Word: syrians
(lookup in dictionary)
(lookup stats)
Dates: all
Sort By: most recent first
(reverse)
Coming a day after the fifth anniversary of 9/11 and following another videotaped al-Qaeda vow to stage new attacks, Tuesday morning's foiled terrorist raid on the American embassy in Damascus is certainly cause for U.S. concern. A Syrian interrogation of one surviving attacker will seek to determine whether the incident was in fact the work of al-Qaeda or that of other individuals seeking to add to the carnage. Anti-American feelings are high throughout the Middle East, which in recent months has been gripped not only by the war in Iraq and the Israeli-Palestinian conflict...
...Syrian regime itself may have more to worry about in this particular attack than the U.S. That's because as it may have been intended as a riposte to Washington, the raid was a bold challenge to the rule of President Bashar Assad. The attack was carried out by as many as four Islamic militants shouting Muslim slogans in the heart of Damascus's diplomatic quarter not far from Assad's own residence - in short, one of the most heavily protected neighborhoods in Syria, if not the Middle East. The attackers failed to kill any American diplomats, and Syrian security...
...belli for a U.S. military strike on Syria. Relations have been tense for years. The U.S. recalled its ambassador in Damascus after Syria, despite its denials, was implicated in the assassination of former Lebanese Prime Minister Rafic Hariri in February 2005. Mobs are one thing, but terrorism tells the Syrian people something that no dictator wishes to show: that the regime does not have as tight a grip on the country as it would like its citizens to believe...
...What the attack shows, in fact, is that the Syrian regime's own long war with Islamic extremists is heating up again. In 1982, the regime of Assad's late father, Hafez, obliterated sections of the Syrian city of Hama, killing an estimated 20,000 people, to quell an uprising by the fundamentalist Muslim Brotherhood. The Assad dynasty's iron rule has kept the lid on discontent for most of the time since. But during the last few years, new attacks seem to herald the return of violent extremists. Just three months ago, in one of the Syrian capital...
...movie's red herring is the Syrian suspect. He is superficially plausible both because of the plague of Islamic jihadism and because of our memory of Sirhan Sirhan, the Palestinian who in 1968 shot Robert F. Kennedy because, he said, of Bobby's support for Israel in the Six-Day War. If Sirhan was indeed the lone gunman, then the assassination (which is dramatized in the Emilio Estevez movie Bobby, also playing in Toronto) could be said to mark the birth of Arab terrorism on U.S. soil...