DECEMBER 1999, pages 78-81

Facts For Your Files

A Chronology of U.S.-Middle East Relations

Compiled by Janet McMahon

Aug. 1: While still seeking a delay in the final stage of agreed-upon Israeli withdrawal from the West Bank, Prime Minister Ehud Barak set a target date of Oct. 1 to resume partial implementation of the Wye accord.

• In their first meeting since the PLO’s signing of the 1993 Oslo accords, Palestinian President Yasser Arafat met in Cairo with representatives of George Habash, leader of the rival Popular Front for the Liberation of Palestine, based in Syria.

• A bomb damaged a Serbian Orthodox church in the Kosovo capital of Pristina.

Aug. 2: Palestinian President Arafat publicly criticized Israeli Prime Minister Barak for the first time, calling Barak’s delays “an attempt to avoid the accurate and honest implementation of the [Wye] agreement.”

• Afghanistan’s ruling Taliban militia seized the key northern town of Charikar, the only remaining opposition stronghold north of the capital, Kabul.

Aug. 3: Kurdish Workers Party (PKK) leader Abdullah Ocalan, condemned to death by a Turkish security court, called on his PKK fighters to end their armed struggle for independence by Sept. 1 and remove their bases from Turkey.

Aug. 4: A coalition of American Muslim and Arab organizations announced a boycott of Burger King, which recently opened a franchise in the illegal Jewish settlement of Ma’ale Adumim in the West Bank.

• U.S. warplanes killed one Iraqi and wounded two when they bombed anti-aircraft sites in the northern “no-fly” zone.

• Iran’s Special Court for Clergy banned the liberal newspaper Salam for five years and suspended its publisher, Mohammed Moussavi Khoeini, from working as a newspaper managing director for three years.

Aug. 5: Israeli Prime Minister Barak expanded his cabinet from 17 to 23 members and appointed Israel’s first Arab deputy foreign minister, Nawaf Masalha.

• PKK leaders said they would obey Abdullah Ocalan’s call to end their guerrilla war.

• In a surprise counterattack, opposition forces led by Ahmed Shah Masood recaptured key towns in northern Afghanistan.

• The government of Montenegro demanded more self-rule in its Yugoslav confederation with Serbia, giving President Slobodan Milosevic six weeks to accept the proposed reforms.

• U.N. and KLA officials condemned the continuing attacks on Kosovo’s Serb population, with a U.N. spokesman vowing to improve protection for the minority Serbs.

Aug. 6: Israeli Prime Minister Barak threatened to carry out the Wye agreement as written if Palestinian negotiators refused to agree to a delay in the final Israeli withdrawal from 13.1 percent of the West Bank until after February, when Israeli negotiators said they hope to agree on the outlines of a final peace.

• At least 32 people were killed and 13 injured in fighting in Kashmir.

Aug. 7: On the eve of the first anniversary of the bombing of two U.S. embassies in Africa, Pakistan’s militant Al-Badar Mujaheddin group announced that its commander, Naseer Ahmad Mujahid, had met with alleged mastermind Osama bin Laden in Afghanistan.

• Saying the U.S. was playing down the extent of its bombing campaign, Iraqi Lt. Gen. Shaheen Yassin said that, in contrast to the U.S. figure of 108 sorties, U.S. and British planes had conducted 10,977 sorties against Iraq since December.

• Turkey lifted a five-year political ban on former Islamist Prime Minister Necmettin Erbakan.

Aug. 8: Palestinian President Arafat acceded to the demands of Israeli Prime Minister Barak and agreed to delay Wye treaty land transfers until October, while the Palestinian Authority further catered to Israeli sensibilities by arresting three Hamas leaders in the Gaza Strip.

• Secretary of State Madeleine Albright postponed her scheduled trip to the Middle East in accordance with Israeli Prime Minister Barak’s request that the U.S. no longer actively mediate Israeli-Palestinian disputes over implementation of the Wye agreement.

Aug. 9: With both sides claiming the downing occurred over their territory, Indian fighter jets shot down a Pakistani surveillance plane, killing 16 military personnel.

