Word: damascus
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Dates: during 2000-2009
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...officials on suspicion of helping to recruit some of the 9/11 hijackers, as part of Al Qaeda's Hamburg cell. According to the report, after a U.S. request Zammar was arrested in Morocco by local police. He was questioned in Morocco by CIA officials and then flown to Damascus; the intelligence report does not specify which aircraft transferred...
...embassy. During an anti-American demonstration in 2000, security forces looked the other way as a mob stormed the grounds and ransacked the American mission. Amid last winter's protests over Danish cartoons viewed as mocking the Prophet Mohammed, demonstrators burned the Danish and Norwegian embassies in Damascus...
...allowing terrorists to hit a foreign embassy is a different matter altogether. For one thing, Assad's regime knows that could be a casus belli for a U.S. military strike on Syria. Relations have been tense for years. The U.S. recalled its ambassador in Damascus after Syria, despite its denials, was implicated in the assassination of former Lebanese Prime Minister Rafic Hariri in February 2005. Mobs are one thing, but terrorism tells the Syrian people something that no dictator wishes to show: that the regime does not have as tight a grip on the country as it would like...
...herald the return of violent extremists. Just three months ago, in one of the Syrian capital's most prominent public squares, four gunmen were killed trying to attack the building housing Syrian state television. In 2004, the government blamed terrorists for setting off a car bomb in West Damascus near several ministries and embassies...
...factions, Hamas and Islamic Jihad. U.S. officials believe that the Assad regime has secretly aided the three-year-old Sunni insurgency in Iraq, providing passage for jihad volunteers and funds, and safe haven for insurgency leaders. At the start of the war in 2003, Arab jihadists who poured into Damascus en route to Baghdad were allowed to openly line up outside the Iraqi embassy just down the road from the American embassy...