Word: hama
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Dates: during 1940-1949
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Arabs and Frenchmen in the Levant were on edge. At a soccer game in Hama an Arab crowd began yelling "Pas de goal" ("Block that kick"). Sensitive Frenchmen thought they heard "A has De Gaulle" ("Down with De Gaulle"). That did it. Rioting spread from Hama to Horns and then to Damascus. The wild Djebel Druse country rose. Last week the trouble between Arabs and Frenchmen in the Levant (TIME, June 4) suddenly became the world's trouble...
Death in Damascus. In all of Syria and Lebanon, the French had only five or six battalions when the riots started. But the French set their hated Senegalese troops to "restoring order" with the utmost violence. By last week Horns, Hama and Aleppo were under control, twelve French soldiers and several hundred Arabs had been killed before, in the words of a French communique, "at Damascus it was necessary to use artillery...
...conscription of all men between the ages of 18 and 60 for the Syrian national guard. It also voted immediate credits to increase the Syrian gendarmerie by 5,000 men. Both states abruptly broke off negotiations with France. Later there was bloody street fighting between French and Syrians in Hama. (In his Damascus home President Shukri el-Kuwatly, in bed with an intestinal ulcer, suffered a serious relapse and had to have blood transfusions...