Aug. 10: Israeli and Palestinian officials downplayed an attack in which a young Palestinian twice drove his car into a group of Israeli soldiers, injuring 11, before being shot to death by Israeli police.

• The Serbian Orthodox Church called upon Yugoslav President Slobodan Milosevic to resign.

• Iraq charged that U.S. warplanes bombed a fourth-century monastery near the northern city of Mosul, where scientists had gathered to watch the century’s last solar eclipse, killing several people. American spokesmen denied bombing the monastery.

Aug. 11: As Israeli soldiers clashed with some 200 Palestinians protesting the demolitions of three Palestinian homes in the West Bank, Israeli and Palestinian negotiators held talks on the timetable for the Wye-mandated Israeli withdrawal from the West Bank.

• Pakistan fired a surface-to-air missile at an Indian aircraft in response to the downing of its reconnaissance plane.

Aug. 12: Ethnic Albanians fired on international peacekeepers attempting to prevent another revenge attack on Serbian Kosovars, as some 200 ethnic Albanians in Kosovska Kamenoca demonstrated against the presence of Russian peacekeeping troops.

• Six months into their three-year prison terms, Cyprus released two Israelis caught in November with listening devices near a Cypriot military installation.

Aug. 13: For the first time since Dec. 28, Iraq fired surface-to-air missiles at U.S. planes patroling the northern “no-fly” zone. American jets fired on artillery and communications sites near Mosul in response.

• In response to Turkish pressure, Iran agreed to conduct joint military operations against Kurdish rebels along the two countries’ common border.

Aug. 15: In the worst violence since Algerian President Abdelaziz Bouteflika took office in April, gunmen killed 29 people near Algeria’s western border with Morocco.

• U.S. warplanes attacked sites in three northern Iraqi provinces, wounding three people and destroying a mosque.

Aug. 16: Islamist militant groups in Pakistan threatened to strike American targets if the U.S. attacked the ruling Taliban militia or alleged terrorist Osama bin Laden in Afghanistan.

• Two roadside bombs exploded near Sidon in southern Lebanon, killing Hezbollah “coordinator of operations” Ali Hassan Deeb.

• U.S. and British warplanes attacked targets in northern and southern Iraq, killing three people and wounding nine.

Aug. 17: An earthquake measuring 7.4 on the Richter scale struck western Turkey, killing more than 15,000 people.

• At least two Israeli soldiers were killed and six wounded in clashes with Hezbollah guerrillas in Israeli-occupied southern Lebanon.

• U.S. and British warplanes bombed missile sites in northern and southern Iraq, killing 19 people and injuring 11 others, the highest one-day toll since December’s Desert Fox campaign, bringing the total of deaths this year to 134. Baghdad charged that the bombers had attacked targets outside the “no-fly” zones.

• U.N. Secretary-General Kofi Annan condemned the forced displacement of some 20,000 civilians in northern Afghanistan as a result of the Taliban militia’s latest offensive.

Aug. 18: Israeli-Palestinian negotiations on the implementation of the Wye agreement deadlocked over the issue of the release of Palestinian prisoners.

Aug. 19: In Belgrade, more than 150,000 demonstrators called for the resignation of Yugoslav President Milosevic.

• As another mass grave, containing the bodies of some 200 ethnic Albanians, was discovered outside Pristina, a Serbian Orthodox church in southwestern Kosovo was attacked with grenades and firebombs, wounding two Italian NATO peacekeeping soldiers.

• The Israeli army reopened a major thoroughfare in Hebron, closed since settler Baruch Goldstein massacred praying Palestinians in the Ibrahimi mosque. The road passes by heavily guarded compounds where some 500 illegal Jewish settlers live.

Aug. 20: Local elections were held in Iraq for the first time since 1972, seven years before Saddam Hussain assumed power.

