Washington Report on Middle East Affairs, November/December 1996, pages 117-118

Facts for Your File: A Chronology of U.S.-Middle East Relations

Compiled by Janet McMahon

Sept. 1: Secret Israeli-Palestinian talks aimed at agreeing upon an agenda for future negotiations between the Palestinian National Authority (PNA) and Israel’s two-month-old Likud government began a second all-night session.

Officials of the exiled opposition Iraqi National Congress said that Iraqi troops had summarily executed INC cadres in northern Iraq and arrested followers of Jalal Talabani’s Patriotic Union of Kurdistan.

Sept. 2: Two Iraqi mechanized troop divisions moved deeper into Kurdish-held northern Iraq, as U.S. President Bill Clinton was reported to have decided upon air strikes against Baghdad in response to Saddam Hussain’s move on Irbil.

Sept. 3: U.S. cruise missiles were fired at antiaircraft installations in southern Iraq. Former Gulf war allies France and Russia criticized the U.S. action, Britain and Germany expressed support, and moderate Arab states voiced concern.

Sept. 4: In a reversal of longstanding Likud policy, Israeli Prime Minister Binyamin Netanyahu shook hands with Palestinian President Yasser Arafat following their first meeting, held at the Erez Crossing between Israel and the Gaza Strip.

In what Pentagon officials called a “mop-up operation,” the U.S. launched a second round of cruise missile attacks on military targets in southern Iraq, and unilaterally expanded the southern no-fly zone.

Sept. 5: U.S. officials said Saddam Hussain was withdrawing most of his troops from northern Iraq, except for a group of spies and secret agents.

The State Department approved Turkey’s plan to establish a 3- to 6-mile-wide “security zone” in northern Iraq as a buffer against Kurdish Workers Party (PKK) guerrillas. Meanwhile, France said it would resume patrolling the original, but not the expanded, no-fly zone in southern Iraq.

A federal jury in New York convicted Ramzi Ahmed Yousef, alleged to be the mastermind behind the World Trade Center bombing, and two co-defendents of plotting to blow up American airliners over the Pacific.

Sept. 6: Senior U.S. officials said that Saddam Hussain’s recent offensive in Kurdish northern Iraq had undermined a covert CIA operation to overthrow the Iraqi leader and caused American intelligence agents to flee along with U.S. military and diplomatic personnel.

Israeli Prime Minister Binyamin Netanyahu appeared before the Likud rank-and-file to defend his meeting with Palestinian President Arafat.

Sept. 8: On the eve of a visit by Israeli Prime Minister Netanyahu, the U.S. urged Israel to take “tangible steps to follow up on the psychological breakthrough of the meeting with [Palestinian President] Arafat.”

The Iraqi-backed Kurdistan Democratic Party captured the northern Iraqi city of Sulaimaniya, which had been under the control of the rival Patriotic Union of Kurdistan. In Washington, U.S. Joint Chiefs of Staff chairman Gen. John Shalikashvili warned Saddam Hussain not to try to rebuild military sites destroyed by U.S. cruise missile attacks.

Sept. 9: Israeli Prime Minister Netanyahu informed U.S. Secretary of State Warren Christopher that pulling Israeli troops out of Hebron too quickly could jeopardize the peace process. Later, in a White House meeting, Netanyahu told President Clinton that his Likud government was not bound by informal agreements its predecessor had made with Syria.

President Clinton, while not offering direct American help, said the U.S. was doing “everything we can” to help U.S.-backed Iraqi dissidents, members of the opposition Iraqi National Congress, trapped in northern Iraq between warring Kurdish factions and the security forces of Saddam Hussain.

Sept. 11: Following reports that Iraq had fired an SA-6 missile at a U.S. jet patrolling the northern no-fly zone, the Pentagon announced that it was sending stealth fighters to Kuwait and moving four B-52 bombers close to the Middle East.

Sept. 12: The U.S. announced it would help evacuate some 2,000 refugees who had worked with its covert, military and relief operations in northern Iraq and would grant many of them asylum.

