Word: assads
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...this week's World section story on Syria and its pivotal position in the Middle East peace equation, TIME Correspondents Karsten Prager and William Marmon were granted a rare interview with Syria's President Hafez Assad. Prager also talked to two of Assad's closest advisers: Major General Naji Jamil, head of the Syrian air force, and Major General Mustapha Tlas, the Defense Minister. Following an old Syrian gift-giving custom, Jamil presented Prager with a small air-force pin, smilingly suggesting that it might make it easier for Prager to be a military correspondent in Syria...
...extension of the U.N. force should be tied to a Security Council decision on rights for the Palestinians and to a peace treaty, within six months, calling for Israeli withdrawal from all territory occupied during the Six-Day War of 1967. In fact, last week Syrian President Hafez Assad suggested that the Security Council rather than Geneva should be the forum for future negotiations...
...finish to last week's mandate negotiations was a deliberate diplomatic ploy by the Syrian President. Assad has been described by Kissinger as "the most interesting man in the Middle East." He looks rather like an indulgent schoolteacher, but has been a crack jet pilot and commander of Syria's air force. In negotiations, he at first seems to waffle and waver, yet even Kissinger has come to respect his exquisite sense of timing and his decisiveness in the crunch. Outwardly modest and self-effacing, inwardly tough, Assad today appears to be consolidating his control of Syria...
Bitter Feud. Assad does not want another Middle East war so soon after 1973 (see box), and is testing diplomatic alternatives while keeping up his military guard. His brinkmanship act over the U.N. mandate last week was in part intended to show the world that Syria plans to regain all of the Golan Heights. Syria has refused to rebuild the ruined city of Quneitra, the ancient Golan capital given up by Israel in the 1974 disengagement agreement. Syrian officials delight in showing foreign visitors the remains of buildings bulldozed by the Israelis before they left...
...since the Syrian-Israeli disengagement in May 1974. The Syrian strategy seemed clearly designed to discredit Sadat in the Arab world on the eve of his departure to Washington. Damascus apparently intends to raise tension on the Golan to draw world attention to this unsolved problem, and President Hafez Assad has warned that Syria may not renew the U.N. force mandate, which expires on Nov. 30. By contrast, the peacekeeping-force mandate for the Sinai was approved last week by the Security Council by a vote of 13 to 0, with two abstentions...