Word: syrian
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...hostages, six of them American. Though the whereabouts of the captives are unknown, rumors often place them in Baalbek or surrounding villages. Yet at the moment, Hizballah's grip on Baalbek is < threatened by the advent of peace. Lebanon's 15-year civil war ended last October, when Syrian troops ousted General Michel Aoun, the renegade Christian leader, from his power base in Beirut. Over the past few months, thousands of Lebanese tourists have begun to return to Baalbek, and both their dress and behavior are anathema to Islamic fundamentalists...
...legitimacy, al-Husseini's credentials are impressive. His father, Abdul Qader al-Husseini, became a martyr to Palestinians in 1948 during a battle between Palestinian and Jewish fighters in the mountain village of Kastel west of Jerusalem. The younger al-Husseini has endured continuous hardship since graduating from a Syrian military college in 1967. Arrested five times by Israeli officials, he has spent 42 months in prison and an additional five years under house arrest. Since 1988, when Israeli officials shut down his Arab Studies Society, a research organization, al-Husseini has lived off the royalties he earns from...
...alliance against Iraq. For his efforts, he received major subsidies from Saudi Arabia -- at least $2.5 billion so far -- and a nod of acceptance from the U.S. as he completed his domination of Lebanon and disarmed the rival militias. Whatever threat Lebanon's civil war might have posed to Syrian hegemony is now gone...
...Syrian President Hafez Assad ordinarily is no one's idea of a cooperative statesman, not with his record as a bloodily repressive dictator. But Assad is shrewd enough to sense which way the winds of world power are blowing. So last week he accepted the American formula for a Middle East peace conference. That, in effect, made him the first Arab leader since Egypt's Anwar Sadat to agree to public, direct peace talks with Israel: that is what the conference is supposed to lead to, after a brief ceremonial opening...
Even so, Assad's move underlines the extent to which once unfriendly countries are concluding that it is prudent to please the U.S., the world's sole remaining superpower. The Syrian President had long been a client of the Soviet Union and a leader of the rejectionist Arab states that opposed any dealing with Israel. But, American analysts believe, at the end of the gulf war Assad realized he had reached a turning point: he could become the unrivaled leader of Arab radicals -- or he could bid for status among the moderates. Assad decided, as one American diplomat puts...