Word: bashar
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Dates: during 2000-2009
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...week and a half in April 2005, one of the favorite warlords of fugitive Taliban leader Mullah Mohammed Omar was sitting in a room at the Embassy Suites Hotel in lower Manhattan, not far from where the Twin Towers of the World Trade Center once stood. But Haji Bashar Noorzai, the burly, bearded leader of one of Afghanistan's largest and most troublesome tribes, was not on a mission to case New York City for a terrorist attack. On the contrary, Noorzai, a confidant of the fugitive Taliban overlord, who is a well-known ally of Osama bin Laden...
...Saddam's hanging has removed the last Arab strongman willing to fight the fundamentalists in the name of Arab secularism. (The sole remaining candidate is Syrian President Bashar Assad, but his lack of military clout and key alliance with the non-Arab Islamic Republic of Iran undermine his claim to the mantle.) Nor is there much prospect that liberal Arabs will present a new, democratic alternative any time soon. Instead, in Iraq and elsewhere in the Middle East, the future increasingly belongs to the Islamic fundamentalists. Judging by the escalating conflicts in Lebanon and the Palestinian territories as well...
...Bush Administration has been quietly nurturing individuals and parties opposed to the Syrian government in an effort to undermine the regime of President Bashar Assad. Parts of the scheme are outlined in a classified, two-page document that says that the U.S. already is "supporting regular meetings of internal and diaspora Syrian activists" in Europe. The document bluntly expresses the hope that "these meetings will facilitate a more coherent strategy and plan of actions for all anti-Assad activists...
...payback time. Lebanese officials, along with Israeli military sources and Western diplomats, say that while Syrian President Bashar Assad may be willing to help pull the Bush Administration out of the Iraqi quicksand, he hopes to exact concessions that would allow him to treat Lebanon, where the Syrian regime has vast financial interests, as his private turf. And according to these same sources, he is unnerved by a U.N.-sponsored inquiry that implicates top Syrian officials in the February 2005 car bombing that killed former Prime Minister Rafiq Hariri and 22 others. Assad is hoping that the international probe will...
...into voting for a controversial three-year extension of the presidency of the pro-Syrian incumbent, Emile Lahoud. Ahdab ignored the threats and voted against the extension. He was not the only politician under pressure. Then-Lebanese prime minister Rafik Hariri was allegedly directly threatened by Syrian president Bashar al-Assad to support Lahoud's extension, despite his deep opposition to the move...