Word: damascus
(lookup in dictionary)
(lookup stats)
Dates: during 2000-2009
Sort By: most recent first
(reverse)
...complicity in or authorship of the crime, and have warned President Emil Lahoud and other members of his government to stay away from Wednesday's funeral lest their presence provoke violence. The U.S. responded to the killing by demanding Syrian withdrawal from Lebanon, and by summoning home its Damascus ambassador in order to express its ?profound outrage? over Hariri's death. The Bush administration has stopped short of directly accusing Syria of complicity, although it has not hidden the obvious implications of its actions - and has warned that it holds Syria responsible because of its domination of Lebanon...
...Syria has professed innocence and President Bashar al-Assad condemned Hariri's killing as a ?horrible terrorist act,? but that has not dimmed ire of Lebanese opposition groups and the Bush administration. Damascus had been hard at work in recent months maneuvering to maintain its fraying control over the fate of a neighboring country it has treated more like a restive province over the past three decades. Hariri, a one-time ally of Syria, had symbolized the best hope of a growing opposition movement in Lebanon to press for Syrian withdrawal. Although he had carefully nurtured his own relationship with...
...Although the longtime Saudi-associated billionaire had many enemies, Syria's accusers say none benefit as much from Hariri's slaying as those in Damascus who want to maintain a stranglehold over Lebanon. The ?confession? broadcast on Lebanese TV, in which a man later identified as a Palestinian refugee purported to take responsibility for the killing in the name of a Qaeda-linked jihad against ?Greater Syria,? was quickly dismissed within the region as a clumsy fraud designed to draw attention away from the real killers...
...Syria has cultivated politicians from all ends of the sectarian divide, while also dominating Lebanon's own intelligence and security services. But it is more than some nostalgic ?Greater Syria? concept that has driven Damascus to keep a tight hold on affairs in Lebanon. There are certainly economic benefits for Syria to maintain control over its economically dynamic neighbor whose progress and integration into the world economy puts Syria's own decrepit economy to shame. But Lebanon's primary importance to Damascus is its value as a strategic trump card. The organizing principle of Syrian foreign policy over the past...
...someone often derided for his passivity, Abbas, 69, has also been willing to mix it up. Born in Safed, a town now part of Israel, he grew up in Damascus after his family fled when the Jewish state was founded in 1948. As a young member of Fatah, Arafat's faction of the Palestine Liberation Organization (P.L.O.), he made his name as a fund raiser while avoiding involvement in the group's terrorist attacks. He was among the first Fatah leaders to build bridges to Israeli peace campaigners and in 1977 issued a declaration in favor of a two-state...