Word: guerrillas
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Dates: during 2000-2000
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...have Hafez Assad grinning - if he's able to, since a British newspaper reported over the weekend that the Syrian president recently suffered an incapacitating stroke. But Assad certainly has reason to smile, because the latest exchange of fire between the Jewish state and the Hezbollah guerrilla fighters just across the border casts a shadow over Israel's plan to complete its withdrawal from Lebanon without first concluding a land-for-peace deal with Syria. Hezbollah fired Katyushka rockets into the town of Shlomi on Friday, killing one soldier, following Israel's overnight strike on Lebanese power plants. The Israeli...
...unilaterally withdrawing from a war that was costing Israeli lives with little security benefit. That suited Hezbollah, which would with some justification claim to be the first army ever to have driven Israel from Arab territory. Instead of being reined in by the heavy hand of Damascus, the guerrilla movement found itself at liberty to step up attacks to reinforce its claim to the mantle of Lebanon's liberators. In the unilateral withdrawal scenario, Israel's only defense against rocket attacks on its northern population centers is the promise that retaliation would be swift and brutal. But Thursday...
...forces that are too small to deal with the scale of the problem and therefore vulnerable to attacks and kidnapping, which appears to be exactly what has happened in Sierra Leone," says Dowell. "But it's no simple matter to expand the peacekeeping force, because to control a recalcitrant guerrilla army in hostile terrain would require a military commitment far larger even than what the U.S. undertook in Vietnam, and it's unlikely that the international community will be willing to take that on." In addition, the threadbare economies of countries such as Sierra Leone and the Congo create little...
...always hard to beat a guerrilla army fighting for independence on home ground, but even more so when the insurgents are better armed than the government forces. Sri Lanka found itself forced to declare martial law Thursday following another dramatic defeat at the hands of the Liberation Tigers of Tamil Eelam, who last week took control of the gateway to the disputed Jaffna province, leaving some 40,000 government troops trapped and surrounded. And to make matters worse, India - whose government includes parties from India's Tamil province, and which was eventually asked by Sri Lanka to withdraw the last...
Which is a problem, since unlike other conventional armies that find themselves confounded by poorly armed but elusive guerrilla opponents, the Sri Lankans are now outgunned by their guerrilla enemies. "The LTTE is better armed than the Sri Lankan army," says TIME New Delhi correspondent Meenakshi Ganguly. "In fact, a lot of their weapons once belonged to the army and were usurped by the Tigers when they overran the camps. The Tigers are also much more motivated than the army, which is facing problems of desertion and low recruitment because of the heavy casualties it has suffered in this conflict...