Word: damascus
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Dates: during 2000-2009
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...player. The Elysée hopes Sarkozy's visit to Ramallah to meet with Palestinian President Mahmoud Abbas can help reverse Abbas' increasing marginalization and make him an active partner in hammering out a truce. But the main event of Sarkozy's peacemaking foray will more likely be in Damascus, where he will meet with Syrian President Bashar Assad on Tuesday. Sarkozy's recent rapprochement with Syria, the regional player with the most influence over Hamas, means that the French President may have more diplomatic leverage than many of his Western counterparts...
Hamas, through its Damascus-based leader Khaled Meshal, has indicated acceptance of Israel's basic requirement for a truce - an end to rocket fire - but only if the truce, along with ending Israeli military strikes, also opens the border crossings that would allow normalization of economic life in Gaza. Hamas insists that it ended the cease-fire precisely because the truce had failed to lift the economic siege of Gaza...
...avoided direct talks with the militant Hamas movement, which runs Gaza but which the U.S. deems a terrorist organization, Abdullah was approached to act as a go-between, these sources told TIME. The Jordanian monarch complied with the U.S. request and last week dispatched a senior intelligence officer to Damascus to warn exiled Hamas leader Khaled Mashaal that Gaza was in danger of an Israeli attack unless the rocket fire was immediately stopped. (See pictures of tension along the Gaza border...
...Damascus, Hamas leader Mashaal reportedly agreed to the request to halt rocket attacks and relayed orders to Gaza, Jordanian sources say. On Wednesday, according to sources in Gaza, senior Hamas military commanders met with leaders of Islamic Jihad and other smaller militant bands and ordered them to stop firing rockets...
...raids into Syria and the possibility of a Syrian nuclear weapons program paint a darker picture of just how deep hostility may have run between the U.S. and Syria. "This was a real cold war," says Andrew J. Tabler, former editor of Syria Today, an English-language magazine in Damascus. "Improving U.S.-Syrian relations could be a lot harder than we thought...