Epstein Secrets

ct. Emblematic of his brutal rule was the crushing of the uprising in the city of Hama in 1982, in which tens of thousands of Syrians were killed. Hafez had originally designated his eldest and favorite son, Bassel, as his successor, and Bassel, the chief of presidential security, was perfect for th

understand him in the context EFTA_R1_01992731 EFTA02681516 33 of the Assad family's dominance of the Syrian political scene. Bashar's father, Hafez al-Assad, ruled Syria with an iron fist for three decades, including enforcing draconian emergency laws in 1963 that helped him eliminate political opponent

of the Arab plan on December 19. Expectations by most regional experts and officials are that sooner or later the Syrian file will be referred to the United Nations Security Council, and a Turkish-led international military intervention would be inevitable. However, the resilience of the Syrian regime has surprised many, but so

ly wrong: Assad's is an oppressive, minority-Alawi regime. It came to power via a 1970 coup. In 1982, the current dictator's father, then president Hafez al- Assad, brought artillery and killed over twenty thousand Islamist rebels in the town of Hama. The son is less efficient and likely to lose powe

the West Bank, Gaza and East Jerusalem; that track has proved harder than expected. Last September, Mr. Abbas was unable to get enough members of the United Nations Security Council to vote yes for recognizing Palestine as a state. He did gain membership in Unesco, a United Nations agency, but that led the United States to cut

ians do." The Syrian-Russian relationship was always rather complicated, full of mutual suspicion and attempts by Moscow to impose an ideology that Hafez al-Assad didn't much care for, in exchange for military and intelligence assistance that Syria couldn't do without. But Damascus isn't just a resurrected st

overnment decided to vent its anger with the Obama Administration's Syria policy by issuing statements in the Western press and by refusing to join the United Nations Security Council as a rotating member (after two years of lobbying vigorously for the post), Riyadh tried an alternative method of advancing its interests in the Le