Word: damascus
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Dates: during 1970-1979
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...civil war grew so intense that Syria came as close to threatening intervention as at any time since the crisis began a year ago. Under severe pressure not only from Damascus but from Yasser Arafat, head of the Palestine Liberation Organization, Jumblatt agreed to a ten-day ceasefire, which would allow Parliament to elect a new President in place of Suleiman Franjieh, the stubborn Maronite leader who at week's end was still clinging desperately to office...
...along the border, the Syrians hinted at intervention. They also cut off Jumblatt's supply line: at one point he complained that the Syrians were denying him 4,000 guns and 7 million rounds of ammunition that had been donated by the Egyptian government and confiscated when they reached Damascus en route to Beirut. Finally, Assad persuaded Arafat to put pressure on Jumblatt to accept another ceasefire. The persuasions contained an implicit warning that if the war continued the Lebanese-based Palestinians might lose Syrian support and supplies...
Although Assad regained some lost prestige by arranging the freeze, his credibility as claimant to leadership of the Arab world suffered when the Pax Syriana collapsed. For one thing, it appeared that Damascus had far less sway over the Lebanese Moslems, leftists and Palestinians than it had claimed. For another, Syria's frantic efforts to gain another cease-fire were backed primarily by Jordan's King Hussein and Saudi Arabia's King Khalid, two conservative monarchs who are anathema to radical Arabs. The U.S. also endorsed Syria's peace efforts, as did Moscow, although the Russians played no perceptible role...
SYRIA has replaced and upgraded all the equipment it lost in 1973, thanks to the Soviet Union. Damascus has received hundreds of top-of-the-line T-62 battle tanks, 45 MIG-23 fighter-bombers, unpiloted drone planes and hundreds of antiaircraft missiles. Its 50 Scud surface-to-surface missiles can reach virtually all of Israel's populated areas. To enable Damascus to operate properly all its new, ultrasophisticated military hardware, there are now more than 2,000 Soviet advisers with the Syrian armed forces, while Cubans serve in Syrian tanks and North Koreans and Pakistanis fly some...
What prompted Ahdab's demi-coup was the collapse of the fragile seven-week-old Pax Syriana-the Damascus-sponsored truce of Jan. 22. The authorities, charged Ahdab, had simply been unable to maintain order or begin to build a consensus in the divided country. This threatened to push Lebanon into renewed war between right-wing Christians and Moslem leftists. All last week gunmen again began erecting street barricades and kidnaping scores of civilians...