Word: beirutization
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...crisis stretches on, it becomes increasingly clear that members of the anti-Saddam alliance have their own goals to pursue. Last week, for example, Lebanese President Elias Hrawi asked Syria to help him rout his rival, General Michel Aoun, from his stronghold in Beirut's Christian enclave, thus giving Damascus the opportunity to complete its control of Lebanon at a moment when the world is distracted by other events in the Middle East. Syrian President Hafez Assad ordered thousands of troops to Beirut to beef up the 10,000 Syrian soldiers already there. On Friday a lone gunman shot twice...
...thousands of troops who had been temporarily housed in hotels, spreading them out horizontally rather than stacking them vertically. Troop encampments in vulnerable areas are protected by sentries carrying loaded automatic weapons and by concrete barriers positioned in front of barred gates. "We're not going to have another Beirut barracks bombing if I can help it," says Schwarzkopf. He is less worried about chemical and biological attacks, since he contends that the Iraqis lack reliable systems to deliver chemical warheads to their targets...
...sybarite who virtually abandoned his desert kingdom for a career of overseas carousing. He drank Scotch freely, ordered caviar by the pound, attended the raunchy shows in the nightclubs of Beirut so frequently that he knew all the leading belly dancers by name, engaged in myriad liaisons with women (he is said to have paid the wife of a Lebanese businessman $100,000 a year to make herself available) and, if old stories are to be believed, gambled away $1 million in the casinos of Monte Carlo during a single weekend...
Ostrovsky's most sensational claim is that in 1983 Mossad received specific intelligence, down to the make of a Mercedes truck outfitted to carry bombs, that Shi'ite extremists in Beirut were planning a major terrorist attack. Though the U.S. forces then stationed in Lebanon were an obvious target possibility, Mossad officials only warned the U.S. in the most general terms. The attack was carried out at Marine Corps headquarters and resulted in 241 American deaths. Writes Ostrovsky: "The problem was that if we had leaked information and it was traced back, our informant would have been killed. The next...
...prisoners, Mustafa Badreddin, a Syrian- trained explosives expert who is the brother-in-law of Imad Mughniyah, a Lebanese terrorist and suspected kidnapper identified as the mastermind behind the 1985 hijacking of TWA Flight 847. Originally scheduled to fly from Athens to Rome, the plane was eventually taken to Beirut, where Robert Dean Stethem, a U.S. Navy diver who was a passenger on the flight, was beaten and shot to death. Saddam conceivably could try to enlist Mustafa and his colleagues in terrorist acts against the U.S., release them to Iran as a goodwill gesture or keep them...