Word: ite
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Dates: during 1980-1989
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...questions about the region's future. Two days after the last Israeli convoy of some 40 vehicles had left Sidon (pop. 200,000), the largest city in southern Lebanon, there was a brief invasion of another kind. Into Sidon, by bus from Beirut, came a ragtag army of Shi'ite Muslim militants, swearing vengeance against Israel and Lebanon's Christian leadership and vowing to rebuild the country in the image of the Ayatullah Ruhollah Khomeini's Iran...
Israel's efforts to gain the support of the Shi'ites, who make up 80% of the population of the south, had failed, and a growing resistance movement against the Israeli presence had exacted a mounting toll of casualties. Syria provided moral and logistical support to the Shi'ite resistance, finding this a way to fight Israel at little cost. One of the worst consequences of the Israeli invasion of Lebanon, as Israel's Defense Minister Yitzhak Rabin put it last month, is that it let "the Shi'ite genie out of the bottle...
Israel decided unilaterally in January to pull out of Lebanon because attempts to work out a security agreement with Lebanon had failed. Plans call for a total withdrawal by this summer. Israel's Prime Minister Shimon Peres believes that the continuing occupation serves only to build the Shi'ite resistance and to increase Israeli losses. Those fatalities now total 621, more than 40% of them since the Palestine Liberation Organization was expelled from Beirut in August...
Islamic Jihad, the radical Shi'ite Muslim group that has claimed responsibility for a number of terrorist acts, including the October 1983 bombing that resulted in the deaths of 241 U.S. servicemen in Beirut, had said repeatedly that it was holding Levin. Last week it issued a statement contending that it had decided to release him because "we have established that the American correspondent was not involved in any espionage or subversion against Islamic forces." The militants denied that Levin had escaped. Syria went along with the contention that Levin had been released. Ambassador to the U.S. Rafiq Jouejati said...
...State Department suggested in background briefings that Levin's "escape" may have been a disguised release. The department's aim was to encourage Syria to help find and free four other Americans who are believed to be held by the same Shi'ite group, possibly in the very building where Levin was detained. Levin reported that other prisoners were in the building, but he could not hear their voices well enough to know whether they were the four Americans: William Buckley, 56, a U.S. diplomat who has been missing since March 16; the Rev. Benjamin Weir, 60, a Presbyterian minister...