Aug. 21: Ahmed Saeed and Mohammed Salim, members of Pakistan’s Urdu-speaking Muslim organization MQM, were sentenced to death for the November 1997 attack in Karachi on a van carrying four American accountants, killing them and their driver. The attack occurred two days after a court in Virginia convicted Pakistani Mir Aimal Kasi of the murder of two CIA employees outside the agency’s Langley, VA headquarters.

• Iran’s new chief judge, Ayatollah Mahmoud Hashemi Shahroudi, replaced nine judicial hard-liners with more moderate appointees.

Aug. 22: For the first time since their estrangement over the 1993 signing of the Oslo accords, Palestinian President Arafat met with Nayef Hawatmeh, head of the Damascus-based Democratic Front for the Liberation of Palestine.

• Hours after two of its soldiers were wounded in its occupation zone in southern Lebanon, Israel fired missiles at suspected guerrilla positions near the village of Rihan.

• One week before the scheduled replacement of Dutch peacekeeping forces by Russian troops, NATO granted a Serbian request to extend the deadline for returning weapons, and postponed a threatened house search of the Kosovo Serb neighborhood of Orahovac.

Aug. 23: Israeli and Palestinian negotiators agreed on the details for an Oct. 1 opening of a “safe passage” between the Gaza Strip and West Bank and the construction of a Gaza sea port, both promised under the 1993 Oslo accords. No agreement was reached on the promised release of Palestinian prisoners.

• Ethnic Albanian residents blockaded the three main access roads to Orahovac, preventing the deployment of Russian peacekeepers.

• U.N. Secretary-General Kofi Annan told Iraq it could do more under the existing U.N. “oil-for-food” program to protect the health of mothers and children. Meanwhile, Iraq accused U.S. and British warplanes of killing two people in an attack on the northern town of Basheqa.

Aug. 25: Israeli officials defended the plea bargain agreement under which Maryland teenager Samuel Sheinbein, who fled to Israel to avoid extradition, would plead guilty to the murder of Alfredo Tello in exchange for a 24-year prison sentence, making him eligible for parole in 14 years.

• Kosovar Serb leaders asked the U.N. to establish all-Serb zones in Kosovo as a protection against continuing revenge attacks by ethnic Albanians, whose leaders rejected the proposal.

• While attending a conference in Vienna, Gen. Momir Talic, chief of staff of the Bosnian Serb army, was arrested on a secret warrant charging him with the “ethnic cleansing” of some 100,000 Bosnian Muslims, Croats and other non-Serbs.

• Kurdish Workers’ Party (PKK) guerrillas announced that they had begun withdrawing from southeastern Turkey a week earlier than promised.

• In Afghanistan, a truck bomb exploded near the home of Taliban leader Mullah Mohammed Omar, killing seven people, including three bodyguards.

• U.S. warplanes attacked an Iraqi air defense depot near Mosul after being fired on while patrolling the northern “no-fly” zone.

Aug. 26: Following the discovery in Kosovo of a mass grave containing the bodies of 15 Serbs, Yugoslav President Milosevic accused the U.S. of conspiring with ethnic Albanians to target the province’s minority Serbs.

• Turkey’s parliament passed a law granting amnesty to Kurdish rebels not known to have fought the state, having no criminal record, or who surrender and provide information on the PKK.

Aug. 28: After coming under anti-aircraft fire, U.S warplanes patrolling the northern “no-fly” zone bombed two missile sites and a military radar site in northern Iraq.

Aug. 29: Israeli Prime Minister Barak warned that he would implement the Wye agreement as written unless agreement was reached on the release of Palestinian prisoners and the timetable for Israeli withdrawal from the West Bank.

• Ignoring State Department objections, five congressional staff members began a fact-finding mission to Iraq.

• Visiting the Kosovo capital of Pristina, former Balkan negotiator Richard Holbrooke, newly confirmed as U.S. ambassador to the United Nations, praised U.N. peacekeeping troops and warned Yugoslav President Milosevic not to cause problems in northern Kosovo.

Aug. 30: On the eve of a visit by American Secretary of State Albright, negotiations over implementation of the Wye agreement broke down over whether Israel would release Palestinian prisoners accused of killing Jewish Israelis.

