Word: syria
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Dates: during 1980-1989
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...domestic power struggle between Rafsanjani and his hard-line Interior Minister, Ali Akbar Mohtashami, who served as paymaster to Hizballah in the early 1980s. Experts feel that Mohtashami's - ability to sustain the hostage holding will be a litmus test of his power under the newly elected President. Syria, which maintains about 25,000 troops in Lebanon, could improve its relations with the West by rescuing the hostages, but it wields little influence over the Shi'ites who hold them. Still, the U.S. believes Syria could use its intelligence network to locate the hostages and flex its military muscle...
...Syria, in fact, appears just as powerless as other would-be peacekeepers in Lebanon, which has been reduced by 14 years of civil war to a lawless slum where kidnaping and murder are the norm. The fate of the hostages is tied as much to the bitter backyard struggle for power in Beirut as to international diplomacy, and that struggle has grown worse. Over the past five months, artillery duels between the Lebanese Christian General Michel Aoun and the Syrians have killed at least 600 people and wounded nearly...
Last week the shelling sharply intensified, spreading well beyond Beirut's boundaries and leading some observers to speculate that Syria might be making a decisive assault. "Until the problem of Lebanon is solved," says a Lebanese diplomat, "there will never be a resolution of the hostages...
...force, while the White House launched a diplomatic rescue effort that one U.S. envoy called "a full-court press on everybody we know." Characteristically, the President worked the phone with the heads of state of most European allies and nations in the Middle East -- with the notable exception of Syria's Hafez Assad, whom Bush does not trust...
...remarkable range of close-in experience with dozens of terrorist acts over the past two decades. Press Secretary Marlin Fitzwater, between lengthy jousting with the alerted journalists, recalled being with Vice President Bush in Paris in 1985, when the TWA Flight 847 hostages were being driven from Lebanon to Syria to be released. "Now, Marlin," said Bush in a cool and level voice, "tell me once again why I should appear on Face the Nation just at this moment. And remember, if that caravan turns and goes back to Beirut, your career is finished." Bush was restrained and cautious...