Word: syrians
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TIME Beirut Correspondent Roberto Suro covers not one but two of the toughest news beats in the world: embattled Lebanon and the police state of Syria. For this week's cover stories on the continuing violence in Lebanon and on Syrian President Hafez As sad and his country's pivotal role in the tur bulent Middle East, Suro confronted the difficulties of reporting from both countries...
...improvement in U.S.Israeli relations was engineered largely by Secretary of State George Shultz, who has felt personally betrayed by the refusal of Syrian President Hafez Assad to carry out a promise to withdraw troops from Lebanon after Israel not only agreed to do so but unilaterally and prematurely drew back to safer positions in southern Lebanon, actually against U.S. wishes. The agreement is virtually a return to former Secretary of State Alexander Haig's "consensus of strategic concerns," in which U.S. and Israeli military cooperation was seen as vital to discouraging Soviet intrusion into Middle East politics and, more...
...recommendation was an explosive one, discussed in secret in a National Security Council meeting. Robert McFarlane, then the special envoy to the Middle East, was urging the President to order air strikes against Syrian positions in Lebanon. But the next day, even as McFarlane toured the troubled region, all three major television networks had stories on the classified proposal...
...held on in Tripoli as long as he could, convinced that one or another group of foreign governments would eventually come to his aid. Sure enough, at week's end the Foreign Ministers of Saudi Arabia and Syria announced, after several days of intense bargaining in the Syrian capital of Damascus, that they had devised an agreement acceptable to both Arafat and his enemies...
...Lebanese captured by the Israelis during the war in Lebanon. That exchange, in turn, strengthened the prestige of Arafat at a precarious moment, and may have hastened the negotiations leading to the agreement between Arafat and the rebels. Those negotiations had been closely supervised by Syria, even though Syrian President Hafez Assad was absent and rumored to be seriously ill. Official reports had stated that Assad underwent an appendectomy two weeks ago, but many diplomats believed that he was suffering from some sort of heart trouble...