Word: syrian
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This is not the first such raid into Syrian territory in recent years. In September 2007, Israeli jets bombed a site in northeast Syria suspected of being a nuclear facility. Syria has also been shaken by attacks from within its borders. In February, Imad Mughniyah, posthumously identified as the top military commander of Lebanon's militant Shi'ite Hizballah, was assassinated in a car-bomb explosion in Damascus. Last month, a rare car bomb exploded in the Syrian capital, killing 28 people...
...first such incursion from the Iraq side since the U.S. invasion of Iraq in March 2003, at least four U.S. helicopters crossed Iraq's western border with Syria and attacked what officials in Damascus said was a half-constructed building in Sukkariyeh Farm, 5 miles from the Syrian frontier town of Abu Qamal. Eight people were reported to have been killed in the raid. Damascus "condemns this aggression and holds the American forces responsible," said the Syrian government in a statement that went on to demand that the Iraqi government launch an investigation into "this serious violation...
Last week, Major General John Kelly, commander of coalition forces in western Iraq, said security along Iraq's borders with Kuwait, Saudi Arabia and Jordan was fairly tight but that the Syrian frontier remained porous. "The Syrian side is, I guess, uncontrolled by their side," Kelly said. "We still have a certain level of foreign-fighter movement." He told Pentagon reporters via teleconference last week, "We're doing much more work along the Syrian border than we've done in the past," adding that Iraqi security and intelligence forces "feel that al-Qaeda operatives and others operate, live pretty openly...
That car-bombing was blamed on jihadists. It was followed by a gun battle in a Palestinian refugee camp outside Damascus in which a number of militants were killed and arrested. Syrian troops have also deployed along the northern border of neighboring Lebanon in what Damascus says is an attempt to block jihadists from slipping into Syria. These recent developments have raised speculation that Syria is threatened by a blowback from jihadist militants who no longer have easy access to cross the border into Iraq and instead are turning their attention to the secular regime in Damascus. "We assumed...
...Syrian art boom is taking place amid an economic thaw. Syria began opening its economy in 2005 under pressure from U.S. sanctions; foreign investment has changed the face of the country. Once the streets of Damascus were filled with 1950s-era American auto-mobiles, kept running by trade barriers and twine; now there's a daily traffic jam of new Asian sedans and German sports cars. Superseding the capital's dictator-chic hotels from the 1970s--massive concrete towers with prostitutes in the bars and spies in the lobbies--modern boutique inns are sprouting in renovated courtyard palaces...