Word: syrians
(lookup in dictionary)
(lookup stats)
Dates: all
Sort By: most recent first
(reverse)
...courting the tribes. Starting in November 2003, tribal sheiks and Baathist expatriates held a series of monthly meetings at the Cham Palace hotel in Damascus. They were public events, supposedly meetings to express solidarity with the Iraqi opposition to the U.S. occupation. (The January 2004 gathering was attended by Syrian President Bashar Assad.) Behind the scenes, however, the meetings provided a convenient cover for leaders of the insurgency, including Muhammad Yunis al-Ahmed, the former Military Bureau director, to meet, plan and distribute money. A senior military officer told TIME that U.S. intelligence had an informant--a mid-level Baathist...
What is remarkable is the extent to which the U.S. is aware of al-Ahmed's activities. "We know where Muhammad Yunis al-Ahmed lives in Damascus," says a U.S. intelligence official. "We know his phone number. He believes he has the protection of the Syrian government, and that certainly seems to be the case." But he hasn't been aggressively pursued by the U.S. either--in part because there has been a persistent and forlorn hope that al-Ahmed might be willing to help negotiate an end to the Baathist part of the insurgency. A senior U.S. intelligence officer...
...still be salvaged from an unwinnable military fight after the series of failures (see following story) that have marked the U.S. enterprise in Iraq? How can the U.S. extract itself without compounding the damage done to U.S. interests in the region? After a month in the al-Qaeda-dominated Syrian border region, TIME spent 10 days on the front lines of the war, having lived with U.S. and Iraqi troops as they prepared for the battle of Tall 'Afar, one of al-Zarqawi's biggest strongholds and, intelligence officers say, a place where he was detected in recent weeks. Waiting...
...Nonetheless, many see the election, after the fall of Saddam in 2003 and the Cedar Revolution against Syrian domination of Lebanon this year, as a further crumbling of the edifice that has guarded authoritarian regimes in the Arab world for half a century. They hope that Egyptian elections in November will produce a more representative parliament, and that voters will have a real choice in the next presidential contest, in 2011. After surveying the overflow crowd of 5,000 people at a rally in the northern city of El Mahla El Kobra, Maram Mazen, 19, a law student volunteering with...
...once it has sunk his teeth into something." Speaking to reporters, Mehlis, best known for obtaining a difficult conviction of four people involved in the 1986 bombing of a Berlin disco, refused to address the widespread Lebanese suspicion that Hariri's murder was ordered by the Syrian regime. Mehlis said, however: "We do think more people were involved." Last week, the U.S. State Department demanded that Syrian President Bashar Assad cooperate with the U.N. investigation, which thus far has been prevented from interrogating up to 15 senior Syrian officials. On Saturday, a Syrian official said that Damascus was ready...