafat from agreeing last week to start negotiating next month on a final settlement--Iran or Syria may have been growing uneasy. Some Syrians suspect Iran had concluded that Assad was about to sign a treaty with Israel and cranked up Hizballah to delay the process. Other analysts think Assad is worried about what disruption peace with Israel might bring to Syria's tightly controlled society and has decided to stall...
...even more complicated than that. Assad wants all of the Golan back, and Israel wants a full peace with Syria, including diplomatic and trade relations. But Israel is willing to return the Golan territory only slice by slice, testing at each stage to see if the peace is real. Given those unsatisfactory terms, Assad may have decided that it makes no difference whether Peres the peacemaker or Netanyahu the hard-liner is in office in Jerusalem. "Syrians were very hopeful that Peres would take a big step," says Ibrahim Hamidi, a Damascus-based journalist. "Either Peres couldn...