• Jordanian security forces raided, searched and shut down offices of the Islamist group Hamas, issued warrants for top Hamas political leaders Khaled Meshal, Mousa Abu Marzook, Ibrahim Ghosheh and Mohammed Nazzal, all of whom were said to be in Iran at the time, and arrested some dozen Hamas members.

• The U.S. agreed to give Jordan $50 million in balance-of-payment support.

Sept. 1: Following meetings in Egypt with President Hosni Mubarak and Palestinian President Yasser Arafat, U.S. Secretary of State Madeleine Albright met in Jerusalem with Israeli Prime Minister Ehud Barak but failed to break the deadlock over the release of Palestinian prisoners.

• In the first of three scheduled demonstrations following the July withdrawal of Pakistani-backed forces from Kashmir, tens of thousands of protestors marched in Lahore, calling for the resignation of Prime Minister Nawaz Sharif.

• The U.N. Security Council approved Iraq’s donation of $10 million in oil to aid earthquake victims in Turkey.

• Reviving speculation that a dogfight between NATO warplanes and a Libyan fighter resulted in the 1980 crash of a Libyan DC-9 passenger plane in which 81 passengers were killed, Italian Judge Rosario Priore indicted four generals for withholding information about the incident.

Sept. 2: NATO and U.N. officials agreed to allow part of the Kosovo Liberation Army to remain as a lightly armed civilian emergency force.

• As part of a plea-bargain agreement, Maryland teenager Samuel Sheinbein admitted to an Israeli court that he strangled 19-year-old Alfredo Tello Jr., then cut up and burned his body, fleeing to Israel when the body was discovered near his home.

• Israel’s right-wing Likud Party elected as its leader Gen. Ariel Sharon, who directed the 1982 invasion of Lebanon and later served as minister of infrastructure and as foreign minister in the government of Prime Minister Binyamin Netanyahu, defeated in May elections.

Sept. 3: After a day of shuttle meetings by U.S. Secretary of State Albright, Israeli Prime Minister Barak and Palestinian President Arafat reached agreement on an expanded version of the Wye agreement.

• U.S. Secretary of State Albright complained to Israeli Foreign Minister David Levy about reports that Israel has tortured detained Arab Americans.

• U.S. officials, describing the circumstances as “sensitive,” confirmed that a group of visiting American scholars had left Iran 10 days ahead of schedule.

• U.S. warplanes attacked military sites in northern Iraq for the third straight day.

Sept. 4: In an effort to revive Syrian-Israeli peace talks, Secretary of State Albright met in Damascus with Syrian President Hafez al-Assad, who reiterated that Israel must withdraw from the Golan Heights to its 1967 borders before negotiations can resume.

Sept. 5: Following the signing in the Egyptian resort of Sharm el-Sheikh of the latest Israeli-Palestinian agreement, Madeleine Albright became the first U.S. secretary of state in 16 years to fly to Beirut, where she held talks with Lebanese leaders.

• Less than 18 hours after the signing of the latest peace agreement, car bombs exploded minutes apart in Tiberias and Haifa in northern Israeli, killing the three suspected bombers, all Israeli Arabs, and injuring several passersby.

• Greece announced to its fellow European Union member states that it no longer objected to Turkey’s membership.

Sept. 6: Israel’s Supreme Court unanimously banned the use of “moderate physical pressure”—called torture by human rights organizations and legal in Israel for the past 12 years—in the questioning of Palestinian and Arab-American prisoners and detainees. The court’s decision could be overturned by the Knesset.

• A day after hundreds of Chechen guerrillas seized control of six villages and a town in neighboring Dagestan, after having been pushed back into Chechnya from a previous incursion, Russian tanks, artillery and aircraft attacked western Dagestan in the fiercest fighting since the Chechen revolt for independence three years earlier.

• While traveling in a motorcade in Port Said, Egyptian President Mubarak was attacked and slightly injured by an assailant, who was shot and killed by Mubarak’s bodyguards.

• In the first such visit since the 1990-91 Gulf war, Jordan’s King Abdullah II made an official visit to Kuwait.

