Word: syrians
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Dates: during 1970-1979
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...along the historic road from Beirut to Damascus, Syrian soldiers can be found, manning big guns and tanks by day, huddling beside tents and fires by night. "Lebanon is a thankless, difficult, lonely task," says one high-ranking Damascus official. No one knows that better than Assad's 30,000 troops, who at a cost of $3 million a day provide the bulwark of the Arab peace-keeping force inside Lebanon. In a land where there are more guns than people, violence and bloodshed are always near, ambush and assassination everyday occurrences. But without the Syrian presence the violence would...
Having an army in Lebanon poses a major problem for Assad. So far, an estimated 600 to 700 Syrian soldiers have died there. The requirements of the military presence in Lebanon have also seriously weakened the Syrian forces on the Golan Heights; the current troop level there is far below what it was in 1973, and no combat match at all for Israeli forces. To make up for the huge losses Syria suffered in the 1973 war (7,000 men, 600 tanks and 165 aircraft), the 230,000-man army has been rebuilt and re-equipped by the Soviets, with...
...intention of pulling out of Lebanon, at least so long as the Israelis supply and advise the Christian militiamen. He has recently set about purging Israeli-trained officers from the Lebanese army and dismantling the various factions' checkpoints and military facilities in Beirut, thus leaving only the Syrian army responsible for security in the capital. Assad's goal is to have a Syrian presence throughout Lebanon, except for the areas south of the Litani River, which are patrolled by units of the 6,000-man United Nations Interim Force in Lebanon (UNIFIL...
...Syria is a predominantly Sunni Muslim country. There are complaints that the Alawites, an Islamic sect to which Assad belongs, represent only 10% of the people most top government offices. Some hard-line Baath Party members grumble that Assad is watering down the Marxist policies of previous regimes, while Syrian entrepreneurs think he has moved too slowly away from Baathism's doctrinaire socialism...
...Tito of the Arab world"?a military man who has become an astute politician on a precarious world stage. In seven years, Syria's per capita income has jumped 203% to the present $760, more than twice that of Egypt. The Soviet Union's stranglehold on Syrian imports and exports of the early 1970s has been broken, and today the U.S., Europe and Japan do more business in Syria than does Moscow. Assad is also trying to broaden his country's foreign political alignments. Egyptian President Anwar Sadat's visit to Jerusalem, which Assad warned would be a fateful...