Word: bekaa
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...mean streets of Beirut and across the green mountains to the east, the guns of Lebanon sounded once again last week. In the fiercest fighting since 1978, Syrian peace-keeping forces and Lebanese Christian militiamen squared off for control of Zahle (pop. 200,000), a city in the Bekaa Valley, 25 miles east of Beirut. For eight days the Syrian forces, using field artillery, tank guns and rocket launchers, pounded Christian positions in and around the city, which is located just off the strategic Beirut-Damascus highway. Christian militiamen in the city and nearby hills returned the fire with their...
...tenuous three-year-old truce in Lebanon was once again broken by sporadic fighting after Syria announced that it would soon reduce its policeman's role in Beirut. At the same time, the Damascus government said that it would move some of its Beirut-based forces into the Bekaa Valley in eastern Lebanon to buttress Syria's own defense lines against a possible Israeli attack. The announcement sent shock waves throughout the Middle East-and nowhere more than in Israel, which nervously worried about renewed Arab-Jewish tensions in the occupied West Bank...
WELCOME TO THE BIG BOSS, read a new sign in Lebanon's Bekaa Valley along the Beirut-Damascus highway. In case any traveler did not recognize the big boss, the sign was surrounded by photographs of Syrian President Hafez Assad. Last week the highway was completely open for the first time in nine months-and free of marauding gangs that robbed and killed travelers-as Assad's troops moved into Beirut to unite and pacify the Lebanese capital...
...President last week-spoke of their presence as "temporary." It will take at least two years, by some estimates, merely to rebuild Lebanon's fragmented army and internal security forces. In parts of Lebanon, the Syrians seem to have settled in for a long stay. In the fertile Bekaa Valley, Syrian currency circulates as easily as the Lebanese pound, and shopkeepers routinely do business in either. Arriving there from Damascus, TIME Correspondent Wilton Wynn stopped at a Lebanese checkpoint manned by a Syrian soldier. "Welcome to our country," he said...
...Syrians responded with a fierce artillery and rocket barrage from their positions in the Bekaa. As town after town was hit, Palestinian defenders took advantage of the mist and smoke from exploding rounds to slip out of their positions. Arafat himself had nearly been hit earlier when Syrian gunners rained shells and rockets into Aley, a resort town on the Beirut-Damascus highway where the P.L.O. leader was conferring with his military commanders in a luxury villa...