Word: syrians
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Dates: during 1970-1979
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...week, but East Beirut was a smouldering ruin. In that battered section of the city, once home to 600,000 Maronite Christians, rescue workers picked through the rubble in search of the dead and dying. Glassy-eyed survivors crept cautiously out of basement shelters, scurrying back to safety when Syrian snipers cut loose with automatic weapons. A number of would-be refugees, seeking to join the exodus that has emptied East Beirut of more than two-thirds of its residents, were mowed down by Syrian machine guns as they tried to cross the bridges leading to Christian strongholds outside...
From a bunker near the presidential palace-which itself came under fire from misdirected Syrian guns aiming at Christian strongholds in the hillsides-Sarkis made desperate efforts to invoke a truce. He announced a plan to replace the apolitical "Cabinet of technocrats" that has ruled Lebanon for two years with a new government composed of Christian and Muslim leaders. By week's end Sarkis, who had earlier declared that Lebanon was "on the verge of collapse," had been rudely rebuffed by virtually every important faction in Lebanese politics. Declared former President Camille Chamoun, Christian leader of the National Liberals...
International efforts to halt the fighting were similarly troubled. In the same curt tones with which he had rejected a U.S. plan for bringing peace to Lebanon two weeks ago, Syrian President Hafez Assad rejected a French proposal for installing a United Nations buffer force between the warring sides. "It is not logical that a buffer should be established between troublemakers and mutineers on the one hand and the legitimate forces on the other," snapped Assad, whose troops in Lebanon are nominally under Sarkis' command...
...more arms and ammunition. The mission was fresh evidence of the heavy costs Syria had incurred since it intervened in Lebanon two years ago. Ironically, Assad's forces moved in to prevent the defeat of the Christian armies by radical Muslim and Palestinian commandos. Since then, however, the Syrians and the Christians have become bitter enemies because the Christians persist-against Assad's advice-in their efforts to partition Lebanon along sectarian lines. Since February more than 650 Syrian soldiers have perished in running battles with the militiamen, who receive guns and training from Israel. Moreover, the Lebanese...
...state visit to Moscow last week, Syrian President Hafez Assad joined Soviet President Leonid Brezhnev in a communiqué denouncing the "separate Camp David deal" as a "collusion arranged behind the back of the Arab nations," which would make an overall Middle East settlement "significantly more difficult." Both Assad and Brezhnev also demanded the resumption of a Geneva conference, under joint U.S. and U.S.S.R. sponsorship, which would work out a settlement based on unconditional Israeli withdrawal from all occupied territories...