Word: bashar
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...individuals implicated by the U.N. is Assef Shawkat, who is responsible for military security and is also the brother-in-law to Syrian President Bashar al Assad...
...Bashar Assad likes to be seen. In Damascus, the Syrian President is often spotted dining at a smart restaurant with his wife Asma or driving his family to their weekend retreat in the mountains. Since succeeding his father Hafez as President in 2000, Assad has left the dirty work of running Syria's ruthless intelligence and security organs to two members of his clan--his brother Maher, 37, commander of the Presidential Guard, and his brother-in-law, Assef Shawkat, 55, chief of Syrian military intelligence. They haven't always got along. About five years ago, Maher shot Shawkat...
...Minister Rafiq Hariri--and specifically fingered Maher Assad and Shawkat as playing leading roles in the violent conspiracy. The report, by German prosecutor Detlev Mehlis, reconstructs the events that it says led up to the car-bomb murder of Hariri, including the August 2004 meeting in Damascus during which Bashar Assad threatened the billionaire Lebanese politician if he got in the way of Syria's domination of Lebanon...
...murder of Hariri, with whom he had been on good terms; that he was a scapegoat sacrificed to address possible accusations against Syria in the report; or that he was killed, under the convenient cloak of the U.N. probe, to eliminate a rival to President Bashar Assad. The last theory, says Syria watcher and history professor Joshua Landis, "is the conclusion everyone is jumping...
...Vulnerable Borders In "Syria Gets the Cold Shoulder" [Sept. 26], TIME reported that most world leaders were unwilling to meet with Syrian President Bashar Assad at the U.N. World Summit and that President Bush blames Syria for not doing enough to stop terrorists from entering Iraq. Does no one in the Bush Administration find it ironic that it is criticizing a developing country for its inability to guard its border with Iraq while the U.S. has been unable to secure its own border with Mexico? Why should Syria, which opposed the war, put all its efforts toward securing a border...