Word: ites
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Dates: during 1980-1989
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Israeli officials set no timetable for freeing as many as 460 more Lebanese prisoners, mostly Shi'ites, still held in Atlit. One purpose of a delay would be to underscore the insistence of both the U.S. and Israel that they had made no deal to secure the freedom of the hostages taken off the hijacked TWA Flight 847. Israeli Defense Minister Yitzhak Rabin asserted once again last week that the hijacking had actually delayed release of the Atlit prisoners. Nonetheless, the freeing of the 300 validated assurances relayed to Nabih Berri, leader of the Shi'ite Amal militia holding...
...dawn on Saturday. But no. They were still in Beirut. The carefully crafted plan for their release had gone awry. Darkness fell in the war-torn city, and the hostages were once again split into groups and sent back to their beds in the secret hideaways of their Shi'ite Muslim guards from Lebanon's Amal militia. When they awoke on Sunday, they had no way of knowing how much longer their ordeal would last...
Another serious obstacle that developed on Saturday morning was that Berri's militia did not have control over four of the captives, who were being held by Shi'ite extremists of Hizballah (Party...
...sees eye to eye with Washington on Middle East policy. But the Administration was betting that in the current crisis U.S. interests converged in many ways with Assad's. By agreeing last week to act as the mediator in the release of 39 U.S. hostages from their Lebanese Shi'ite Muslim captors, Assad proved to be a good gamble. And when Saturday's last-minute delays threw the deal into question, it was the Syrian President to whom Washington turned for fresh assistance...
...hijacked the Americans from their original hijackers. For Assad, Berri and his Amal movement play a vital role in Assad's long campaign to become power broker and peacemaker among Lebanon's warring factions. While Amal currently commands the allegiance of most of Lebanon's estimated 1.2 million Shi'ites, its leadership has come under intense pressure from far more radical and fundamentalist Shi'ite factions, especially a group called Hizballah (Party of God), which has strong ties to Iran. Although Assad's relations with Iran are friendly, he has no desire to see Lebanon become a Shi'ite theocracy...