Sunday, June 26, 2005
Wednesday, June 22, 2005
Death Clock: The Internet's friendly reminder that life is slipping away...
To listen click here:
ABDEL HALEEM HAFEZ
Saturday, June 18, 2005
فيروز التي لم تغن كارهة حبيبها يوما.. سبعينية لم يعيها طول السهر
click here to listen:
لبنان
السهر
الشتاء
يا أهل الأرض
دور يا زمن
فيروزقصيدة لبنان
فيروزلعب الريشة
فيروزبيروت هل ذرفت
فيروزرجعت العصفورة
فيروزيا مينا الحبايب
فيروززنوبيا
ماجدة الروميشعبك واقف بالريح
ماجدة الروميالحلم الجاي
ماجدة الروميشبابيك الأمان
لو بحبها جديد
لا ما خلصت الحكاية مجموعة فنانين
أنا قلبي دليلي
يا عاشقة الورد
Je te aime
Comme toi
يا غايب
يا مسهر عيني
يا دنيا
ميدلي الشمس
ليالي الأنس
لبيروت
لو فينا نرجع صغار
أول مرة
A murder stirs Kurds in Syria
Syria's 1.7 million Kurds are impatient over their rights, and key to Syrian stability.
By Nicholas Blanford
– At a meeting of Syrian political-intelligence officers in late April in the Kurdish northeast, the only item on the agenda was Sheikh Mohammed Mashouq al-Khaznawi.
He was becoming a problem for Syria, says a Western diplomat familiar with the meeting.
A moderate Islamic cleric who once worked with the Syrian government to temper extremism, Sheikh Khaznawi was emerging as one of its most outspoken critics. He advocated Kurdish rights and democracy, galvanizing many of the 1.7 million Kurds against the regime of President Bashar al-Assad. At the same time, Kurds were gaining political power in Iraq, Lebanon was casting Syrian troops out, and the US was criticizing Syria's government.
"[Syrian intelligence] wrote a report saying he ... should be stopped. They said he would start a revolution," says Sheikh Murad Khaznawi, the eldest of Sheikh Mohammed's eight sons.
On May 10, the cleric disappeared in Damascus. Three weeks later, he was found dead.
His murder sent shock waves through Syria's marginalized Kurdish community, sparking mass demonstrations earlier this month and mobilizing a community that represents the most potent domestic threat to President Assad.
"The sheikh was a symbol for the Kurdish people and he wanted all the people to unite and struggle peacefully," says Hassan Saleh, secretary-general of Yakiti Party, a banned Kurdish group.
The Syrian authorities deny involvement in Khaznawi's killing. But analysts and diplomats note that the cleric's death coincides with a crackdown by Damascus against internal political dissent.
"The stability of Syria is in the hands of the Kurds," says Ibrahim Hamidi, correspondent of the Arabic Al Hayat daily. "They have a unique position. They are organized, they have an Islamic identity, regional support through the Kurds in Turkey, Iraq and Iran, international support with some European countries lobbying for them, and political status because of [the Kurdish empowerment in] Iraq."
Syria's 1.7 million Kurds comprise the largest non-Arab group in Syria, making up about 9 percent of the population. Most Kurds live in the Hasake province. The area's economic importance and the Baath Party's Arab nationalist ideology have ensured that the province has long been under firm state control.
In 1962, a year before the Baath Party took power, a census stripped around 120,000 Kurdish Syrians of their citizenship, reclassifying them as "foreigners," who carry red identity cards rather than passports. Today, some 300,000 Kurds live here.
In the early 1970s, thousands of Arabs were resettled on confiscated Kurdish property along a 200-mile strip on the Turkish border as part of an Arabization policy that included banning Kurds from schools.
Preaching individual rights
It was in this milieu that Sheikh Khaznawi was raised. He was born into a respected religious family that followed the Sufi branch of Islam, a movement of organized brotherhoods, known as Tariqas, each one headed by a sheikh. But the young Khaznawi broke with Sufi tradition and began preaching individual freedom and self-responsibility rather than collective obedience to a single leader.
"The sheikh used to speak against the majority of Sufi ways. He said it was like drugging the mind," says his son Murad.
A father of 16 children, he cut a distinguished figure in his traditional garb of gray tunic and tightly wrapped white turban. He possessed a good sense of humor and, unlike most Islamic clerics, was happy to shake hands with women. Khaznawi's moderate ideas, which included support for secularism and tolerance of other faiths, won him a growing number of followers and endeared him initially to the Syrian government, which views Islamic extremism with hostility.
The Kurds' Status in Syria
• Population: 1.7 million. As Syria's largest non-Arab group, Kurds account for approximately 9 percent of the country's total population.
• Stateless Kurds: In 1962, more than 120,000 Kurds were stripped of their Syrian citizenship. Today the number of Kurds without Syrian passports has swelled to more than 300,000.
• Hasake Province, where most Kurds live, is the main source of Syria's oil and gas reserves and a major center of cotton and wheat production.
In March 2004, simmering tensions in the Kurdish northeast exploded into bloody clashes between Kurds, Syrian security forces, and Arab tribesmen. The government asked Khaznawi to travel to Qamishli to help ease tensions. His mediation helped calm the situation, but he grew increasingly active in advocating Kurdish rights. When 312 Kurdish detainees were released in March, Khaznawi was there to greet them. In April, on the anniversary of the death of a Kurd in last year's riots, he publicly denounced the government's treatment of Kurds.
"After that he was warned by the security [agents] that what he was doing was dangerous," says Mr. Saleh. Then, Khaznawi traveled to Brussels in February and met with the exiled head of the Muslim Brotherhood, an Islamist organization which fought a terrorist campaign against the government in the early 1980s. The meeting earned him another warning from state security.
In April, he gave an interview with the Canadian Globe and Mail newspaper in which he was quoted as saying, "Either the regime will change or the regime must go.... The reason I can speak out is because the Americans are trying get rid of dictators and help the oppressed."
Khaznawi began receiving death threats from Islamic extremists who abhorred his moderation and his criticism of suicide bombings in Iraq. Also threatened was his colleague Mohammed Habash, director of the Islamic Studies Center in Damascus, an institution that advocates moderate Islam.
"They warned me and Khaznawi that we were playing with fire," says Mr. Habash. "I'm afraid. I think there's a clear plan of the fundamentalists to fight the renewal [moderation] of Islam."
Early last month, Khaznawi received a call from people claiming to be followers of his father, who died in 1992. They told the cleric that their father was ill and wanted to see him. Could he come to their house for breakfast? He was suspicious, but he accepted. He left the Islamic Studies Center on the morning of May 10 and was not seen again. "He said he would go to breakfast, but unfortunately he went to his death instead," Habash says.
Kurds rising
Khaznawi's disappearance spurred some 10,000 Kurds to demonstrate in Qamishli on May 21, calling on the government to reveal his whereabouts. But the government denied any knowledge of the kidnapping.
On June 1, Khaznawi's family was informed that their father had been found dead in Deir ez-Zor. His body, which was buried in a cemetery on the edge of town, showed signs of torture. "The security told us he had been buried for 12 days," says Sheikh Morshed Khaznawi, another of Khaznawi's sons. "We didn't believe them because the depth of the grave was only 70 centimeters [two feet] and Deir ez-Zor is very hot. He should have decayed very badly."
The Syrian authorities blamed the cleric's murder on a "criminal gang." Two gang members were arrested and were shown confessing on television.
Tens of thousands of mourners attended Khaznawi's burial and some 10,000 (mostly Kurd) protesters took to the streets of Qamishli on June 5. The demonstration turned violent when police and Arab tribesmen beat the protesters, including women, then looted dozens of Kurdish-owned shops.
"We have exceeded the culture of fear that the regime planted in us," says Machal Tammo, of the Tayyar Mustaqbal, a Kurdish Party. "For this very reason, the regime does not want us to ask for our demands peacefully."
More rights for Kurds?
The main road between Hasake and Qamishli cuts across a barren terrain of harvested wheat fields, the monotony of the featureless plain occasionally broken by small man-made hills, known as tells, which have been part of this ancient steppe for more than 4,000 years. The hot wind creates spinning columns of dust which pirouette and sway gracefully across the fields of golden stubble.
At the entrance to Qamishli today, plainclothes Syrian intelligence officers with rifles keep an eye on passing traffic. More intelligence officers sit on stools beside their vehicle at a roundabout. Security has grown tighter since Khaznawi's kidnapping and murder.
Morshed Khaznawi, who bears a striking resemblance to his slain father, demands an international investigation into his father's death. "We think the Syrian authorities have complete and total responsibility," he says.
But Mr. Habash and some analysts doubt that the regime was behind Khaznawi's death, pointing to a long-running family dispute and the enmity he aroused among Islamic extremists.
"I believe the children of Mashouq are in the eye of the storm and have a desire to accuse the government," Habash says. "Mashouq had good contacts with the regime, government, army, and intelligence. His political activities were not enough to get him killed."
Following the March 2004 riots in Qamishli, Abdullah Derdary, the Syrian planning minister, traveled to Hasake province and reassured the Kurds that economic assistance was on its way.
"Nothing happened and this time no one believes them," says a Western diplomat familiar with Kurdish affairs. "They are looking at Iraq and thinking we can organize ourselves and the regime knows it."
During the 1990s, Syrian Kurds were permitted to fulfill their military service with the PKK, the Kurdish armed separatist group that was fighting for autonomy in southeast Turkey. Damascus and Ankara signed a security pact in 1998 which ended Syria's support for the PKK. But, according to the diplomat, many Syrian Kurds have slipped into northern Iraq to continue fighting with a newly resurgent PKK, which could have alarming implications for Damascus.
Still, there are indications that the government is taking the Kurdish dilemma more seriously. The government recently appointed Major General Mohammed Mansoura as head of Syria's powerful political security department. General Mansoura has extensive experience with the Kurds having headed the Hasake branch of military intelligence from 1982 to 2002.
Regardless of who killed Khaznawi, the death of the respected cleric has refocused attention on Syria's Kurds. Last week's Baath Party Congress referred to unspecified steps to help the Kurds - widely reported to involve granting citizenship to the 300,000 stateless Kurds.
But for many Kurds such government measures are too little too late. "The Kurds are really fed up. They don't care anymore," says Maan Abdelsalam, a Syrian civil rights activist.
Syria's 1.7 million Kurds are impatient over their rights, and key to Syrian stability.
By Nicholas Blanford
– At a meeting of Syrian political-intelligence officers in late April in the Kurdish northeast, the only item on the agenda was Sheikh Mohammed Mashouq al-Khaznawi.
He was becoming a problem for Syria, says a Western diplomat familiar with the meeting.
A moderate Islamic cleric who once worked with the Syrian government to temper extremism, Sheikh Khaznawi was emerging as one of its most outspoken critics. He advocated Kurdish rights and democracy, galvanizing many of the 1.7 million Kurds against the regime of President Bashar al-Assad. At the same time, Kurds were gaining political power in Iraq, Lebanon was casting Syrian troops out, and the US was criticizing Syria's government.
"[Syrian intelligence] wrote a report saying he ... should be stopped. They said he would start a revolution," says Sheikh Murad Khaznawi, the eldest of Sheikh Mohammed's eight sons.
On May 10, the cleric disappeared in Damascus. Three weeks later, he was found dead.
His murder sent shock waves through Syria's marginalized Kurdish community, sparking mass demonstrations earlier this month and mobilizing a community that represents the most potent domestic threat to President Assad.
"The sheikh was a symbol for the Kurdish people and he wanted all the people to unite and struggle peacefully," says Hassan Saleh, secretary-general of Yakiti Party, a banned Kurdish group.
The Syrian authorities deny involvement in Khaznawi's killing. But analysts and diplomats note that the cleric's death coincides with a crackdown by Damascus against internal political dissent.
"The stability of Syria is in the hands of the Kurds," says Ibrahim Hamidi, correspondent of the Arabic Al Hayat daily. "They have a unique position. They are organized, they have an Islamic identity, regional support through the Kurds in Turkey, Iraq and Iran, international support with some European countries lobbying for them, and political status because of [the Kurdish empowerment in] Iraq."
