Word: phalangist
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...unfinished 30-story Murr Tower, Beirut's tallest building, leftist Moslems fired a lethal .50-cal. Chinese machine gun at anything that moved in the center of the city. Some five blocks north, in the gilded Corniche area on the Mediterranean, right-wing Christian Phalangist forces occupied the Holiday Inn and other hotels and began firing from the luxury bedrooms in a desperate effort to hold ground. Answering rocket blasts tore apart the Inn's top two floors. Banks, shops and business offices were shuttered, few besides gunmen ventured onto the streets and about the only traffic along...
...result was stalemate. Now leftist Moslem forces, spearheaded by a group called the Independent Nasserites, have launched an offensive to win a clear victory. Moving out of their base area in southwest Beirut, the Nasserites intend to cut through the city up to the sea, thereby flanking some Phalangist positions and driving other rightist forces into the eastern part of the city...
...best hope for a solution lies with the 20-member "National Dialogue Committee" hastily put together by Premier Rashid Karami (TIME, Oct. 20). Yet because the committee is composed of representatives of most of Lebanon's rival religious and political factions, it is possible that-as the Phalangist daily al-Amal put it last week-"the Dialogue Committee's discussions may turn into 'a dialogue of the deaf...
...sure exactly how the latest round started. One report was that two Iraqi youths made a pass at a pretty Christian Lebanese girl in a suburb of Beirut. Unfortunately, the suburb was Ain Rumanneh, the stronghold of the right-wing Christian Phalangist Party, where violence broke out last April between Phalangists and Moslems. In no time, according to the story, the Iraqis were attacked by Christians. Before long the incident had somehow escalated into Beirut's third round of street fighting in as many months. The stutter of automatic weapons fire and the thud of rockets and mortars echoed...
...several months, the leader of the right-wing, predominantly Christian Phalangist Party, Pierre Gemayel, 70, had been demanding that Palestinian guerrillas be barred from bearing arms. To Gemayel, the 320,000 Palestinians in Lebanon, including 5,000 under arms, represent a "state within a state" that exposed Lebanon to recurring Israeli attack. In mid-April a five-day battle in Beirut between Palestinians and the Phalangists' own 6,000-man militia left at least 150 dead and 300 injured...