Word: druze
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Dates: during 2000-2009
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...carry their rifles at chest height, baseball caps shading their grim faces as they scan the surrounding area for potential trouble. Jaafar was killed two days earlier - wounded by a sniper and executed with a bullet in the head, according to residents -during heavy clashes between Hizballah and the Druze followers of Walid Jumblatt, an arch-critic of the Shi'ite party, in the hills of the Aley district above Beirut. Because of the tensions, there must be no shooting in the air during the funeral procession, a Hizballah organizer instructs the mourners. "Save your bullets for the Israelis...
Qmatiyeh is one of two predominantly Shi'ite villages nestled in a mainly Druze area at the northern end of the Chouf mountains. The village's isolation from the densely Shi'ite-populated areas of southern Beirut, clearly visible from here and where Hizballah holds sway, is a source of unease for the residents who look to the Shi'ite group for protection. "I don't think it's calm enough yet to feel confident," says Hussam Najjar, a criminal court magistrate. With his pressed gray suit, blue tie, sunglasses and neatly trimmed mustache, Najjar looked out of place among...
Sources close to Hizballah said that dozens of the group's fighters deployed from southern Beirut to the Qmatiyeh area on Monday night, taking up position in the woods and dense undergrowth surrounding the village to protect its residents from Druze incursions. Hizballah is thought to have lost 13 fighters in the battle with the Druze militants, a significant number for one of the world's most professional guerrilla armies. Hizballah militants told TIME that the Druze fighters had fought them from dug-in positions prepared well in advance of last week's outbreak of violence between the supporters...
...fighting ended with the Shi'ites demanding that Jumblatt's Druze forces must turn over all their medium and heavy weapons. "We want everything from rocket-propelled grenade launchers and up," says Hussam Asrawi, a senior official with the Syrian Social Nationalist Party, a secular opposition party and ally of Hizballah. But Jumblatt has signaled some defiance, saying that he is willing to yield his weapons to the Lebanese army, but "our dignity is important and the people of the [Chouf] will not allow anyone to enter their homes...
...hereditary chieftain of Lebanon's Druze Muslim minority, Jumblatt earned the nickname 'the weather vane" for being able to steer his followers through the ever changing winds of Middle East politics. A former princely vassal to the Syrian Assad regime, he switched his loyalties to the Bush administration after the invasion of Iraq, when it briefly seemed like American military power would transform the region. Yet, despite the fact that Hizballah is perhaps the world's most fearsome guerrilla organization, somehow Jumblatt misjudged the ease with which Hizballah could pull Lebanon back into the Syrian and Iranian orbit. "I must...