Syria's 1.7 million Kurds comprise the largest non-Arab group in Syria, making up about 9 percent of the population. Most Kurds live in the Hasake province. The area's economic importance and the Baath Party's Arab nationalist ideology have ensured that the province has long been under firm state control.
In 1962, a year before the Baath Party took power, a census stripped around 120,000 Kurdish Syrians of their citizenship, reclassifying them as "foreigners," who carry red identity cards rather than passports. Today, some 300,000 Kurds live here.
In the early 1970s, thousands of Arabs were resettled on confiscated Kurdish property along a 200-mile strip on the Turkish border as part of an Arabization policy that included banning Kurds from schools.
Preaching individual rights
It was in this milieu that Sheikh Khaznawi was raised. He was born into a respected religious family that followed the Sufi branch of Islam, a movement of organized brotherhoods, known as Tariqas, each one headed by a sheikh. But the young Khaznawi broke with Sufi tradition and began preaching individual freedom and self-responsibility rather than collective obedience to a single leader.
"The sheikh used to speak against the majority of Sufi ways. He said it was like drugging the mind," says his son Murad.
A father of 16 children, he cut a distinguished figure in his traditional garb of gray tunic and tightly wrapped white turban. He possessed a good sense of humor and, unlike most Islamic clerics, was happy to shake hands with women. Khaznawi's moderate ideas, which included support for secularism and tolerance of other faiths, won him a growing number of followers and endeared him initially to the Syrian government, which views Islamic extremism with hostility.
The Kurds' Status in Syria
• Population: 1.7 million. As Syria's largest non-Arab group, Kurds account for approximately 9 percent of the country's total population.
• Stateless Kurds: In 1962, more than 120,000 Kurds were stripped of their Syrian citizenship. Today the number of Kurds without Syrian passports has swelled to more than 300,000.
• Hasake Province, where most Kurds live, is the main source of Syria's oil and gas reserves and a major center of cotton and wheat production.
In March 2004, simmering tensions in the Kurdish northeast exploded into bloody clashes between Kurds, Syrian security forces, and Arab tribesmen. The government asked Khaznawi to travel to Qamishli to help ease tensions. His mediation helped calm the situation, but he grew increasingly active in advocating Kurdish rights. When 312 Kurdish detainees were released in March, Khaznawi was there to greet them. In April, on the anniversary of the death of a Kurd in last year's riots, he publicly denounced the government's treatment of Kurds.
"After that he was warned by the security [agents] that what he was doing was dangerous," says Mr. Saleh. Then, Khaznawi traveled to Brussels in February and met with the exiled head of the Muslim Brotherhood, an Islamist organization which fought a terrorist campaign against the government in the early 1980s. The meeting earned him another warning from state security.
In April, he gave an interview with the Canadian Globe and Mail newspaper in which he was quoted as saying, "Either the regime will change or the regime must go.... The reason I can speak out is because the Americans are trying get rid of dictators and help the oppressed."
Khaznawi began receiving death threats from Islamic extremists who abhorred his moderation and his criticism of suicide bombings in Iraq. Also threatened was his colleague Mohammed Habash, director of the Islamic Studies Center in Damascus, an institution that advocates moderate Islam.
"They warned me and Khaznawi that we were playing with fire," says Mr. Habash. "I'm afraid. I think there's a clear plan of the fundamentalists to fight the renewal [moderation] of Islam."
Early last month, Khaznawi received a call from people claiming to be followers of his father, who died in 1992. They told the cleric that their father was ill and wanted to see him. Could he come to their house for breakfast? He was suspicious, but he accepted. He left the Islamic Studies Center on the morning of May 10 and was not seen again. "He said he would go to breakfast, but unfortunately he went to his death instead," Habash says.
Kurds rising
Khaznawi's disappearance spurred some 10,000 Kurds to demonstrate in Qamishli on May 21, calling on the government to reveal his whereabouts. But the government denied any knowledge of the kidnapping.
On June 1, Khaznawi's family was informed that their father had been found dead in Deir ez-Zor. His body, which was buried in a cemetery on the edge of town, showed signs of torture. "The security told us he had been buried for 12 days," says Sheikh Morshed Khaznawi, another of Khaznawi's sons. "We didn't believe them because the depth of the grave was only 70 centimeters [two feet] and Deir ez-Zor is very hot. He should have decayed very badly."
The Syrian authorities blamed the cleric's murder on a "criminal gang." Two gang members were arrested and were shown confessing on television.
Tens of thousands of mourners attended Khaznawi's burial and some 10,000 (mostly Kurd) protesters took to the streets of Qamishli on June 5. The demonstration turned violent when police and Arab tribesmen beat the protesters, including women, then looted dozens of Kurdish-owned shops.
"We have exceeded the culture of fear that the regime planted in us," says Machal Tammo, of the Tayyar Mustaqbal, a Kurdish Party. "For this very reason, the regime does not want us to ask for our demands peacefully."
More rights for Kurds?
The main road between Hasake and Qamishli cuts across a barren terrain of harvested wheat fields, the monotony of the featureless plain occasionally broken by small man-made hills, known as tells, which have been part of this ancient steppe for more than 4,000 years. The hot wind creates spinning columns of dust which pirouette and sway gracefully across the fields of golden stubble.
At the entrance to Qamishli today, plainclothes Syrian intelligence officers with rifles keep an eye on passing traffic. More intelligence officers sit on stools beside their vehicle at a roundabout. Security has grown tighter since Khaznawi's kidnapping and murder.
Morshed Khaznawi, who bears a striking resemblance to his slain father, demands an international investigation into his father's death. "We think the Syrian authorities have complete and total responsibility," he says.
But Mr. Habash and some analysts doubt that the regime was behind Khaznawi's death, pointing to a long-running family dispute and the enmity he aroused among Islamic extremists.
"I believe the children of Mashouq are in the eye of the storm and have a desire to accuse the government," Habash says. "Mashouq had good contacts with the regime, government, army, and intelligence. His political activities were not enough to get him killed."
Following the March 2004 riots in Qamishli, Abdullah Derdary, the Syrian planning minister, traveled to Hasake province and reassured the Kurds that economic assistance was on its way.
"Nothing happened and this time no one believes them," says a Western diplomat familiar with Kurdish affairs. "They are looking at Iraq and thinking we can organize ourselves and the regime knows it."
During the 1990s, Syrian Kurds were permitted to fulfill their military service with the PKK, the Kurdish armed separatist group that was fighting for autonomy in southeast Turkey. Damascus and Ankara signed a security pact in 1998 which ended Syria's support for the PKK. But, according to the diplomat, many Syrian Kurds have slipped into northern Iraq to continue fighting with a newly resurgent PKK, which could have alarming implications for Damascus.
Still, there are indications that the government is taking the Kurdish dilemma more seriously. The government recently appointed Major General Mohammed Mansoura as head of Syria's powerful political security department. General Mansoura has extensive experience with the Kurds having headed the Hasake branch of military intelligence from 1982 to 2002.
Regardless of who killed Khaznawi, the death of the respected cleric has refocused attention on Syria's Kurds. Last week's Baath Party Congress referred to unspecified steps to help the Kurds - widely reported to involve granting citizenship to the 300,000 stateless Kurds.
But for many Kurds such government measures are too little too late. "The Kurds are really fed up. They don't care anymore," says Maan Abdelsalam, a Syrian civil rights activist.
Friday, June 17, 2005
Syrian Influence Is Seen in Lebanese Parliamentary Vote
[The Traitor Aoun]
By John KifnerNY Times
BEIRUT, Lebanon, June 16 - As the four-week Lebanese elections approach their last round on Sunday, opposition leaders, critics and Western diplomats contend that Syrian intelligence operatives, intertwined over 15 years with the Lebanese security services, are still operating here and influencing the vote despite the withdrawal of Syrian troops and official denials from Damascus."The Syrians are still controlling the army, the security services," said a former high-ranking Lebanese intelligence officer, who stipulated that his name could not be used because of the danger of assassination. "They issue orders by phone, by e-mail, by fax," the former officer said. "Everybody in this government is still manipulated by Syria."The Syrians and their allies here are working to increase turnout for the long-exiled Gen. Michel Aoun's candidates on Sunday in the last of four rounds of parliamentary voting. Their goal is to secure the rule of Syria's handpicked Lebanese president, Émil Lahoud, which has grown more likely with General Aoun's electoral victories in the last week. The demands by the opposition coalition for President Lahoud's ouster are fading as swiftly as the coalition's electoral prospects.This appears to mean a continued, if more shadowy, influence by Syria, even though General Aoun returned here after 15 years of exile as a Lebanese nationalist and Maronite Catholic symbol of resistance to Syria.The crux of the problem, the former officer and others suggested, is the relationships - often profitable and corrupt - between the Syrian intelligence officers, who functioned much like proconsuls here, and the security and military intelligence services of Mr. Lahoud, the former Lebanese army commander."I have seen personally the mukhtars and the mayors being contacted by the intelligence of the army to vote for the Aoun list," the former officer said, referring to pressure put on local officials in voting on June 12 in the mountains north of Beirut."They are working for Aoun's list because it is the best way to keep control," he said.Several opposition leaders have made similar accusations. Last weekend for example, Samir Franjieh, a breakaway leftist member of the powerful far-right Franjieh clan in northern Lebanon said that Brig. Gen. Mohammed Khallof of Syria was in Tripoli.General Khallof was "addressing threats to some opposition members saying that what happened to journalist Samir Kassir might happen to another person," Mr. Franjieh told supporters, referring to the bombing of a critic of Syria this month.Keeping Mr. Lahoud in office would mean largely preserving the government security services that many Lebanese contend were involved with Syria in the assassination of Rafik Hariri, the former prime minister, in February. That car bombing, which killed 19 other people, incited huge demonstrations here and international pressure, forcing Syria to remove the last of the troops that had been here since early in the civil war in 1976. In the intricate, religion-based politics here, the opposition coalition led by Saad Hariri, Mr. Hariri's son and a Sunni Muslim, and Walid Jumblatt, the Druse chieftain, urged throwing President Lahoud out of office and called for a march on the Presidential Palace last week. But they abandoned the protest at the urging of the Maronite Catholic patriarch, Nasrullah Sfeir.General Aoun has said he favors keeping Mr. Lahoud in office. The Maronite patriarch, who blessed a Christian opposition group, has nonetheless resisted ousting Mr. Lahoud, a Maronite Christian. The president, by the unwritten National Accord, must be a Maronite. Hezbollah leaders also declared last night that the Shiite militia party would not support efforts to cut short Mr. Lahoud's term, which the Lebanese Parliament extended by three years. Western diplomats said that embassies had received reports of Syrian military officers wandering around the country. The diplomats said the situation was compounded by a decade and a half of entanglements between Syrian and Lebanese intelligence agencies. Diplomats have also expressed concern about the possibility of assassination attempts, given Mr. Kassir's fate. None of this surprises Timur Goksel, the former chief adviser to the United Nations peacekeeping force in southern Lebanon who teaches conflict resolution and Lebanese issues at the American University of Beirut and Notre Dame University here."I didn't expect them to leave anyway," Mr. Goksel said with a shrug. "Give me a break. All these connections with family and money?"
