Tue May 14, 2013
473 articles tagged "Syria"
DEBKAfile
Exclusive Report
January 11, 2005, 2:44 PM (GMT+02:00)
Last Sunday, January 2, US deputy secretary of state Richard Armitage performed his last major mission before stepping down in favor of Robert B. Zoellick, whom incoming secretary Condoleezza Rice has picked as her deputy. (Zoellick, currently trade representative in charge US world trade, served as deputy to secretary of ...
DEBKAfile
Exclusive Report
December 4, 2004, 11:57 PM (GMT+02:00)
Syrian ruler Bashar Assad is pitching his offer of peace talks with Israel to disguise and dodge his real woes: US and French demands to disarm the Hizballah terrorists and let Lebanon have a fair election and the internal divisions bedeviling his regime. The Bush administration and Israeli prime minister ...
DEBKAfile
Exclusive Report
September 27, 2004, 10:38 AM (GMT+02:00)
Before deporting him to Lebanon in 1991, the late Yitzhak Rabin called Ezz-Eldin Sheikh al-Khalil "the snake's head," singling him out as the terror master who raised and handled Hamas' most accomplished terror operatives, Adnan al Hool and Mohammed Deif. Yasser Arafat used to claim in the early days of ...
DEBKAfile
Exclusive Report
August 14, 2004, 3:47 PM (GMT+02:00)
Israel's chief of staff, Lt.-Gen Moshe Yaalon put his hand in a hornet's nest when he said in an interview: The question is will we reach agreement with Syria for the right price. If you ask me if an agreement that is correctly balanced is theoretically possible, I say that ...
DEBKAfile
Exclusive Report
June 22, 2004, 3:31 PM (GMT+02:00)
Obeying a tradition of more than a quarter of a century, the Syrian army shifts some officers around twice a year - in summer and winter. It is a game of musical chairs with little impact on the armed forces as a whole. This time was different. On June 1, ...
DEBKAfile
Exclusive Report
February 10, 2004, 2:26 PM (GMT+02:00)
Syrian president Bashar Assad's advisers tried hitching a ride on the second stage of the Hizballah-Israeli prisoner swap - the one requiring the handover of information on the long missing Israeli navigator Ron Arad. Assad's men went to work on Iranian foreign minister Kamal Kharazi when he came to Beirut ...
DEBKAfile
Exclusive Report
January 23, 2004, 7:51 PM (GMT+02:00)
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There were no giveaways, balloons or barbecues, but business was booming this month at a bizarre Syrian bazaar - a used tank lot at al-Qamishli, located at the point where the borders of Syria, Iraq and Turkey meet. On sale: Russian T-72 tanks. No, not ... 
DEBKAfile
Exclusive Report
January 19, 2004, 11:31 PM (GMT+02:00)
Syrian president Bashar Assad is a very worried man. In a typical reflex action, he sent his Hizballah proxy to shoot up an Israeli military tractor, killing one Israeli soldier and injuring another, on the very day, January 19, that a group of Syrian opposition leaders based overseas held its ...
DEBKAfile
Exclusive Report
January 16, 2004, 5:19 PM (GMT+02:00)
At its wits' end to pierce the thicket of rhetoric emanating from Damascus and Jerusalem, the White House has plucked the veteran Middle East hand, Edward P. Djerejian, from academia for a fresh initiative to try and decode the conflicting signals broadcast by the Assad regime on whether or not ...
DEBKAfile
Exclusive Report
January 14, 2004, 1:38 PM (GMT+02:00)
The Syrian leadership, in an urgent session on Sunday, January 11, resolved on two fresh initiatives after failing to make head or tail of Israel's wordy and inconsistent responses to Bashar Assad's feelers for the resumption of the peace talks that broke down four years ago. The first such feeler ...
DEBKAfile
Exclusive Report
January 10, 2004, 5:31 PM (GMT+02:00)
Update January 12: Turkish Cypriots form a new government led by Mehmet Ali Talat's Republican Turkish party which favors UN's reunification plan Greek Cypriots and others may remain skeptical, but debkafile's intelligence sources believe Turkey to be genuinely committed to a speedy settlement of the decades-old division of ...
DEBKAfile
Exclusive Report
January 2, 2004, 5:56 AM (GMT+02:00)
US President George W. Bush took advantage of his end-of-year vacation to launch a surprise move in the Middle East. He added the region to the remit of his special envoy on Iraqi debt relief, the former secretary of state James Baker, after commending him on progress made so far, ...
DEBKAfile
Exclusive Report
December 29, 2003, 3:24 PM (GMT+02:00)
The Syrian-Israel diplomatic track has been reduced to mathematical polemic before taking any other shape. Ariel Sharon told his cabinet in Jerusalem that any Israeli response to Syrian president Bashar Assad's call for fresh negotiations must begin at zero percent, ie on a slate wiped clean of all failed diplomatic ...
DEBKAfile
Exclusive Report
December 25, 2003, 4:28 PM (GMT+02:00)
Cairo is still fuming over the "flying shoe ambush" to which Egyptian foreign minister Ahmed Maher was treated when he tried to pray Monday, December 12, at al Aqsa mosque on Temple Mount, Jerusalem. Mubarak regards the assault as a spiteful rejoinder from Yasser Arafat for the Egyptian minister's failure ...
DEBKAfile
Exclusive Report
December 14, 2003, 8:43 PM (GMT+02:00)
Syrian president Bashar Assad is due to begin a state visit to Athens Monday, December 15. DEBKA-Net-Weekly's Athens sources report that Greek foreign minister Georges Papandreou entertains high hopes of a sparkling diplomatic breakthrough from the visit, bright enough to eclipse the Greek's drab performance as former European Union ...
DEBKAfile
Exclusive Report
November 11, 2003, 2:13 PM (GMT+02:00)
On Monday, November 10, Israeli defense minister Shaul Mofaz said that as long as Syria provides bases for Palestinian terrorists for attacks in Israel, his government reserves the right of self-defense. He is reported to have said this to US defense secretary Donald Rumsfeld during their two-hour discussion in Washington ...
DEBKAfile
Exclusive Report
October 29, 2003, 3:34 PM (GMT+02:00)
A shrill chorus of threats has been emanating from Syria, the Palestinians and the Hizballah as the Middle East heads toward another bleak winter. President Bashar Assad is still smarting from Israel's October 5 retaliatory air strike against a terrorist training camp at Ein Hatsav 15 miles from Damascus - ...
DEBKAfile
Exclusive Report
October 14, 2003, 12:28 PM (GMT+02:00)
According to one Damascus source, Syria has followed the Israeli air raid of a Palestinian site on its soil by secretly calling up 300,000 reservists to beef up its standing army of roughly the same number. This figure, in the view of debkafile's military sources, is implausibly high. ...
DEBKAfile
Exclusive Report
September 22, 2003, 1:52 PM (GMT+02:00)
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Syrian Vice President Khalim Haddam Saturday, September 20, dismissed any suggestion of Damascus bowing to pressure from Washington - or being scared by economic sanctions. American threats are futile, he said. Syria does little business with the US; its main trading partners are European. ... 
DEBKAfile
Exclusive Report
July 7, 2003, 11:26 PM (GMT+02:00)
On July 6, the day before he took off for Cairo, Syrian President Bashar Assad signed Decree 408 in the name of the ruling Baath party. This bureaucratic measure hit the Syrian political system like a bolt from the blue. In a trice, the party which had governed ever corner ...
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