Word: syrians
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...Iran was to be contained or if it changed its tune, it is hardly certain that Hizballah would follow suit. There is even less reason to think Hamas would. Israel's Dichter claims that Iran made its first overtures to Hamas in 2001 and that Khaled Mashaal, the Syrian-based leader of Hamas, is a "frequent flyer between Damascus and Tehran." But Hamas is a Sunni organization rooted in Palestinian resistance. It doesn't need Iran's encouragement to fight Israel...
...love Damascus, but I certainly do not love being here under these circumstances. I came here from Beirut a week ago, in the aging Volvo of a Syrian named Ali, a kind middle-aged Shi'ite who has driven my friends and me back and forth between the two cities many times. His knowledge of Lebanon's roads is matched only by his devotion to Hizballah. I would have trusted no other driver to bring me safely past the Israeli jets bombing our road. But fleeing Lebanon in a car decorated with the photograph of Hizballah leader Sheik Hassan Nasrallah...
...sounds of jets overhead. I had been hearing them for days in Beirut, and we both tensed, waiting to hear the boom of an explosion on the road. That did not come until we had descended past the town of Zahle and into the Bekaa Valley, close to the Syrian border. We had stopped the car on a side road so that Ali could hand over his Lebanese mobile-phone chip to a friend heading into the country. The delay turned out to be a godsend. When Ali started the car again, it was to flee the bombs hitting...
...probably think the same. Theirs are tales of constant flight from one crisis to another. Ismael, for example, fled Darfur in Sudan to work in Iraq, until the Americans invaded and he fled to Syria, where he was arrested for entering the country illegally. For two months, his Syrian jailors beat him every day, he said, before releasing him to go to Lebanon."Where will I go now?" he asks. He can't return to Sudan, where he fears Arab militias will kill him, and he says he won't go to Syria because he fears being arrested and beaten...
...country is by land through Syria. Fleets of taxis carried hotel guests on the three-hour trip to Damascus until an air strike knocked out a key bridge. Now cars have to take back roads through the high mountain passes or head north up the coast road toward the Syrian city of Homs. Given the conditions on the roads, staying in Beirut while the bombs fall is as good an option as trying to make a run for it. "You share your bed with a Lebanese girl?" a staff member at the Tourism Ministry asked me. "Get married...