[The Traitor Aoun]
By John KifnerNY Times
BEIRUT, Lebanon, June 16 - As the four-week Lebanese elections approach their last round on Sunday, opposition leaders, critics and Western diplomats contend that Syrian intelligence operatives, intertwined over 15 years with the Lebanese security services, are still operating here and influencing the vote despite the withdrawal of Syrian troops and official denials from Damascus."The Syrians are still controlling the army, the security services," said a former high-ranking Lebanese intelligence officer, who stipulated that his name could not be used because of the danger of assassination. "They issue orders by phone, by e-mail, by fax," the former officer said. "Everybody in this government is still manipulated by Syria."The Syrians and their allies here are working to increase turnout for the long-exiled Gen. Michel Aoun's candidates on Sunday in the last of four rounds of parliamentary voting. Their goal is to secure the rule of Syria's handpicked Lebanese president, Émil Lahoud, which has grown more likely with General Aoun's electoral victories in the last week. The demands by the opposition coalition for President Lahoud's ouster are fading as swiftly as the coalition's electoral prospects.This appears to mean a continued, if more shadowy, influence by Syria, even though General Aoun returned here after 15 years of exile as a Lebanese nationalist and Maronite Catholic symbol of resistance to Syria.The crux of the problem, the former officer and others suggested, is the relationships - often profitable and corrupt - between the Syrian intelligence officers, who functioned much like proconsuls here, and the security and military intelligence services of Mr. Lahoud, the former Lebanese army commander."I have seen personally the mukhtars and the mayors being contacted by the intelligence of the army to vote for the Aoun list," the former officer said, referring to pressure put on local officials in voting on June 12 in the mountains north of Beirut."They are working for Aoun's list because it is the best way to keep control," he said.Several opposition leaders have made similar accusations. Last weekend for example, Samir Franjieh, a breakaway leftist member of the powerful far-right Franjieh clan in northern Lebanon said that Brig. Gen. Mohammed Khallof of Syria was in Tripoli.General Khallof was "addressing threats to some opposition members saying that what happened to journalist Samir Kassir might happen to another person," Mr. Franjieh told supporters, referring to the bombing of a critic of Syria this month.Keeping Mr. Lahoud in office would mean largely preserving the government security services that many Lebanese contend were involved with Syria in the assassination of Rafik Hariri, the former prime minister, in February. That car bombing, which killed 19 other people, incited huge demonstrations here and international pressure, forcing Syria to remove the last of the troops that had been here since early in the civil war in 1976. In the intricate, religion-based politics here, the opposition coalition led by Saad Hariri, Mr. Hariri's son and a Sunni Muslim, and Walid Jumblatt, the Druse chieftain, urged throwing President Lahoud out of office and called for a march on the Presidential Palace last week. But they abandoned the protest at the urging of the Maronite Catholic patriarch, Nasrullah Sfeir.General Aoun has said he favors keeping Mr. Lahoud in office. The Maronite patriarch, who blessed a Christian opposition group, has nonetheless resisted ousting Mr. Lahoud, a Maronite Christian. The president, by the unwritten National Accord, must be a Maronite. Hezbollah leaders also declared last night that the Shiite militia party would not support efforts to cut short Mr. Lahoud's term, which the Lebanese Parliament extended by three years. Western diplomats said that embassies had received reports of Syrian military officers wandering around the country. The diplomats said the situation was compounded by a decade and a half of entanglements between Syrian and Lebanese intelligence agencies. Diplomats have also expressed concern about the possibility of assassination attempts, given Mr. Kassir's fate. None of this surprises Timur Goksel, the former chief adviser to the United Nations peacekeeping force in southern Lebanon who teaches conflict resolution and Lebanese issues at the American University of Beirut and Notre Dame University here."I didn't expect them to leave anyway," Mr. Goksel said with a shrug. "Give me a break. All these connections with family and money?"
CAPTION: The Cedar of Lebanon tree that overlooks Washington's grave site.
The Cedar of Lebanon
The cedar of Lebanon was planted Dec. 15, 1899, to commemorate the 100th anniversary of Washington's death. Norton said the sapling was obtained from the U.S. Botanic Garden and brought to Mount Vernon by a Masonic delegation. The tree, which is native to the Middle East, is 70 feet tall with a trunk circumference of 156 inches. It is located adjacent to the first president's grave. "This is really special," Norton said. "You see magnificent cedars of Lebanon in Europe. There are some really beautiful ones in England. There are very, very few of these trees . . . in this area, but boy, they are gorgeous. And how nice to have it here at the tomb. It just is perfect to have it here, shading the sarcophagus area. It's a solemn area, and the tree fits quite nicely."
Thursday, June 16, 2005
Intelligence agents return to Lebanon with cash, orders for pro-Syrian assets
Senior Syrian intelligence agents have returned to Lebanon with money and instructions to influence parliamentary elections. Lebanese newspapers said at least five Syrian intelligence officers entered Lebanon to help Syria's allies win Lebanese parliamentary seats. They said the officers have targeted the anti-Syrian opposition. On June 2, a prominent anti-Syrian Lebanese journalist was killed when his car exploded in Beirut
Senior Syrian intelligence agents have returned to Lebanon with money and instructions to influence parliamentary elections. Lebanese newspapers said at least five Syrian intelligence officers entered Lebanon to help Syria's allies win Lebanese parliamentary seats. They said the officers have targeted the anti-Syrian opposition. On June 2, a prominent anti-Syrian Lebanese journalist was killed when his car exploded in Beirut
General Mad Max,A Syrian Trojan Horse, per excellence
by Nagi N. Najjar
Elie Hobeika, the architect of Sabra and Chatilla, is classified by many as a Syrian Trojan Horse in Lebanon. A master gangster-assassin, Damascus groomed him for years to serve its interests for the Lebanese Presidency. When the book " From Israel to Damascus" was published, it exposed Elie Hobeika's massacres, murders, and distortions in Lebanon, resulting in Hobeika's political legacy destruction, and Damascus had to get rid of him. He became a dangerous liability that could implicate Syria in many embarrassments . Emile Lahoud, our current President, a corrupted General in the Lebanese Army, coming politically from a better environment, hasn't committed any major crimes in the Lebanese war. Syria installed him as a good boy in power and manipulated him for years without setback, until Syrian Generals Assef Shawkat and Rustom Ghazali along with Bachar Assad instructions decided to eliminate Prime Minister Hariri of Lebanon. President Lahoud's Intelligence services were instrumental in instigating, surveiling, and covering up the evidence and the murder later on. For many analysts, President Lahoud, a Syrian agent in Lebanon, became a liability for Syria. His political existence was in danger for Syria -- therefore he has to be replaced. Damascus is actively looking for an acceptable "Christian" replacement and found crazy, retired Mad Max resting in Paris with over a 100 million dollar fortune he "accumulated" from his last war in Lebanon. President Lahoud's son and Kareem Pakradouni, another Syrian French speaking puppet, were rapidly dispatched to Paris to give the General guarantees to return to Lebanon and support President Lahoud and defend the "Christian" legacy of the Presidency in Lebanon. Within the context of many secret meetings that happened in Damascus in the past between the secret envoys of General Aoun and Walid Muallem, the newly Syrian appointed Vice Minister of Foreign Affairs (Former Syria's Ambassador to Washington), General Michel Aoun received the green light to return to Lebanon with a secret understanding to support President Lahoud's regime, recruit, neutralize, and divide the Christian street against the opposition. Hariri's murder accelerated Aoun's return as Syria was losing ground in Lebanon and Damascus found a substitute for President Lahoud and promised the General the Presidency. No one will surpass General Michel Aoun's record for supporting Syrian strategy in Lebanese politics. For the record: His Excellency General Aoun's relation with Syria is old news.Jan 15th 1986- Major Paul Matar rescues Elias Hobeika (a Syrian Stooge) on instructions from Aoun. General Aoun received a telephone call that day from the chief of staff of the Syrian Army, then General Hikmat Shehabi, urging him to save Hobeika. He saved Elie Hobeika's life from his Intelligence Headquarters in Beirut,1986, hiding him in the Ministry of Defence, and later on flew Hobeika to Cyprus from where he went to France and from Paris took the first plane to Damascus as the Syrian Army offered him a strong military base in the Bekaa Valley in the city of Zahleh. Hobeika started to send his spies and hit men to East Beirut with explosives and car bombs, and General Aoun trusted officers facilitated their passages on the checkpoints of East Beirut, a gesture from Aoun to appease and gain Damascus trust . 1987, Ashrafieh military incursion.He helped Hobeika's military incursion against East Beirut in 1987 against the Christian Lebanese Forces, he was constantly in contact over the telephone with Hobeika and Ghazi Kanaan (The Syrian Secret Service Chief) detailing to them what was the Army was going to do by order of former President Amine Gemayel and former then Ambassador Bartholomew. Gemayel asked the Army to interfere rapidly and secure the breach. Gen Aoun delayed the deployment of the Army for over 3 hours, coordinating the military momentum with Kanaan, and Hobeika giving enough time for Elie Hobeika to withdraw his men and join their Syrian controlled bases in West Beirut. Hobeika after this secret military operation was called by the Syrian political Hierarchy in Damascus, "Abu Ali " Hobeika, a promotion in the Syrian lexicon. 1988, Secret meeting in the city of Zahleh in the Bekaa Valley with Syrian intelligence . General Michel Aoun, Commander of the Army then, went to the city of Zahleh secretly without the knowledge of President Amine Gemayel and the head of Lebanese Military Intelligence, then General Simon Kassis. Aoun met secretly in Elie Hobeika's Headquarter (above the Restaurant Casino Monte Alberto) , with the vice President of Syria Abdel Halim Khaddam, Ghazi Kanaan the head of Syrian Intelligence in Lebanon, and Elie Hobeika assisted the meeting. The whole Command was emptied of Hobeika's partisans except for a few trusted lieutenants of Elie Hobeika on guard. Gemayel knew about this meeting later on along with few superior officers of the Lebanese Army. A large dispute occurred between them in the Presidential Palace, and in the last 2 hours of Amine Gemayel's Regime, Damascus called and imposed General Aoun on Lebanon as head of the interim Government.The War of Elimination 1990:This war was declared by General Aoun against the Christian Community and the Christian Lebanese Forces. He was promised the Presidency in the Arab summit then taking place in Tunis should he eliminate the "Israeli mechanism" of Lebanon, the Christian militia of the Lebanese Forces . The General received all his military logistics from a base of the Syrian Army in Dhour El Shouier (Mount Lebanon) to fight the Christians. He was helped by Assaad Hardane, (mastermind of President Bashir Gemayel's assassination). Hardane was head of the SSNP militia then, today they will meet together in the elected Parliament . Two days before the Syrian invasion of East Beirut, Hobeika smuggled and met secretly with General Aoun in the Presidential Palace and instructed Aoun to decline any Israeli help for Lebanon. Israel who had an emissary offering assistance in the Presidential palace was furious when it learned that Aoun declined any help from Jerusalem on Syrian orders.Today, the General is no different : Past and present, Michel Aoun is the Class A Syrian Trojan Horse par excellence for Lebanese politics. Damascus having lost most of its cards in the Lebanese puzzle after the murder of Rafic Hariri, wanted at all cost to stop its retreat from Lebanese politics and stop the progression of US influence in Lebanon's politics. Syria wanted to stop the US mechanism in Lebanon translated by the Hariri-Jumblatt alliance against Syria, and no better candidate would play the role of a divisive dynamic and neutralize the US role but Michel Aoun since Hezbollah is on the black list of international terrorism.. President Bachar el Assad played personally the card of General Aoun in Lebanon's recent politics. He made certain to boost General Aoun to a majority in the elections in the Christian underground in order to consolidate Syria's political power grip on the Christian community and weaken Washington's interference against Syria in Lebanon. Syria boosted his election in Mount Lebanon, along with Lebanese President Lahoud and Michel el Murr. President Assad of Syria dispatched General Aoun to Tripoli, North Lebanon to forge a political reconciliation between Christian Leader Suleiman Frangieh and Sunni Leader of Tripoli, Omar Karameh, Syria is definitely preparing Aoun for the Presidency for Lebanon. What is Syria up to? Syria main concern is to stop the Sunni-Druze progression in Lebanese politics that is supported by the United States, in this instance by boosting General Michel Aoun in the Parliament from one side and Hezbollah from the other side. Syria intends to neutralize the Sunni influence in the Lebanese Parliament, considered as an extension of American policy in Lebanon. By doing so, Syria will save its presence in Lebanese politics using two springboards, Michel Aoun and Nasrallah of Hezbollah who will keep the Americans at bay, with the blessing of a France who sides with the US cosmetic wise and substance wise hopes to make a return and diminish American power in the Middle East As for Syria, having a new Christian leadership on its side, together with the Shiaa leadership, it could stay on in Lebanon's politics long after the Americans are defeated in Iraq. Syria will organize for itself a forced "come back" on Lebanon's scene, and if Mad Max reject the Syrian momentum of that moment, Damascus will buy him a ticket to visit his old friend Elie Hobeika and look for a new candidate to replace him. For the blind Christians of Lebanon today, it is the moment of supporting the General fiesta.... The Charles de Gaulle of Lebanon........
