Word: ayatullah
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Dates: during 1980-1989
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According to Kuwaiti newspapers, the terrorist who drove into the U.S. compound was an Iraqi member of the banned Al Dawa party, a fundamentalist Muslim group with ties to Iran. For years, Ayatullah Ruhollah Khomeini has branded the U.S. as "the Great Satan." He is also angry with France for selling military equipment to Iraq and with Kuwait for supporting and underwriting Iraq in its three-year-old war against Iran. The Iraqi government of President Saddam Hussein immediately ordered missiles fired at five Iranian cities in retaliation...
Syria's ties with renegade non-Arab Iran, on the other hand, have been highly profitable for Damascus. When the Iran-Iraq war broke out in 1980, Assad, who has long been bitterly opposed to the Iraqi regime of Saddam Hussein, rushed to support the Ayatullah Ruhollah Khomeini. Aside from giving Damascus an estimated $600 million in cheap oil, the Ayatullah has bestowed his blessing on Assad's minority Alawites, a sect that most Sunnis consider heretical. In return, Damascus has shut down the Iraqi oil pipeline that slices across Syria to the Mediterranean, thereby slowing the flow of petrodollars...
...withdraw from the territory they had captured in the 1967 war. But in the past three years, as he has fought against internal challenges, Assad's regime has become increasingly bloody and repressive. In the region, he has aligned himself with two menacing Islamic nationalists, Iran's Ayatullah Ruhollah Khomeini and Libya's Muammar Gaddafi. By the time President Reagan announced his peace initiative last year, Assad was fearful of Israeli gains in Lebanon and disenchanted with U.S. diplomacy. In no mood for negotiations, Assad believed that foreigners had trifled with Syria long enough...
...cultivated Crown Prince Abdullah of Saudi Arabia, whose government has given Syria an estimated $6 billion over the past five years. He has worked to conciliate, and sometimes protect, P.L.O. Leader Yasser Arafat. Last summer President Reagan publicly thanked him when, through contacts in the Iranian regime of Ayatullah Khomeini, Rifaat secured the release of David Dodge, acting president of the American University in Beirut, who had been kidnaped the previous year and abducted to Iran...
...Crisis Game, a docudrama produced by ABC News' Nightline and broadcast for four nights running, was an extraordinary TV hybrid. Ten former high Government officials, acting the unscripted parts of a President and his National Security Council, coped with an imaginary U.S.-Soviet crisis set in 1985: Ayatullah Khomeini's death, Iranian civil war and Red Army battalions pouring across the Soviet border to join local Communist forces...