Word: damascus
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Dates: during 2000-2009
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Bashar Assad likes to be seen. In Damascus, the Syrian President is often spotted dining at a smart restaurant with his wife Asma or driving his family to their weekend retreat in the mountains. Since succeeding his father Hafez as President in 2000, Assad has left the dirty work of running Syria's ruthless intelligence and security organs to two members of his clan--his brother Maher, 37, commander of the Presidential Guard, and his brother-in-law, Assef Shawkat, 55, chief of Syrian military intelligence. They haven't always got along. About five years ago, Maher shot Shawkat...
...former Lebanese Prime Minister Rafiq Hariri--and specifically fingered Maher Assad and Shawkat as playing leading roles in the violent conspiracy. The report, by German prosecutor Detlev Mehlis, reconstructs the events that it says led up to the car-bomb murder of Hariri, including the August 2004 meeting in Damascus during which Bashar Assad threatened the billionaire Lebanese politician if he got in the way of Syria's domination of Lebanon...
...speculation. What was once imponderable--the end of the Assad family's 35-year hold on power--is suddenly being discussed as if it is a real, if still distant, possibility. "People are edgy, jumpy and scared," says Marwan al-Kabalan of the Center for Strategic Studies at Damascus University. "This is the most serious crisis in the recent history of Syria...
...suicide or murder? And why? Syrian Interior Minister Ghazi Kenaan--who had been Syrian proconsul from 1982 to 2002 and "the real power in Lebanon," says former Lebanese President Amin Gemayel--was found shot in his Damascus office last week, less than two weeks before the expected release of a U.N. report on the assassination of former Lebanese Prime Minister Rafiq Hariri. Syrian authorities swiftly declared Kenaan's death a suicide. Still, speculation swept Damascus that Kenaan may have killed himself because he feared that his government was setting him up in the murder of Hariri, with whom...
...minimalist setting A Starflyer Is Born In-flight comfort with an internet connection in every seat Take a Hike Destinations to restore your sense of wonder In Venice For Lovers, novelist Louis Begley and biographer Anka Muhlstein describe 30 years of exploring the backstreets of La Serenissima. In Damascus: Taste of a City, resident Marie Fadel writes vividly to her brother, an exiled journalist in Germany, of a walk through the Old City, weaving in recipes for Damascene dishes like tis'iyye, a spicy chickpea soup. While readers may find it easy enough to undertake some of the journeys, like...