by Nagi N. Najjar
Elie Hobeika, the architect of Sabra and Chatilla, is classified by many as a Syrian Trojan Horse in Lebanon. A master gangster-assassin, Damascus groomed him for years to serve its interests for the Lebanese Presidency. When the book " From Israel to Damascus" was published, it exposed Elie Hobeika's massacres, murders, and distortions in Lebanon, resulting in Hobeika's political legacy destruction, and Damascus had to get rid of him. He became a dangerous liability that could implicate Syria in many embarrassments . Emile Lahoud, our current President, a corrupted General in the Lebanese Army, coming politically from a better environment, hasn't committed any major crimes in the Lebanese war. Syria installed him as a good boy in power and manipulated him for years without setback, until Syrian Generals Assef Shawkat and Rustom Ghazali along with Bachar Assad instructions decided to eliminate Prime Minister Hariri of Lebanon. President Lahoud's Intelligence services were instrumental in instigating, surveiling, and covering up the evidence and the murder later on. For many analysts, President Lahoud, a Syrian agent in Lebanon, became a liability for Syria. His political existence was in danger for Syria -- therefore he has to be replaced. Damascus is actively looking for an acceptable "Christian" replacement and found crazy, retired Mad Max resting in Paris with over a 100 million dollar fortune he "accumulated" from his last war in Lebanon. President Lahoud's son and Kareem Pakradouni, another Syrian French speaking puppet, were rapidly dispatched to Paris to give the General guarantees to return to Lebanon and support President Lahoud and defend the "Christian" legacy of the Presidency in Lebanon. Within the context of many secret meetings that happened in Damascus in the past between the secret envoys of General Aoun and Walid Muallem, the newly Syrian appointed Vice Minister of Foreign Affairs (Former Syria's Ambassador to Washington), General Michel Aoun received the green light to return to Lebanon with a secret understanding to support President Lahoud's regime, recruit, neutralize, and divide the Christian street against the opposition. Hariri's murder accelerated Aoun's return as Syria was losing ground in Lebanon and Damascus found a substitute for President Lahoud and promised the General the Presidency. No one will surpass General Michel Aoun's record for supporting Syrian strategy in Lebanese politics. For the record: His Excellency General Aoun's relation with Syria is old news.Jan 15th 1986- Major Paul Matar rescues Elias Hobeika (a Syrian Stooge) on instructions from Aoun. General Aoun received a telephone call that day from the chief of staff of the Syrian Army, then General Hikmat Shehabi, urging him to save Hobeika. He saved Elie Hobeika's life from his Intelligence Headquarters in Beirut,1986, hiding him in the Ministry of Defence, and later on flew Hobeika to Cyprus from where he went to France and from Paris took the first plane to Damascus as the Syrian Army offered him a strong military base in the Bekaa Valley in the city of Zahleh. Hobeika started to send his spies and hit men to East Beirut with explosives and car bombs, and General Aoun trusted officers facilitated their passages on the checkpoints of East Beirut, a gesture from Aoun to appease and gain Damascus trust . 1987, Ashrafieh military incursion.He helped Hobeika's military incursion against East Beirut in 1987 against the Christian Lebanese Forces, he was constantly in contact over the telephone with Hobeika and Ghazi Kanaan (The Syrian Secret Service Chief) detailing to them what was the Army was going to do by order of former President Amine Gemayel and former then Ambassador Bartholomew. Gemayel asked the Army to interfere rapidly and secure the breach. Gen Aoun delayed the deployment of the Army for over 3 hours, coordinating the military momentum with Kanaan, and Hobeika giving enough time for Elie Hobeika to withdraw his men and join their Syrian controlled bases in West Beirut. Hobeika after this secret military operation was called by the Syrian political Hierarchy in Damascus, "Abu Ali " Hobeika, a promotion in the Syrian lexicon. 1988, Secret meeting in the city of Zahleh in the Bekaa Valley with Syrian intelligence . General Michel Aoun, Commander of the Army then, went to the city of Zahleh secretly without the knowledge of President Amine Gemayel and the head of Lebanese Military Intelligence, then General Simon Kassis. Aoun met secretly in Elie Hobeika's Headquarter (above the Restaurant Casino Monte Alberto) , with the vice President of Syria Abdel Halim Khaddam, Ghazi Kanaan the head of Syrian Intelligence in Lebanon, and Elie Hobeika assisted the meeting. The whole Command was emptied of Hobeika's partisans except for a few trusted lieutenants of Elie Hobeika on guard. Gemayel knew about this meeting later on along with few superior officers of the Lebanese Army. A large dispute occurred between them in the Presidential Palace, and in the last 2 hours of Amine Gemayel's Regime, Damascus called and imposed General Aoun on Lebanon as head of the interim Government.The War of Elimination 1990:This war was declared by General Aoun against the Christian Community and the Christian Lebanese Forces. He was promised the Presidency in the Arab summit then taking place in Tunis should he eliminate the "Israeli mechanism" of Lebanon, the Christian militia of the Lebanese Forces . The General received all his military logistics from a base of the Syrian Army in Dhour El Shouier (Mount Lebanon) to fight the Christians. He was helped by Assaad Hardane, (mastermind of President Bashir Gemayel's assassination). Hardane was head of the SSNP militia then, today they will meet together in the elected Parliament . Two days before the Syrian invasion of East Beirut, Hobeika smuggled and met secretly with General Aoun in the Presidential Palace and instructed Aoun to decline any Israeli help for Lebanon. Israel who had an emissary offering assistance in the Presidential palace was furious when it learned that Aoun declined any help from Jerusalem on Syrian orders.Today, the General is no different : Past and present, Michel Aoun is the Class A Syrian Trojan Horse par excellence for Lebanese politics. Damascus having lost most of its cards in the Lebanese puzzle after the murder of Rafic Hariri, wanted at all cost to stop its retreat from Lebanese politics and stop the progression of US influence in Lebanon's politics. Syria wanted to stop the US mechanism in Lebanon translated by the Hariri-Jumblatt alliance against Syria, and no better candidate would play the role of a divisive dynamic and neutralize the US role but Michel Aoun since Hezbollah is on the black list of international terrorism.. President Bachar el Assad played personally the card of General Aoun in Lebanon's recent politics. He made certain to boost General Aoun to a majority in the elections in the Christian underground in order to consolidate Syria's political power grip on the Christian community and weaken Washington's interference against Syria in Lebanon. Syria boosted his election in Mount Lebanon, along with Lebanese President Lahoud and Michel el Murr. President Assad of Syria dispatched General Aoun to Tripoli, North Lebanon to forge a political reconciliation between Christian Leader Suleiman Frangieh and Sunni Leader of Tripoli, Omar Karameh, Syria is definitely preparing Aoun for the Presidency for Lebanon. What is Syria up to? Syria main concern is to stop the Sunni-Druze progression in Lebanese politics that is supported by the United States, in this instance by boosting General Michel Aoun in the Parliament from one side and Hezbollah from the other side. Syria intends to neutralize the Sunni influence in the Lebanese Parliament, considered as an extension of American policy in Lebanon. By doing so, Syria will save its presence in Lebanese politics using two springboards, Michel Aoun and Nasrallah of Hezbollah who will keep the Americans at bay, with the blessing of a France who sides with the US cosmetic wise and substance wise hopes to make a return and diminish American power in the Middle East As for Syria, having a new Christian leadership on its side, together with the Shiaa leadership, it could stay on in Lebanon's politics long after the Americans are defeated in Iraq. Syria will organize for itself a forced "come back" on Lebanon's scene, and if Mad Max reject the Syrian momentum of that moment, Damascus will buy him a ticket to visit his old friend Elie Hobeika and look for a new candidate to replace him. For the blind Christians of Lebanon today, it is the moment of supporting the General fiesta.... The Charles de Gaulle of Lebanon........
Sunday, June 12, 2005
Saturday, June 11, 2005
Lebanese Rivals, in a Tangled Web of Alliances, Face Off in a Crucial Stage in Elections
By JOHN KIFNER
Published: June 12, 2005
BEIRUT, Lebanon, June 11 - Parliamentary elections enter a crucial stage in the mountains above Beirut on Sunday as rival anti-Syrian candidates - those of a long-exiled general and of an unlikely coalition of civil war enemies - face off for the first time.
A Hezbollah supporter with a toy gun at a rally in Baalbek on Friday.
Lebanese politics, dominated here for decades by neighboring Syria, are always religious and tribal. But this election is developing into a tale of intrigue tangled even by Levantine standards, a quintessentially Lebanese mélange of bloodshed, betrayal and a raven-haired beauty.
Indeed, the campaign is now so convoluted that Gen. Michel Aoun, the anti-Syrian nationalist who returned from 15 years in exile, has allied himself with politicians widely regarded as Syrian vassals. And in a breathtakingly odd moment the other night, Sheik Hassan Nasrullah, the Hezbollah leader whose Shiite guerrillas drove Israel out of southern Lebanon, exhorted his followers to vote for candidates of the outlawed Christian militia, the Lebanese Forces, invoking the name of its assassinated leader, Bashir Gemayel, who cooperated with the Israelis' invasion in 1982 and was elected president behind their tanks.
The assassination of former Prime Minister Rafik Hariri in February set off the tumultuous chain of events - including rallies calling for an end to Syrian occupation that eventually drew a million and a half Lebanese across religious divides - that forced the Syrian president, Bashar al-Assad, to end his country's 29-year occupation. The withdrawal set the stage for the unlikely coalitions of former civil war enemies. Most of them once cooperated with Syria. Their chances seem good to gain control of Parliament, a development that would almost certainly be followed by an attempt to oust the president, Emil Lahoud, who was hand-picked by Syria. Last September, President Assad had ordered the Lebanese Parliament to amend the Constitution to extend Mr. Lahoud's term by three years.
General Aoun was able to return after the withdrawal. In Lebanon's darkest days in 1989 and 1990, with the civil war at its anarchic worst and an impasse over who would become president, General Aoun, who commanded the Lebanese Army, took over the presidential palace and attacked and defeated the main Christian militia, the Lebanese Forces. This period is little known to the outside world because most foreign journalists had left after a wave of kidnapping of foreigners and attention was focused on the brewing 1991 Persian Gulf war, and the United States, assembling an alliance against Iraq, turned a blind eye to Syria's role in Lebanon in exchange for a token Syrian contingent.
Syria attacked in force, along with remnants of the Lebanese Army and some Christian militias, overwhelming General Aoun. He took refuge in the French Embassy and was eventually spirited off to exile in France, where he became a symbol of resistance to many Christians.
The assassination of Mr. Hariri, widely believed by Lebanese to be Syrian-backed, was followed on June 2 by the killing of a well-known Beirut journalist, Samir Kassir, who had been sharply critical of Syria.
On Thursday, Walid Jumblatt, the Druse leader of the anti-Syrian opposition, said in a television interview that "tens of Syrian intelligence officers are still running free," roaming his Shuf Mountain stronghold and eating lunch in the Bekaa Valley. All the opposition figures are targeted for assassination, Mr. Jumblatt said. "There seems to be a decision somewhere, with or without the knowledge of President al-Assad, to carry on with the assassinations and continue the sabotage campaign."
On Friday, Scott McClellan, the White House spokesman, said that Washington had received information about "a Syrian hit list targeting key Lebanese figures of various political and religious persuasions for assassination." Asked if Syrian intelligence was still operating here, Marwan Hamadeh, a leading opposition strategist who barely escaped a car bomb last October that killed his bodyguard, replied, "Absolutely."
1
2Next>>
Friday, June 10, 2005
We know they dominated sea trade in the Mediterranean for 3,000 years. Now DNA testing and recent archaeological finds are revealing just what the Phoenician legacy meant to the ancient world—and to our own.WHO WERE THE PHOENICIANS? NEW CLUES FROM ANCIENT BONES AND MODERN BLOOD
by: Rick Gore, National Geographic, 00279358, Oct 2004, Vol. 206, Issue 4
ANCESTRAL BLOOD TESTING THE GENE POOL Every day, long before dawn, the fishermen of Tyre, Lebanon, launch their boats as their ancestors have done as far back as anyone can remember. By about nine in the morning they return to port and relax over coffee and games of cards at a seaside cafe. That's where Spencer Wells, a National Geographic emerging explorer, and his colleague Pierre Zalloua, a geneticist at the American University of Beirut, approached them about taking part in a wide-ranging research project. The goal: to learn whether these fishermen are descended from the Phoenicians who left the first traces of their lives here in the Levant more than 5,000 years ago, and who later spread their culture westward by ship borne commerce. The scientists could find the answer in the inherited-genetic patterns of Y chromosomes if the fishermen agreed to donate samples of their blood. Almost all volunteered eagerly--and then stood for portraits, some of which appear here. "Most people are interested in their family history," says Wells. "And they're fascinated by the idea that they have a secret in their blood that not only ties them to their grandparents but to people they've never met."The tests could confirm that men of Tyre-Christians and Muslims alike--are related to the ancient traders. Wells and Zalloua also took samples in other parts of the Phoenician world, where results may reveal the same lineage in areas of former colonies like Sardinia and Malta.