Sept. 13: Iraq announced it will no longer fire antiaircraft missiles at U.S. and allied planes patrolling the northern and southern no-fly zones. The U.S. said it would launch no attacks against Iraq while Secretary of Defense William Perry was in the region for consultations with Turkey and Gulf allies.

Sept. 14: Bosnian elections were held in accordance with the terms of the Dayton accords and with few reports of violence.

Sept. 15: Kuwait temporarily withheld permission for the deployment of U.S. troops there after the Pentagon announced the impending deployment of 5,000 U.S. troops before receiving formal approval from Kuwait.

Sept. 16: Kuwait agreed to the deployment of 3,300 U.S. troops there.

Sept. 17: Bosnian voters elected the existing leaders of the Muslim, Serb and Croat factions to power, with Bosnian President Alija Izetbegovic winning the most votes and hence the chairmanship of the three-member presidency.

Sept. 18: Judge Richard Goldstone, departing chief prosecutor of the international war crimes tribunal at The Hague, described the international community as “pusillanimous” for its failure to arrest indicted Bosnian Serb war criminals Radovan Karadzic and Gen. Ratko Mladic.

Sept. 19: Israeli authorities approved plans to build some 4,000 new homes in illegal Jewish settlements in the West Bank.

In what Western diplomats described as a foreshadowing of a Croat-Serb alliance against Bosnian Muslims, Bosnia’s Croat and Serb presidents-elect, Kresimir Zubak and Momcilo Krajisnik, met in the Bosnian Serb “capital” of Pale without Bosnian Muslim President Alija Izetbegovic.

CIA director John Deutch told a Senate intelligence committee that Iraqi President Saddam Hussain is politically stronger now than he was before sending his troops into northern Iraq and sustaining U.S. cruise missile attacks against military installations in southern Iraq.

Sept. 22: Defense Secretary William Perry said Iraq was “backing off” from its recent military threats.

Sept. 24: Palestinians threw stones and bottles at Israeli police in protest and Palestinian President Arafat described as a “crime against [Islamic] religious and holy places” and a violation of the spirit of the peace process Israel’s nighttime excavation of a tunnel adjacent to the Muslim Haram al-Sharif linking the Western Wall with the Via Dolorosa in Jerusalem’s Old City.

In the southern Lebanese border town of Naqoura, members of a five-nation cease-fire committee met for more than eight hours in an attempt to reach a truce between Hezbollah forces and Israeli occupation troops, which had been fighting for more than a week.

Sept. 25: Israeli soldiers and Palestinian police traded gunfire in Ramallah and Israeli troops killed at least seven Palestinians and wounded hundreds more as protests continued over Israel’s opening of the Haram al-Sharif tunnel. Eight Israeli soldiers were slightly wounded.

The radical Islamist Taliban militia moved into the Afghan capital of Kabul.

The U.S. agreed to study the need for a new Bosnian peacekeeping force.

Sept. 26: As at least 35 Palestinians and 11 Israelis were killed in continued violence, the U.S. urged Israel to close the newly opened tunnel, and Arab states as well as U.S. allies in Europe and elsewhere condemned Israel for its provocative opening of the Haram al-Sharif tunnel.

Sept. 27: Israeli police and border guards stormed the Haram al-Sharif after Friday Muslim prayers, killing three Palestinians. Later, in a nighttime attack, Israeli helicopters opened fire on residents of Gaza’s Rafah refugee camp.

In Kabul, victorious Taliban militia troops displayed the bodies of murdered former Afghan President Najibullah and his brother hanging outside the former presidential palace.

The Provisional Election Commission for Bosnia, chaired by American diplomat Robert Frowick, overruled the recommendation of the Election Appeals Subcommittee of the Organization for Security and Cooperation in Europe that there be a recount of Bosnian election results due to the possibility of massive voting fraud.

Sept. 29: As Israel imposed a strict shutdown on West Bank cities and towns, President Clinton announced that Israeli Prime Minister Netanyahu and Palestinian President Arafat had agreed to meet in Washington Oct. 1 in an attempt to resume the peace process and end the violence resulting from Israel’s opening of the Haram al-Sharif tunnel.