Sept. 7: Israeli jets fired missiles deep into Lebanon, some 30 miles northeast of Baalbek and four miles from the Syrian-Lebanese border.

Sept. 8: Following cabinet approval of Israeli withdrawal from an additional 7 percent of the West Bank, the Knesset approved the latest peace agreement with the Palestinians and authorities began releasing some 200 Palestinian prisoners.

• Two people were killed and four wounded in a mortar attack on a Serbian village in U.S.-controlled eastern Kosovo.

Sept. 9: U.S. and British warplanes bombed Iraqi targets in the northern and southern “no-fly” zones, wounding 11 people.

Sept. 10: Israel transferred civilian control of 7 percent of occupied West Bank Palestinian land three days ahead of schedule.

• Ethnic Albanians clashed for a second day with French U.N. peacekeeping troops in Kosovska Mitrovica, where tensions between Serb and ethnic Albanian residents remained high.

• U.S. warplanes bombed an Iraqi air-defense warning site in the northern “no-fly” zone.

Sept. 11: The Kosovo Liberation Army dispersed a gathering crowd of ethnic Albanians, averting a third day of clashes in Kosovska Mitrovica.

• Despite heavy artillery and air strikes, Russian forces failed to eject Chechen rebels from two villages in southern Dagestan.

• In Karachi, Pakistani police arrested hundreds of opposition supporters to prevent an anti-government rally.

Sept. 12: After more than a month of fighting, Russian troops captured the villages of Karamakhi and Chabanmakhi in southern Dagestan.

• Calling the Taliban’s Ministry of Vice and Virtue “the most misogynist department in the whole world,” the U.N. special investigator into violence against women, Radhika Coomaraswamy, criticized Afghanistan’s ruling militia for widespread, systematic and officially sanctioned abuse of women.

Sept. 13: Six years to the day after the signing of the Oslo accords, scheduled to have been completed May 4, Israeli and Palestinian negotiators formally opened the final round of negotiations, with a target of reaching an agreement within one year.

• NATO’s outgoing supreme commander, U.S. Gen. Wesley Clark, said Serbian paramilitary forces appeared to be infiltrating Kosovo.

• U.S. warplanes bombed two Iraqi air defense sites near the northern city of Mosul.

• Killing at least seven people and injuring more than 200, an aftershock registering 5.8 on the Richter scale shook the region of Turkey still struggling to recover from August’s 7.4 earthquake.

Sept. 14: Israeli Prime Minister Barak visited Ma’ale Adumim, the West Bank’s largest illegal Jewish settlement, saying he considered it “part of Jerusalem” which would forever remain part of Israel.

• Threatening to reconsider Russia’s peacekeeping role, Col. Gen. Leonid Ivashov accused NATO and the U.N. of trying to separate Kosovo from Yugoslavia. In Kosovo, gunmen fired on a convoy of Serbs returning to their homes in the U.S.-controlled sector, and two Montenegrin women were found dead in the western city of Pec.

• On a visit intended to “open a new chapter” in relations between the two countries, which had cooled following Amman’s 1994 peace treaty with Israel, Jordan’s King Abdullah II made his country’s first state visit to Lebanon in 34 years.

Sept. 15: As previously agreed, the Palestinian Authority provided Israel with the names of the 30,000 PA police officers.

Sept. 16: Bringing to 150 the number of former South Lebanon Army members sentenced over the past five weeks, Lebanon’s military court sentenced 17 former members of the Israeli-sponsored militia to prison terms ranging from two months to 18 months for having collaborated with Israel.

• NATO commander Gen. Wesley Clark released a study showing that NATO’s 78-day bombing campaign destroyed or damaged about a third of the Yugoslav army’s weapons and vehicles in Kosovo.

• Algerian voters overwhelmingly approved President Abdelaziz Bouteflika’s proposal for “civil reconciliation,” including full or partial amnesty for surrendering Islamic militants who have not committed “blood crimes” or rape in the country’s seven-year civil war.