MEN OF THE SEAA LOST HISTORY
"I AM A PHOENICIAN," says the young man, giving the name of a people who vanished from history 2,000 years ago. "At least I feel like I'm one of them. My relatives have been fishermen and sailors here for centuries."Good, we can use some real Phoenicians," says Spencer Wells, an American geneticist, who wraps the young man's arm in a tourniquet as they sit on the veranda of a restaurant in Byblos, Lebanon, an ancient city of stone on the Mediterranean. The young man, Pierre Abi Saad, has arrived late, eager to participate in an experiment to shed new light on the mysterious Phoenicians. He joins a group of volunteers --fishermen, shopkeepers, and taxi drivers--gathered around tables under the restaurant awning. Wells, a lanky, 34-year-old extrovert, has convinced Saad and the others to give him a sample of their blood."What will it tell you?" Saad asks."Your blood contains DNA, which is like a history book," Wells replies. "Many different people have come to Byblos over the centuries, and your blood carries traces of their DNA. It's going to tell us something about your relationships going back thousands of years."Wells has no doubts about the power of the new genetic techniques he is bringing to our understanding of ancient peoples. Nor does his bespectacled colleague standing beside him on the veranda, Pierre Zalloua, a 37-year-old scientist with a dark goatee and an intense passion for his Lebanese heritage. The two men hope to find new clues to an age-old riddle: Who were the Phoenicians?Although they're mentioned frequently in ancient texts as vigorous traders and sailors, we know relatively little about these puzzling people. Historians refer to them as Canaanites when talking about the culture before 1200 B.C. The Greeks called them the phoinikes, which means the "red people"--a name that became Phoenicians--after their word for a prized reddish purple cloth the Phoenicians exported. But they would never have called themselves Phoenicians. Rather, they were citizens of the ports from which they set sail, walled cities such as Byblos, Sidon, and Tyre.The culture later known as Phoenician was flourishing as early as the third millennium B.C. in the Levant, a coastal region now divided primarily between Lebanon, Syria, and Israel. But it wasn't until around 1100 B.C., after a period of general disorder and social collapse throughout the region, that they emerged as a significant cultural and political force.From the ninth to sixth centuries B.C. they dominated the Mediterranean Sea, establishing emporiums and colonies from Cyprus in the east to the Aegean Sea, Italy, North Africa, and Spain in the west. They grew rich trading precious metals from abroad and products such as wine, olive oil, and most notably the timber from the famous cedars of Lebanon, which forested the mountains that rise steeply from the coast of their homeland.The armies and peoples that eventually conquered the Phoenicians either destroyed or built over their cities. Their writings, mostly on fragile papyrus, disintegrated--so that we now know the Phoenicians mainly by the biased reports of their enemies. Although the Phoenicians themselves reportedly had a rich literature, it was totally lost in antiquity. That's ironic, because the Phoenicians actually developed the modern alphabet and spread it through trade to their ports of call.Acting as cultural middlemen, the Phoenicians disseminated ideas, myths, and knowledge from the powerful Assyrian and Babylonian worlds in what is now Syria and Iraq to their contacts in the Aegean. Those ideas helped spark a cultural revival in Greece, one which led to the Greeks' Golden Age and hence the birth of Western civilization. The Phoenicians imported so much papyrus from Egypt that the Greeks used their name for the first great Phoenician port, Byblos, to refer to the ancient paper. The name Bible, or "the book," also derives from Byblos.Today, Spencer Wells says, "Phoenicians have become ghosts, a vanished civilization." Now he and Zalloua hope to use a different alphabet, the molecular letters of DNA, to exhume these ghosts.The two geneticists became friends in 2000 at Harvard University. Wells was pioneering genetic methods for tracing migrations of ancient peoples by looking at the chromosomes of their living descendants; Zalloua was looking for ways to use science to help heal his country, ravaged by 15 years of civil war between its many religious factions.Zalloua was particularly interested in understanding the genetic relationship between the modern Lebanese and their Phoenician ancestors. During the bloody civil war of the 1970s and 1980s, some groups used the name Phoenician as an ideological weapon. Certain Maronites, the dominant Christian sect in Lebanon, claimed a direct ancestry from the Phoenicians, implying that they held a more legitimate historical claim on Lebanon than later immigrants from the Arabian Peninsula. This inflamed many Muslims. The term Phoenician had turned into a code word for Christian rather than Muslim.It still is. "It's now become taboo to use 'Phoenician' here officially," Zalloua explains. "Go to the National Museum. You won't see the word anywhere. They label everything simply by its age--early, middle, or late Bronze Age."Could genetics show that modern Lebanese, both Christians and Muslims, share the same Phoenician heritage? That's one question this project, funded by the National Geographic Society, hopes to resolve. Wells and Zalloua have others.For one, they want to know whether mysterious groups known as the Sea Peoples might have migrated into Lebanon around 1200 B.C. and mixed with the Canaanites to help create Phoenician culture. Although the Sea Peoples, who may have come from the Aegean, marauded and burned most of the major cities along the coast of the Levant, they apparently spared the Canaanite cities. One leading Phoenician scholar, Maria Eugenia Aubet of Pompeu Fabra University in Barcelona, believes the Canaanites made a deal with the Sea Peoples."I think they became friends," she says. "Phoenician material culture shows so many elements from the Sea Peoples. The Phoenicians learned from them how to build harbors, moorings, docks, and piers. The Sea Peoples, like the Phoenicians, were excellent navigators--and they knew the routes west to the rich sources of metals."Spencer Wells suspects that the Sea Peoples also introduced their genes into the DNA of the Canaanites."Was there a mass migration of Sea Peoples?" Wells asks, as he and Zalloua take turns collecting DNA samples in Byblos. "Did it help create a Phoenician genetic type? We have the tools now to answer those questions."Wells and Zalloua are seeking markers--mutations that arose in Phoenician times that can still be found in blood today. The markers would be extremely subtle, changes in a few letters out of three billion in our book of genetic instructions. But they would be enough to identify descendants of Phoenicians. Markers can be found at specific places on the Y chromosome, the threadlike package of genes located in the nucleus of almost every cell in males. Two chromosomes, the X and the Y, determine sex. Females have two X's; males have one X and one Y. The Y contains the genes that create maleness.The Y chromosome, uniquely, is passed from father to son with no input from the mother. Changes in its DNA are preserved generation after generation, so the male descendants of Phoenicians would inherit ancient patterns of mutations indefinitely.Genetic analysis has traced all modern males back to a common Y-chromosome ancestor, nicknamed Adam, who lived in Africa around 60,000 years ago and whose descendants spread throughout the world. Lebanon has also seen many migrations since Phoenician times, notably from the Arabian Peninsula during the rise of Islam and from Europe during the Crusades."The genetic inputs from those migrations are very clear," says Zalloua, including those of northern invaders. "There are villages in Lebanon that still have a high percentage of fair-skinned blonds."Identifying Phoenician markers takes sophisticated comparisons of the DNA from thousands of men like those of Byblos. But Byblos is just one stop on Wells's and Zalloua's sampling campaign--a campaign that will take many months to show results.Genetic researchers aren't the only ones seeking new clues to the identity of the Phoenicians. Scientists from Lebanon to North Africa to Spain are finding other evidence through traditional archaeology. Lebanese archaeologist Claude Doumet-Serhal, for one, is leading a team systematically exploring for the first time the port of Sidon, another major Phoenician city. The heart of that ancient port lies beneath a thriving modern town, out of archaeology's reach until a 19th-century school was torn down. In 1998 Doumet-Serhal's team, funded by the British Museum and a consortium of sponsors, began boring into the center of the old city."We are part of a rebirth of archaeology in Lebanon after 15 years of civil war," she says, descending into the excavation, which stretches for the length of a football field amid a bazaar of old buildings. She moves excitedly through the dig, a series of trenches where clusters of professional and student archaeologists scrape, pick, and chisel back through 5,000 years.The past three seasons have brought a bonanza of discoveries. She stops where team members are scraping out the bones of a burial from the 20th century B.C. This body, along with more than 30 others, was placed in an enigmatic layer of sand as thick as four feet. The layer dates from shortly after 2000 B.C. Puzzled by this deposit, Doumet-Serhal had the grains analyzed and found that they came from a nearby dune."The ancient Sidonians sifted the sand and brought it here manually," she says. "It's bizarre. They went to a lot of trouble to make this layer." Was this a custom brought to Sidon by a wave of invaders? The evidence doesn't say. The bodies initially placed in the layer were those of elite warriors. Their graves were constructed with bricks and adorned with elegantly crafted weapons. Later regular citizens, including children whose bodies were placed in clay pots, were also buried in this layer.Researchers studying the weapons of the warriors have gleaned important clues from the metal. Analysis of isotopes indicates that the ores used to make the weapons came from mines in modern Turkey, Cyprus, or Syria, evidence that the Sidonians were already engaged in a flourishing metals trade in the eastern Mediterranean by 1950 B.C.Across the Mediterranean in Spain, the timbers of two seventh-century B.C. Phoenician shipwrecks discovered in the Bay of Mazarron near Cartagena are providing a different type of information--about how Phoenicians constructed their ships. "For the first time we have the actual ships of the Phoenicians," says Ivan Negueruela of Spain's National Museum for Maritime Archaeology. "Their ships are the key to their colonizing, the way they traveled the Mediterranean. We can't understand them without their ships. Now we can see how they actually cut the wood, how they joined it."The ships reveal that the Phoenicians used mortise-and-tenon joints, giving their boats more strength than earlier boats, which were basically made of planks sewn together. The team discovered a wooden anchor that had been filled with lead, apparently a novel invention of the Phoenicians. Researchers also found intact Phoenician knots, amphorae the crew used to store trade goods, and mills they used to grind wheat. The hulls of the boats were lined with brush, the Phoenician version of bubble wrap, to keep their cargo of lead ingots from shifting and damaging the hulls. That meant the Mazarron ships, measuring about 25 feet in length, were working boats, rather than the impressive galleys historical sources say the Phoenicians sailed.The Phoenicians may have used these smaller boats to ferry cargo to galleys waiting offshore. The boats seemed too small to have made the open-sea journeys back to Phoenician home ports. But Phoenician seafaring skills and larger vessels let them travel into the Atlantic and trade along the African coast.When did they first reach the Atlantic? Scholars debate the possibilities. Classical texts suggest they had established a colony beyond the Strait of Gibraltar at Cadiz by 1100 B.C., but no archaeological remains can be dated earlier than the eighth century B.C. Spanish archaeologist Francisco Giles, a veteran explorer of ancient ruins near the coast of Andalusia, thinks a painting in a rock-shelter in the mountains overlooking the strait may answer the question. The painting, discovered in a remote part of a cork tree forest, stylistically dates to the end of the second millennium B.C. and portrays a sailing ship surrounded by a group of stick figures."This represents contact," says Giles. "The local people were painting something they had never seen before.""The ships were most likely Phoenician, because it was the Phoenicians who settled here," says his collaborator, Clive Finlayson of the Gibraltar Museum.And settle the Phoenicians did. By the eighth century B.C. they had established communities along the entire southern coast of Spain to reap the harvest of the land and the riches of the Iberian mines."They created the concept of colonization,' says Giles. "They brought to the Iberians all the products of cultures to the east. In return the Phoenicians got the Iberians' natural resources."The Phoenicians would have brought something else to Spain--their Y chromosomes. Spencer Wells and Pierre Zalloua want to search for Phoenician markers in