Word: damascus
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Dates: during 2000-2009
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...Lebanon, when Assad implied that the King and other Arab leaders who had criticized the Hizballah raid on Israel that sparked the conflict were "half-men." Saudi Arabia withdrew its ambassador to Syria in 2008, and last year King Abdullah boycotted the Arab League Summit in Damascus. (See pictures of Syria's suspected nuclear reactor...
...fact that the King showed up with just one plane in Damascus on Wednesday didn't seem to faze a beaming Syrian President Bashar Assad, who was waiting at the airport with a red-carpet welcome. Abdullah's visit is a particularly sweet foreign policy triumph for Assad, who became persona non grata after many in the international community accused Syria of involvement in the 2005 car-bomb assassination of former Lebanese Prime Minister Rafik Hariri in Beirut. In the past year, however, the Syrian leader has hosted a growing number of heads of state and world leaders, including French...
...Tuesday Hamas police held a Gaza City press conference demanding the arrest of those responsible for putting the Goldstone report on hold at the U.N. And Syria, which backs Hamas, postponed a planned visit to Damascus by Abbas. Hamas has also warned that the U.N. move presents a serious obstacle to the unity deal that it had been expected to sign with Fatah later this month. Indeed, Palestinian public opinion has turned so sharply against Abbas over this issue that Hamas may be tempted to hold off on reconciling with its rivals while its political position is strengthened...
...Syria is not about to hand over former Baathists for prosecution, either. Syrian officials point out that their country protected many members of the current Iraqi government when they were exiled by Saddam, including Maliki himself, who spent 20 years in Damascus. "There are [now] 1.5 million Iraqi refugees in Syria," Fayssal Mekdad, Syria's Vice Minister of Foreign Affairs tells TIME. "When they came here we didn't ask them what party they belonged to. We just opened our doors...
...last few years, however, Syria has started to clamp down on insurgents trying to infiltrate Iraq, and in August a U.S. military delegation visited Damascus to discuss increased cooperation on border security. Even more promising has been the change of attitude of many former Baathists in Syria, who are broadly split into two factions: a hard-line group led by a former vice president in Saddam's government, Izzat Ibrahim al-Douri, and a more moderate but less powerful group led by Muhammad Younis, a former adviser to Saddam's executive council. Younis's group began reaching...