Word: amale
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Last week the Commodore's luck ran out. The hotel became a killing ground in the bitter, fierce struggle between two Syrian-backed groups, the Shi'ite Amal militia and a leftist coalition of Druze militiamen and fighters of the pro-Soviet Lebanese Communist Party. At midweek, after an all-night battle, the Druze, lobbing grenades and delivering armor-piercing rockets, stormed the hotel and drove the Shi'ites out. The floors and walls of the lobby were stained with blood, and gaping holes made by rockets scarred its walls. By the time the last guests and employees had fled...
...week the Druze and the Communists, who had renewed an old alliance just last month, had the upper hand. They had pushed the Amal out of Hamra and the low-income Sunni Muslim district of Zarif and had begun shelling Shi'ite gunmen occupying the state television station in the Tallet Khayyat district, on the southern edge of West Beirut...
...fighting continued, the big losers were clearly the Syrians. Damascushas 30,000 soldiers in northern Lebanon and the Bekaa Valley. Initial pleas by the Damascus government for a cease-fire were ignored. At one point, Amal Leader Nabih Berri ordered his men to "stand fast. Fight until victory or martyrdom...
...violence a "crime, a genocide," and called for an emergency meeting of the U.N. Security Council to end the siege. Arafat neglected to point out, however, that it is the steady reinfiltration into Lebanon of P.L.O. forces, which were pushed out by the Israelis, that provoked the rival Amal to attack and isolate the camps. In the past two years, an estimated 3,500 P.L.O. fighters have returned to Beirut and southern Lebanon, mostly by ships that deposit them in coastal areas...
...unsuccessful attempts were made to break the blockade. In the first, four occupants of a truck loaded with flour were killed when they tried to drive the vehicle into Burj el-Barajneh and were blasted with Amal rockets. Militia officials claimed that the truck was also carrying ammunition for the P.L.O. Then on Friday, after the Amal had agreed to a cease-fire, an Iranian envoy riding in a small U.N. convoy of trucks and an ambulance was killed when the vehicles were halted by rocket and machine-gun fire just outside the camp's main gate. Finally...