living Spaniards. But to help them identify those markers, they are first taking blood samples closer to the Phoenician homeland.A steep hill known as the Byrsa rises along e Tunisian coast of North Africa, overlooking the residences of modern Carthage, the most affluent suburb of Tunis, the capital. In the distance peninsulas and promontories stretch into the blue sea. On a sunny October morning Wells and Zalloua ascend the Byrsa and peer down on the excavated streets of one of the earliest colonies, and certainly the grandest, established by the Phoenicians.Founded by the city of Tyre as early as 814 B.C., Carthage emerged as a formidable power itself about 300 years later, after a 13-year siege by the Babylonians depleted Tyre's resources. Eventually Carthage dominated the western Mediterranean and gradually developed its own culture, known as Punic to the Romans. As Rome emerged as a central Mediterranean power in the third century B.C., it clashed with Carthage in a series of confrontations known as the Punic Wars. The famous Carthaginian general Hannibal nearly conquered Rome, but in 202 B.C. he was defeated near Carthage. In 146 B.C. Rome burned and destroyed this last major Phoenician city.Wells and Zalloua have come to Carthage to seek help from Tunisian colleagues. They need local DNA to find what's left of Phoenician chromosomes here. That's a complex job: A lot of Middle Eastern people, as well as Africans and Romans, have left their genes in Carthage over the centuries. Calculating when a particular set of chromosomes emerged is difficult, but Wells and Zalloua say they can date mutations relatively accurately.Certain short sections of junk DNA, called microsatellites, mutate much more rapidly than the longer sequences. They nevertheless mutate at a constant rate, providing a clock that lets geneticists date how old a particular form of a chromosome is. For example, Wells knows he comes from a western European Y-chromosome type called M 173. Microsatellites indicate that the man who gave rise to M173, and hence to most western Europeans, lived about 30,000 years ago. Zalloua, on the other hand, has an M20 lineage, which originated in the area of Iran around the same time and is mostly found today in India. Less than 2 percent of Lebanese men have that type.Most Middle Eastern men belong to M89 and M172. M89s date back to a major migration out of Africa around 45,000 years ago; M172s date back to the dawn of agriculture about 12,000 years ago. Phoenician markers should be carried on either of these types. Most men living in the area surrounding Carthage before the Phoenicians arrived should probably have carried variations of the M96, which is the aboriginal type in North and West Africa. So if Wells and Zalloua find in Tunisia a significant number of M 172s and M89s, the Middle Eastern Y chromosomes, that could suggest a link to the Phoenicians."If we can find markers here that could only have originated in the Middle East during the Phoenician age, we can assume they were brought by the Phoenicians," says Wells.While Wells and Zalluoa are taking samples in Tunisia, a Dutch archaeologist is piecing together a different portrait of the Phoenician colonization at Carthage. Roald Docter, a professor at Ghent University, is part of a Tunisian-Belgian team that recently excavated the cemetery of the first generation of Phoenicians to settle Carthage.His site, like many archaeological digs, appears unspectacular at first glimpse. Next to a supermarket in an urban zone, it is overgrown with weeds and pocked with heaps of dirt, plastic bottles, and other trash. Last season's trenches have slumped due to recent heavy rains."This looked very neat a month ago," he says, walking to the edge of a deep muddy trench. He points to a round pit in the yellowish bedrock below. About three feet across, it is one of nine his Tunisian colleagues have located. They found pieces of funerary pots as well as fragments of bone--the bones of the first settlers.This site, called Bit Massouda, and an adjacent zone that Docter also helped excavate with a University of Hamburg team, shows how the Phoenicians changed and reorganized their colony as it grew into a city. During the first part of the eighth century B.C. the homes were widely spaced along a dirt path, which was later lined with cobbles. Then, as more settlers arrived, the city filled in and became more densely urban. Remnants of elephant tusks indicate that merchant shops were trading in ivory.Around 675 B.C. another influx of Phoenicians surged into Carthage, bringing a new style of four-room house typical of the Levant. Apparently, a growing menace from the Assyrians had encouraged many Tyrians to emigrate from the homeland."If a group of Assyrian soldiers arrives every year, rapes your wife, and takes your money, you might head west too," says Docter.During this period the residents moved the original cemetery, replacing it with a huge metalworking site. Docter's team has found remnants of a surprisingly advanced technology. CT scans of ancient bellows reveal they contained intake valves to regulate airflow into the hearths and raise the temperature of the hot iron.The Carthaginians were already strengthening their weapons with a metallurgical technology similar to the Bessemer process, which was not developed until the 19th century. Metallurgist Hans Koens of the University of Amsterdam discovered that the Carthaginians in antiquity were adding large amounts of calcium to the metal, a process that chemically strengthens iron.This past season Docter's research team located the source of that calcium--the shells of the same mollusk, the murex, which yielded the purple dye that gave the Phoenicians their name. Huge amounts of crushed shells, along with basalt grinders and grindstones cover the metalworking site.But at the end of the fifth century B.C. the metalworking region succumbed to another population surge. As their city exploded in size, the residents built houses over the hearths. The pits at Bir Massouda are revealing the foundations of those homes. The residents by then belonged to a new society, as distinct from its Phoenician founders as North Americans are today from their 17th-century colonial ancestors. They had embraced new variants of the Tyrian gods. But the Carthaginians always retained a Phoenician style. They continued their forefathers' wanderlust with voyages around Africa and perhaps farther.Although the Carthaginians ruled the western Mediterranean for centuries, ultimately they could not resist the power of Rome. Their final hours were gruesome."Fire spread and carried everything down," wrote Appian, describing how Roman soldiers finally breached the walls in 146 B.C. and torched the city, pulling down its buildings on top of the residents hiding within.Archaeologist Docter has found chilling evidence of that conflagration. He points down at the mosaic floor of a house the team uncovered. A layer of black char covers it."That's from the fires of 146 B.C." says Docter.When Carthage fell, the people were enslaved and they disappeared, explains Tunisian archaeologist Nejib Ben Lazreg. "This doesn't mean the culture disappeared. It had become so rooted in North Africa that it was centuries before people abandoned the language. By A.D. 193 Rome had an emperor from North Africa, Septimius Severus, and he spoke with a strong Phoenician accent. That was the revenge of Carthage."The Phoenicians also persisted genetically. Early this year, as Wells and Zalloua complete their DNA sampling, they shift their search from collecting samples to analyzing the thousands of plastic vials of DNA they have assembled at Zalloua's lab at the American University of Beirut."All this is concentrated DNA," says Zalloua, holding a box of vials from Tunisia. He lifts out a vial labeled DN44. "We'll put a little of this on a glass plate with appropriate enzymes to isolate a specific region of the Y-chromosome DNA we want to analyze. We have lots of data to digest."He prints a chart of their Lebanese data and runs his finger down a list of analyzed samples. Most, but not all, samples indicate Middle Eastern or African origins."Ah, there's a Spencer--a European," says Zalloua, pointing to an M173. "That man might be descended from a crusader."Over the next few months, the analysis of both Lebanese and Tunisian samples proceeds. By the end of the summer, Wells and Zalloua have come to some conclusions.Who were the Phoenicians? The answer deciphered from their vials of DNA both pleases and frustrates the scientists. Perhaps most significantly, their data show that modern Lebanese people share a genetic identity going back thousands of years."The Phoenicians were the Canaanites--and the ancestors of today's Lebanese," says Wells. That result extinguishes Wells' theory that the migrating Sea Peoples interbred with the Canaanites to create the Phoenician culture."The Sea Peoples apparently had no significant genetic impact on populations in the Levant," he explains. "The people living today along the coast where the Sea Peoples would have interbred have very similar Y-chromosome patterns to those living inland. They are basically all one people."That result delights Zalloua; it supports his belief that both Muslim and Christian Lebanese populations share an ancient genetic heritage."Maybe now we can finally put some of our internal struggles to rest," he says.The data from Tunisia also help redefine the legacy of the Phoenicians."They left only a small impact in North Africa," Wells says. "No more than 20 percent of the men we sampled had Y chromosomes that originated in the Middle East. Most carried the aboriginal North African M96 pattern."That influx from the Middle East could have come in three waves: the arrival of farming in North Africa 10,000 years ago, the Phoenicians, and the Islamic expansion 1,300 years ago. Microsatellites will let the researchers estimate when people bearing those markers arrived. Even if they all turned out to be of Phoenician age, the impact on local people was relatively small."Apparently, they didn't interbreed much," Wells says. "They seem to have stuck mostly to themselves" Since they left so few markers, Wells must modify his plan to track Phoenician migrations around the Mediterranean--and perhaps even farther."They were a slippery people," he says. "They came. They traded. They left. I guess that only adds to their mystery."And so--for the time being, at least--the Phoenicians remain glorious ghosts.
MERCHANT MARINERS Rooted in the Canaanite culture of the eastern Mediterranean coast, the Phoenicians became skillful traders and sailors whose colonies and ports of call stretched to the Atlantic. They remained a loosely affiliated group of cities dominated by powerful neighbors until Carthage finally forged an empire.With mountains to their backs and the sea spreading before them, the Phoenicians left a line of settlements along what is now the coast of Lebanon, Syria, and Israel. Tyre, once the most powerful of their cities, possessed features that Phoenician colonists sought again and again when settling on foreign shores: a defensible island, a protected anchorage, and easy access to agricultural fields on the mainland.Sidon, another great port, provided evidence of a revolutionary Phoenician development: the world's earliest alphabet. In the sixth century B.C. a king named Tabnit obtained an Egyptian sarcophagus and added an inscription in Phoenician so he could use it himself.32OO B.C. As early as the predynastic period, Egyptians imported prized cedars from Phoenician traders of Byblos.25OO B.C. Major ports on the Phoenician coast--Byblos, Sidon, Tyre, and Beirut---emerged as independent city-states.1200 B.C. A phonetic alphabet of 22 consonants developed, along with a distinct Phoenician language and culture.877 B.C. Assyrian King Ashurnasirpal II visited the cities of Phoenicia, which soon began to send gifts as tribute to his empire.814 B.C. Expanding westward, Tyre founded Carthage--Qart-hadasht, or "new city"--an early Phoenician colony in Africa.573 B.C. After his predecessor defeated Assyria, King Nebuchadrezzar II of Babylonia besieged and gained control of Tyre.539 B.C. Persian Emperor Cyrus the Great captured Babylon, and Phoenicia became a province in his vast empire.332 B.C. Alexander the Great crushed Tyre, the only Phoenician city to offer serious resistance to his conquest of Persia.264 B.C. The First Punic War began as Carthage and Rome fought for control of Sicily. A second war started in 218 B.C. in Italy.146 B.C. Rome burned Carthage, ending the Third Punic War and annihilating the last major center of Phoenician culture.HOME PORTS The Phoenicians exported their own raw material and crafts and transported goods produced in other Mediterranean regions.TRADE NETWORK While searching in the Mediterranean--and beyond--for resources such as silver, the Phoenicians found markets for their own products.COLONIES Ships on long trade expeditions laid over in western outposts. Settlers in North Africa spoke a Phoenician dialect called Punic.
Bibliography:
Aubet, Maria Eugenia. The Phoenicians and the West: Politics, Colonies, and Trade. 2nd ed. Cambridge University Press, 2001.Edey, Maitland A. The Sea Traders. Time Inc., 1974.Markoe, Glenn E. Peoples of the Past: Phoenicians. University of California Press, 2002.Moscati, Sabatino, ed. The Phoenicians. I. B. Tauris, 2001.Moscati, Sabatino. The World of the Phoenicians. Orion Books Ltd., 1999. (Orig. by Weidenfeld & Nicolson Ltd. 1968.)Wells, Spencer. The Journey of Man: A Genetic Odyssey. Princeton University Press, 2002.
