Word: bekaa
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Dates: during 2000-2009
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...slow end to a sizzling summer along the shores of the eastern Mediterranean has brought harvest season to the Bekaa Valley. The fertile basin just over Lebanon's coastal mountain range may be well known as a hotbed of Shi'ite militancy that has at various times hosted some of the world's most notorious terrorists, but it is also home to Lebanon's wine industry. It's a very Lebanese experience to watch Bedouin farm workers in the early morning light that illuminates distant mosques, as they carry crateloads of grapes to be pressed into a liquid that Islamic...
...whole existence of wine-making is a contradiction to most of the preconceived notions people have Lebanon," said Ramzi Ghosn, who along with his older brother Sami founded Massaya, one of Lebanon's newer wine-makers, near the Bekaa town of Chtaura. The Ghosn brothers are part of the generation that left Lebanon during the country's brutal 15-year civil war, and who began returning in the 1990s to rebuild the country with skills they learned abroad. For Ramzi, who studied marketing in the United States, wine is a perfect vehicle for changing the perception that Lebanon is haven...
...Perhaps it was the bottle of red, or the ros?, or the arak, or the starry Bekaa night, but suddenly it all started to make sense: We were drinking for Lebanon. The Lebanese economy is now hugely dependent on aid from foreign powers - who have turned the country into a regional battleground - and also on the foreign tourism that has turned Beirut into an Oriental Disneyland for the privileged few. But if foreigners start quaffing Lebanese wine en masse, Bekaa valley vineyards could become incubators for economic independence and environmental sustainability: In vino, libertas. Come to think of it, Israel...
...craggy mountains flanking the Bekaa Valley, fresh Hizballah recruits are undergoing monthlong basic training sessions involving 20-mile (32-km) route marches with rifles, ammunition and rock-filled backpacks. A year ago, Salem, a university student and Hizballah militant, was spending alternate weeks patrolling Lebanon's southern border with Israel. Now he regularly enrolls for refresher training courses in the Bekaa. The training camps are hidden in remote wooded areas, with no permanent structures to give away their presence to Israeli jets and drones overhead. The fighters are taught how to strip, handle and shoot weapons, plant roadside bombs, navigate...
...base, hidden in a small quarry just south of Kfar Zabad village in Lebanon's eastern Bekaa Valley, is local headquarters of the Popular Front for the Liberation of Palestine-General Command (PFLP-GC), a small pro-Syrian faction. With Lebanon mired in steadily worsening violence, this base and other Palestinian refugee military camps are coming under renewed scrutiny: many are controlled by pro-Syrian groups scattered mainly in remote rocky valleys close to the Syrian border and, as the United Nations Security Council said last week, there is "deep concern" that weapons and militants are being smuggled across Syria...