Word: hafez
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Dates: during 1980-1989
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TIME Beirut Correspondent Roberto Suro covers not one but two of the toughest news beats in the world: embattled Lebanon and the police state of Syria. For this week's cover stories on the continuing violence in Lebanon and on Syrian President Hafez As sad and his country's pivotal role in the tur bulent Middle East, Suro confronted the difficulties of reporting from both countries...
...Navy planes that attacked Syrian positions in Lebanon early Fast week were meant to send a message to the government of President Hafez Assad: for every Syrian strike against American forces, such as the previous day's firing on U.S. reconnaissance planes, expect a strike in return. Unfortunately, delivering the message proved costly: two planes lost, one pilot killed, one captured, a Lebanese woman dead in the crash of one of the fighter-bombers. The air attack also sent a number of unintended messages. It told the Lebanese that the U.S. armed forces are neither invincible nor invulnerable. It told...
Though aspirations and methods have been adjusted to the realities of the 1980s, the passion for hegemony lives on in Damascus. Under the shrewd, ruthless, brutally dictatorial guidance of President Hafez Assad, 53, Syria has been making a bid for the past decade to grasp the torch of Arab unity and emerge as the pre-eminent power in the Middle East. By keeping its 62,000 troops in Lebanon and by supporting factions opposed to the government of Lebanese President Amin Gemayel, Syria has become the key player in that fractured country's future. By fueling the raging rebellion within...
...improvement in U.S.Israeli relations was engineered largely by Secretary of State George Shultz, who has felt personally betrayed by the refusal of Syrian President Hafez Assad to carry out a promise to withdraw troops from Lebanon after Israel not only agreed to do so but unilaterally and prematurely drew back to safer positions in southern Lebanon, actually against U.S. wishes. The agreement is virtually a return to former Secretary of State Alexander Haig's "consensus of strategic concerns," in which U.S. and Israeli military cooperation was seen as vital to discouraging Soviet intrusion into Middle East politics and, more...
...captured by the Israelis during the war in Lebanon. That exchange, in turn, strengthened the prestige of Arafat at a precarious moment, and may have hastened the negotiations leading to the agreement between Arafat and the rebels. Those negotiations had been closely supervised by Syria, even though Syrian President Hafez Assad was absent and rumored to be seriously ill. Official reports had stated that Assad underwent an appendectomy two weeks ago, but many diplomats believed that he was suffering from some sort of heart trouble...