Thursday, June 09, 2005
2
عاصي الحلاني
صغيرة الدنيا
إستماع
3
فضل شاكر
لو على قلبي
إستماع
4
كاظم الساهر
أحبيني بلا عقد
إستماع
5
كاظم الساهر
آن الأوان
إستماع
6
اليسا
ارجع للشوق
إستماع
7
ايوان
قلبي سهران
إستماع
8
دارين حدشيتي
قدام الكل
إستماع
9
ماريا
بتكدب عليا
إستماع
10
كارول سماحة
غالي علي
إستماع
عاصي الحلاني
صغيرة الدنيا
إستماع
3
فضل شاكر
لو على قلبي
إستماع
4
كاظم الساهر
أحبيني بلا عقد
إستماع
5
كاظم الساهر
آن الأوان
إستماع
6
اليسا
ارجع للشوق
إستماع
7
ايوان
قلبي سهران
إستماع
8
دارين حدشيتي
قدام الكل
إستماع
9
ماريا
بتكدب عليا
إستماع
10
كارول سماحة
غالي علي
إستماع
Tuesday, June 07, 2005
Saaber al Robaa3i
Click here to listen
Seedi Mansour
Awwil Alb
Ya 7abeebi Wa7eshni
Minnak Lillaah
Khallas Taarak
3alli Gara (Duet)
Maw3oud
Meziaanah
Elli Raa7
Naadem
Click here to listen
Seedi Mansour
Awwil Alb
Ya 7abeebi Wa7eshni
Minnak Lillaah
Khallas Taarak
3alli Gara (Duet)
Maw3oud
Meziaanah
Elli Raa7
Naadem
Monday, June 06, 2005
Enjoy these great classics !!
ABDEL HALEEM HAFEZ
click here to listen
7abeeb 7ayaati
Bee3 Albak
Betloumouni Laih
El 7elw 7ayaati
Gawaab
Na3am Ya 7abeebi
Mohamed Abdel Wahhaab
Bafakkar Filli Naseeni
ABDEL HALEEM HAFEZ
click here to listen
7abeeb 7ayaati
Bee3 Albak
Betloumouni Laih
El 7elw 7ayaati
Gawaab
Na3am Ya 7abeebi
Mohamed Abdel Wahhaab
Bafakkar Filli Naseeni
Saturday, June 04, 2005
On May 20 that Syrian ruler hoped to put off the evil hour by letting his military actively help last month’s US anti-insurgent Operation Matador.
Political sources report: The Bush administration has run out of patience with Syrian ruler Assad, although averse to direct action to topple him.
Impatient for Assad to Go, Washington Made Much of Routine Syrian Scud Test
Last week, Syrian test-fired one elderly Scud B (200km range) and two Scud D (700km range) missiles, capable of delivering air-burst chemical weapons. Syria’s missiles are routinely tested every summer. This time, Damascus took particular care to aim the missiles southwest, so as not to mistakenly hit US forces operating in the al Qaim province on the Iraqi side of its border. The Scud B broke up and shed debris over Turkey
All the same, The New York Times and the US State Department, confirming the Israeli report of the test, made a big fuss. The State Department spokesman scolded the Assad regime, calling the test “one more example of Syria being out of step with what’s going on in the rest of the region.” He said the US had long accused Syria of seeking to acquire weapons of mass destruction and the ability to deliver them, while Iraq and Lebanon were focused on political and economic development.
Syria too leveled a charge that went unnoticed: Israel, said Damascus, was holding its largest military exercise ever on the Golan Heights, with the participation of commando, armored and air force units. According to Damascus, the drill was staged right on the Israel-Syrian border for the purpose of challenging the Syrian army and threatening Damascus.
Military and Middle East sources report that a strong sense of trouble brewing pervades ruling circles in Damascus, as the Syrian Baath prepares for its 10th convention Monday, June 6, a gathering of major moment for the stability and future of the Assad regime.
As the date approaches a stack of problems is piling up on the Syrian ruler, the price of keeping a clandestine finger in the Lebanon pie - even after the exit of his troops and of sticking to his ties with the Iraqi Baath:
1. Counter-terror sources confirm that Syrian army intelligence agents hired contact killers to assassinate the prominent anti-Syria Lebanese journalist Samir Qaseer last Thursday, June 2, by booby-trapping his car. (Washington is pressing for the UN Hariri murder inquiry to include also this latest assassination.). Moreover, three senior Syrian military intelligence officers reappeared in northern Lebanon last week to put their oar into the general election. They ordered candidates to go to Damascus for heart-to-heart talks with their former Syrian boss General Rustum Ghazel.
2. The Baath convention looks like becoming a battleground for delegates’ accusations and counter-accusations over the responsibility for Syria’s debacle in Lebanon. Assad is expected to use this dispute and the political reform slogan as an opening for sacking two- thirds of the top level of the Baath party’s ruling institutions, including, according to rumors in Damascus, vice president Khalim Haddam. He is also believed to be planning to replace prime minister Naji al Oteri with a non-party technocrat, finance minister Mohammed Hussein.
3. Syria’s entire leadership is on edge over the looming return home aboard his private plane of the president’s black sheep uncle Rif’at Assad from 16 years in exile. As vice president, Rifat was caught plotting a coup against his brother, Bashar’s father, president Hafez Assad, while he was recovering from a heart attack.
4. The certainty has gained ground in Middle East capitals that US president George W. Bush has decided to wash his hands of Assad once and for all. Washington will not act directly to remove him; but neither will it refrain from indirect moves that contribute to his downfall. This conviction is reportedly the spur for Rif’at’s decision to be on hand to retain the Assad clan’s hand on the reins of power should they slip from his nephew’s grasp.
Last month, aware of the ground shaking under his feet, Assad performed an epic about-face – or at least gave the appearance of turning over a new leaf.
He ordered his army to pitch in with support for “Operation Matador”, the important U.S. assault against insurgents along the Iraqi-Syrian border, thereby tipping the scales in favor of the American forces. Military sources in an exclusive report from Iraq on May 20. Thanks to Syrian cooperation, American troops were for the first time able to come up from behind Iraqi and Arab insurgents and al Qaeda gunmen, including followers of Abu Mussab al-Zarqawi. From launching pads on Syrian soil, units of the 2nd Marine Division, 2nd Marine Expeditionary drove into Iraq and executed a west-to-east sweep of terrorist bases (as you will see on the special map accompanying this article) .
The US operation was two-pronged: one arm drew a 15 square-mile square around a patch of al Jazira Desert in the al Qaim region. It was delimited by the Syrian frontier town of al-Hary and the Euphrates River, the area around the Iraqi town of Ar Rabit, on the northern bank of the river, and the Iraqi cities of Khutaylah, Sadah and Karabilah on the southern bank.
Simultaneously, the second American arm drove southeast for a systematic purge of insurgent lairs along the centuries-old smuggling route from the Syrian border. They cut through a corridor more than 200-mile (320-km) long, winding from the Syrian border town of Abu Kemal, crossing through the Syrian Desert and ending near the Shiite shrine town of Karbala in central Iraq. Numerous Arab and al Qaeda sanctuaries and launching-pads were mopped up along the route.
Syria deployed an armored brigade between Abu Kamal and the Syrian banks of the Euphrates to cover the US Marine operation around and inside Al Hary. The brigade was under orders to shield the Marines from insurgent attack on the Syrian side of the border and to cut the guerillas’ links via the Euphrates to their comrades on the Iraqi side of the border.
The dense reeds, bushes and vegetation provide cover on the river banks for armed ambushes and hideouts. Syrian forces undertook to cut off the guerrillas’ escape route back into Syria while the Marines hammered these riverside lairs.
The Syrian military umbrella left the Marine Force and the Army’s 814th Multi-Role Bridge Company free to construct a pontoon bridge across the Euphrates and cross safely into Iraq. US forces and Syrian troops then formed a defensive perimeter around the area.
Upon reaching the northern bank, the Marines began their offensive in Iraq, coming at the guerrillas from the rear and forcing them to flee toward western Syria – where they were stopped. Finding themselves running into the arms of Syrian troops, they turned south and took the smugglers’ corridor bound for Karbala. Here they were trapped by the second prong of the US clean-up operation. Those who could, fled east. Most reached Iraqi towns and villages along both banks of the Euphrates at points north of Ramadi and Fallujah in the Sunni Triangle.
It was during Operation Matador that al Qaeda’s Iraq commander Abu Musab al-Zarqawi was injured.
But while helping the American military fight Iraqi insurgents, Assad did not neglect his commitment to the Iraq ex-Baathists running the insurgent campaign from Syria. Washington was tipped off that Syrian military intelligence chief Asaf Shawqat had been instructed to get together Syrian-based Iraqi Baath chiefs for a secret conclave in Homs in advance of Operation Matador. Among them were the masterminds the guerrilla war in Iraq and personal representatives of Iraqi ex-vice president Izzat Ibrahim, the most senior Baath official still at large on America’s most-wanted list. He is also believed commander-in-chief of the Iraqi insurgency at large. There, too, were former Iraqi army and intelligence officers now employed in the recruitment, training and dispatch of guerrillas into the homeland. Other chairs were filled by the moneymen who manage the Baath funds that underwrite the insurgency and run Saddam Hussein’s straw companies.
Shawqat’s initiative was taken in Washington as clear evidence that Assad knows exactly where every Iraqi ex-official involved in the guerrilla war is located and what he is up to.
Officials at the US state department and national security council were convinced that Shawqat’s task was to explain to the Iraqis why Assad was obliged to cooperate with the Americans, to forewarn the guerilla leaders of the coming US offensive and to confer together on how to sabotage it?
That piece of double-dealing was the last straw. The Bush administration finally lost patience with Bashar Assad and decided his time was up.
Political sources report: The Bush administration has run out of patience with Syrian ruler Assad, although averse to direct action to topple him.
Impatient for Assad to Go, Washington Made Much of Routine Syrian Scud Test
Last week, Syrian test-fired one elderly Scud B (200km range) and two Scud D (700km range) missiles, capable of delivering air-burst chemical weapons. Syria’s missiles are routinely tested every summer. This time, Damascus took particular care to aim the missiles southwest, so as not to mistakenly hit US forces operating in the al Qaim province on the Iraqi side of its border. The Scud B broke up and shed debris over Turkey
All the same, The New York Times and the US State Department, confirming the Israeli report of the test, made a big fuss. The State Department spokesman scolded the Assad regime, calling the test “one more example of Syria being out of step with what’s going on in the rest of the region.” He said the US had long accused Syria of seeking to acquire weapons of mass destruction and the ability to deliver them, while Iraq and Lebanon were focused on political and economic development.
Syria too leveled a charge that went unnoticed: Israel, said Damascus, was holding its largest military exercise ever on the Golan Heights, with the participation of commando, armored and air force units. According to Damascus, the drill was staged right on the Israel-Syrian border for the purpose of challenging the Syrian army and threatening Damascus.
Military and Middle East sources report that a strong sense of trouble brewing pervades ruling circles in Damascus, as the Syrian Baath prepares for its 10th convention Monday, June 6, a gathering of major moment for the stability and future of the Assad regime.
As the date approaches a stack of problems is piling up on the Syrian ruler, the price of keeping a clandestine finger in the Lebanon pie - even after the exit of his troops and of sticking to his ties with the Iraqi Baath:
1. Counter-terror sources confirm that Syrian army intelligence agents hired contact killers to assassinate the prominent anti-Syria Lebanese journalist Samir Qaseer last Thursday, June 2, by booby-trapping his car. (Washington is pressing for the UN Hariri murder inquiry to include also this latest assassination.). Moreover, three senior Syrian military intelligence officers reappeared in northern Lebanon last week to put their oar into the general election. They ordered candidates to go to Damascus for heart-to-heart talks with their former Syrian boss General Rustum Ghazel.
2. The Baath convention looks like becoming a battleground for delegates’ accusations and counter-accusations over the responsibility for Syria’s debacle in Lebanon. Assad is expected to use this dispute and the political reform slogan as an opening for sacking two- thirds of the top level of the Baath party’s ruling institutions, including, according to rumors in Damascus, vice president Khalim Haddam. He is also believed to be planning to replace prime minister Naji al Oteri with a non-party technocrat, finance minister Mohammed Hussein.
3. Syria’s entire leadership is on edge over the looming return home aboard his private plane of the president’s black sheep uncle Rif’at Assad from 16 years in exile. As vice president, Rifat was caught plotting a coup against his brother, Bashar’s father, president Hafez Assad, while he was recovering from a heart attack.
4. The certainty has gained ground in Middle East capitals that US president George W. Bush has decided to wash his hands of Assad once and for all. Washington will not act directly to remove him; but neither will it refrain from indirect moves that contribute to his downfall. This conviction is reportedly the spur for Rif’at’s decision to be on hand to retain the Assad clan’s hand on the reins of power should they slip from his nephew’s grasp.
Last month, aware of the ground shaking under his feet, Assad performed an epic about-face – or at least gave the appearance of turning over a new leaf.
He ordered his army to pitch in with support for “Operation Matador”, the important U.S. assault against insurgents along the Iraqi-Syrian border, thereby tipping the scales in favor of the American forces. Military sources in an exclusive report from Iraq on May 20. Thanks to Syrian cooperation, American troops were for the first time able to come up from behind Iraqi and Arab insurgents and al Qaeda gunmen, including followers of Abu Mussab al-Zarqawi. From launching pads on Syrian soil, units of the 2nd Marine Division, 2nd Marine Expeditionary drove into Iraq and executed a west-to-east sweep of terrorist bases (as you will see on the special map accompanying this article) .
The US operation was two-pronged: one arm drew a 15 square-mile square around a patch of al Jazira Desert in the al Qaim region. It was delimited by the Syrian frontier town of al-Hary and the Euphrates River, the area around the Iraqi town of Ar Rabit, on the northern bank of the river, and the Iraqi cities of Khutaylah, Sadah and Karabilah on the southern bank.
Simultaneously, the second American arm drove southeast for a systematic purge of insurgent lairs along the centuries-old smuggling route from the Syrian border. They cut through a corridor more than 200-mile (320-km) long, winding from the Syrian border town of Abu Kemal, crossing through the Syrian Desert and ending near the Shiite shrine town of Karbala in central Iraq. Numerous Arab and al Qaeda sanctuaries and launching-pads were mopped up along the route.
Syria deployed an armored brigade between Abu Kamal and the Syrian banks of the Euphrates to cover the US Marine operation around and inside Al Hary. The brigade was under orders to shield the Marines from insurgent attack on the Syrian side of the border and to cut the guerillas’ links via the Euphrates to their comrades on the Iraqi side of the border.
The dense reeds, bushes and vegetation provide cover on the river banks for armed ambushes and hideouts. Syrian forces undertook to cut off the guerrillas’ escape route back into Syria while the Marines hammered these riverside lairs.
The Syrian military umbrella left the Marine Force and the Army’s 814th Multi-Role Bridge Company free to construct a pontoon bridge across the Euphrates and cross safely into Iraq. US forces and Syrian troops then formed a defensive perimeter around the area.
Upon reaching the northern bank, the Marines began their offensive in Iraq, coming at the guerrillas from the rear and forcing them to flee toward western Syria – where they were stopped. Finding themselves running into the arms of Syrian troops, they turned south and took the smugglers’ corridor bound for Karbala. Here they were trapped by the second prong of the US clean-up operation. Those who could, fled east. Most reached Iraqi towns and villages along both banks of the Euphrates at points north of Ramadi and Fallujah in the Sunni Triangle.
It was during Operation Matador that al Qaeda’s Iraq commander Abu Musab al-Zarqawi was injured.
But while helping the American military fight Iraqi insurgents, Assad did not neglect his commitment to the Iraq ex-Baathists running the insurgent campaign from Syria. Washington was tipped off that Syrian military intelligence chief Asaf Shawqat had been instructed to get together Syrian-based Iraqi Baath chiefs for a secret conclave in Homs in advance of Operation Matador. Among them were the masterminds the guerrilla war in Iraq and personal representatives of Iraqi ex-vice president Izzat Ibrahim, the most senior Baath official still at large on America’s most-wanted list. He is also believed commander-in-chief of the Iraqi insurgency at large. There, too, were former Iraqi army and intelligence officers now employed in the recruitment, training and dispatch of guerrillas into the homeland. Other chairs were filled by the moneymen who manage the Baath funds that underwrite the insurgency and run Saddam Hussein’s straw companies.
Shawqat’s initiative was taken in Washington as clear evidence that Assad knows exactly where every Iraqi ex-official involved in the guerrilla war is located and what he is up to.
Officials at the US state department and national security council were convinced that Shawqat’s task was to explain to the Iraqis why Assad was obliged to cooperate with the Americans, to forewarn the guerilla leaders of the coming US offensive and to confer together on how to sabotage it?
That piece of double-dealing was the last straw. The Bush administration finally lost patience with Bashar Assad and decided his time was up.
Friday, June 03, 2005
Lebanese students mourn over the killing of Samir Kassir, a prominent anti-Syrian journalist, during a sit-in held in Martyrs square in Beirut June 2, 2005. Hundreds of Lebanese students and journalists held a sit-in over the killing of Samir Kassir, who was killed when a bomb exploded in his car in Beirut on Thursday, an attack the opposition blamed on Syria and its Lebanese security allies. REUTERS/Jamal Saidi
The corpse of a man identified as prominent Lebanese journalist Samir Kassir is seen in his car following an explosion in Beirut, Thursday, June 2, 2005. Kassir, known for his anti-Syrian writings, was killed after a bomb placed in his car exploded Thursday, police said, as the country was in the midst of parliamentary elections, free for the first time of overt Syrian interference. (AP Photo/Mahmoud Tawil)
Wednesday, June 01, 2005
click here to listen• Syria: Friend or Foe?
Syria's Odd Man Out
This awkward son of a dictator is struggling to adapt—and survive—in a rapidly changing world.
Patrick Baz / AFP-Getty Images
Against the tide: Waving Assad's picture, Syrian workers in Beirut protested the pullout
By Kevin Peraino And Christopher Dickey
Newsweek
June 6 issue - Bashar al-Assad was never cut out to be a dictator. A week after his Army completed its abrupt retreat from Lebanon, the introverted Syrian leader summoned about two dozen minority-party politicians to a gathering at the People's Palace, the private fortress erected by his father, Hafez al-Assad, on a mountaintop above Damascus. The meeting's purpose wasn't to defend the pullout or to intimidate anyone who dared to criticize it. Instead, the 39-year-old Assad focused on the agenda for next week's congress of the ruling Baath Party. As his guests sipped tea and lemonade, he listened to their thoughts on political and economic liberalization and pledged himself to the cause of reform. Only once did he sound like an old-fashioned president for life, launching into a grim warning about secret Islamist plots to take down his regime.
No one ever had to ask about the true nature and calling of Bashar's father. The old man removed any possible doubt back in 1982, when he crushed an uprising in the northern city of Hama, pounding it with artillery for three merciless weeks and slaughtering thousands of civilians. It's hard to imagine him letting "people power" chase 14,000 well-armed Syrian soldiers out of Lebanon. His dictatorship—like his son's—could never have lasted so long without the unwavering support of an iron-fisted security apparatus. But Bashar is an enigma: his representatives practically beg for Syria to be better understood, and for warmer ties to Washington. Yet U.S. officials have repeatedly accused his regime of giving safe passage, sanctuary and material aid to Iraq's insurgents.
Is Assad trying to play all sides? Is he fueling the Iraq war, allowing Syrians, foreign jihadists and Iraqi Baathists to slip across the border? Or is he trying to reform his own country gradually and stop the insurgency, as he says, fearing the rise of militant Islam in Syria? The only certainty is that Assad's policies have left him dangerously alone in a region where keeping your friends close by—and your enemies at bay—is a matter of survival.
Bashar was never a commanding figure. He was an awkward boy, quite different from his beefy, athletic older brother Basil. Assad biographer Patrick Seale tells how Bashar's great-grandfather Sulayman made his name as a young man in Syria's western mountains by wrestling any challenger to the ground. But Bashar was no fighter. When he reached the age to choose a profession, Bashar picked ophthalmology. He might have made a comfortable career diagnosing eye ailments if Basil hadn't died in a car crash in 1994. Bashar quit his medical residency to take Basil's place as heir apparent. When the elder Assad died in 2000, Syria quickly amended its Constitution to let the 34-year-old Bashar take power. He soon settled into the usual pattern of Mideast despots: periods of reformist promises, followed inevitably by brutal crackdowns.
After 9/11, Assad's regime joined the U.S.-led war on terror, sharing intelligence on Al Qaeda and allowing American teams to operate inside Syria. But the partnership fell apart. "It's not because we made a decision to stop," says Syria's ambassador to Washington, Imad Moustapha. "Syria is still willing to engage, but it takes two parties." State Department spokesman Richard Boucher insists Damascus is to blame. "There were moments when they were cooperating on Al Qaeda," he says. "There were a few things they did with regard to the border. But ... I wouldn't say that they've cut off any particular regular and ongoing cooperation, because there just hasn't been regular and ongoing cooperation." It's Washington's fault, Moustapha says: "[Assad] believes there is no other alternative to working with the U.S. He is disappointed with their refusal to cooperate."
CONTINUED
Syria's Odd Man Out
This awkward son of a dictator is struggling to adapt—and survive—in a rapidly changing world.
Patrick Baz / AFP-Getty Images
Against the tide: Waving Assad's picture, Syrian workers in Beirut protested the pullout
By Kevin Peraino And Christopher Dickey
Newsweek
June 6 issue - Bashar al-Assad was never cut out to be a dictator. A week after his Army completed its abrupt retreat from Lebanon, the introverted Syrian leader summoned about two dozen minority-party politicians to a gathering at the People's Palace, the private fortress erected by his father, Hafez al-Assad, on a mountaintop above Damascus. The meeting's purpose wasn't to defend the pullout or to intimidate anyone who dared to criticize it. Instead, the 39-year-old Assad focused on the agenda for next week's congress of the ruling Baath Party. As his guests sipped tea and lemonade, he listened to their thoughts on political and economic liberalization and pledged himself to the cause of reform. Only once did he sound like an old-fashioned president for life, launching into a grim warning about secret Islamist plots to take down his regime.
No one ever had to ask about the true nature and calling of Bashar's father. The old man removed any possible doubt back in 1982, when he crushed an uprising in the northern city of Hama, pounding it with artillery for three merciless weeks and slaughtering thousands of civilians. It's hard to imagine him letting "people power" chase 14,000 well-armed Syrian soldiers out of Lebanon. His dictatorship—like his son's—could never have lasted so long without the unwavering support of an iron-fisted security apparatus. But Bashar is an enigma: his representatives practically beg for Syria to be better understood, and for warmer ties to Washington. Yet U.S. officials have repeatedly accused his regime of giving safe passage, sanctuary and material aid to Iraq's insurgents.
Is Assad trying to play all sides? Is he fueling the Iraq war, allowing Syrians, foreign jihadists and Iraqi Baathists to slip across the border? Or is he trying to reform his own country gradually and stop the insurgency, as he says, fearing the rise of militant Islam in Syria? The only certainty is that Assad's policies have left him dangerously alone in a region where keeping your friends close by—and your enemies at bay—is a matter of survival.
Bashar was never a commanding figure. He was an awkward boy, quite different from his beefy, athletic older brother Basil. Assad biographer Patrick Seale tells how Bashar's great-grandfather Sulayman made his name as a young man in Syria's western mountains by wrestling any challenger to the ground. But Bashar was no fighter. When he reached the age to choose a profession, Bashar picked ophthalmology. He might have made a comfortable career diagnosing eye ailments if Basil hadn't died in a car crash in 1994. Bashar quit his medical residency to take Basil's place as heir apparent. When the elder Assad died in 2000, Syria quickly amended its Constitution to let the 34-year-old Bashar take power. He soon settled into the usual pattern of Mideast despots: periods of reformist promises, followed inevitably by brutal crackdowns.
After 9/11, Assad's regime joined the U.S.-led war on terror, sharing intelligence on Al Qaeda and allowing American teams to operate inside Syria. But the partnership fell apart. "It's not because we made a decision to stop," says Syria's ambassador to Washington, Imad Moustapha. "Syria is still willing to engage, but it takes two parties." State Department spokesman Richard Boucher insists Damascus is to blame. "There were moments when they were cooperating on Al Qaeda," he says. "There were a few things they did with regard to the border. But ... I wouldn't say that they've cut off any particular regular and ongoing cooperation, because there just hasn't been regular and ongoing cooperation." It's Washington's fault, Moustapha says: "[Assad] believes there is no other alternative to working with the U.S. He is disappointed with their refusal to cooperate."
CONTINUED
Subscribe to:
Posts (Atom)