• On the condition that he not repeat his offenses within three years, Turkey freed author and social critic Ismail Besikci, sentenced in 1993 to 85 years’ imprisonment for his writings criticizing Ankara’s Kurdish policy.

Sept. 17: Israeli Prime Minister Barak and Palestinian President Arafat held a secret late-night meeting, reportedly at Barak’s home, to discuss the latest round of peace negotiations.

• Following objections and a threatened boycott by Arab countries and Arab- and Muslim Americans, the Walt Disney Company said an Israeli-funded millennium exhibit at Epcot Center in Orlando would not depict Jerusalem as the political capital of Israel.

• Iraq’s air force commander said that U.S. and British air attacks since last December had killed 187 civilians and wounded 494 more.

Sept. 18: Newly appointed chief negotiator Yasser Abed Rabbo said the Palestinian Authority would insist that final status issues be resolved in the current round of negotiations with Israel, scheduled to be concluded within a year.

• Russian warplanes bombed rebel positions in Chechnya near the Dagestan border.

• As a midnight deadline for final disarmament passed, the Kosovo Liberation Army rejected a NATO plan to transform part of the KLA into a small civil defense force.

Sept. 19: The senior U.N. official in Baghdad, Hans von Sponek, called for the immediate and unconditional lifting of sanctions to allow for increased imports of food, medicine and other supplies. Von Sponek’s predecessor, Denis Halliday, resigned in protest of the sanctions’ devastating effect on Iraqi civilians.

Sept. 20: As the KLA agreed to disband and be replaced by a civilian force, a series of anti-Milosevic rallies began in some 20 Serbian towns and cities.

• As Secretary of State Albright met at the U.N. with a delegation of Iraqi opposition leaders, Baghdad rejected several U.N. proposals for establishing a new weapons inspection program.

• Latif Safari, publisher of the reformist Iranian newspaper Neshat, was convicted of insulting Islamic values by printing an article opposing capital punishment.

Sept. 21: Saying it implied the U.N. had a role in Middle East peace talks, Israel described as “unacceptable” Secretary-General Kofi Annan’s appointment of Terje Roed-Larsen as special coordinator for the Middle East peace process and personal representative to the PLO and PA.

• Visiting the restored German capital of Berlin, Israeli Prime Minister Barak called on German businesses to expedite compensation to Jews made slaves by the Nazis.

• After coming under anti-aircraft fire, U.S. and British warplanes attacked targets in southern Iraq, wounding a Swedish journalist when a missile landed within 50 yards of his car.

Sept. 22: Israeli Prime Minister Barak praised King Abdullah II as “courageous” for his government’s crackdown on Hamas as Jordanian police arrested Hamas political leaders Khaled Meshal and Ibrahim Ghosheh as they were returning to Amman from Iran, and denied re-entry into Jordan to Mousa Abu Marzook, deported from the U.S. in 1997.

• Israeli warplanes killed a Lebanese soldier in one of four airstrikes on southern Lebanon in six hours.

• Serbian members resigned from the multi-ethnic Kosovo Protection Corps, saying it “most probably [will] become… an Albanian army.”

• Dismissing rumors of an army coup, Pakistan Information Minister Mushahid Hussain said there was “complete harmony” between the government’s civilian and military wings.

Sept. 23: Following a White House meeting, Palestinian President Arafat called for the “personal intervention” of U.S. President Clinton in the latest round of Israeli-Palestinian negotiations.

• As the Yugoslav army conducted a tactical exercise near Kosovo, Third Army commander Col. Gen. Nebojsa Pavkovic said Belgrade would not recognize the newly established Kosovo Protection Corps comprising former KLA troops.

• As Beirut condemned Israeli air raids which killed a Lebanese soldier and wounded six others, Hezbollah-backed guerrillas fired rockets and mortars at outposts in Israeli-occupied southern Lebanon.

• Heeding a call from PKK leader Abdullah Ocalan, sentenced to death for his guerrilla activities, Kurdish rebels said they would send a delegation to talk peace with Turkey.

• Yemen held its first direct presidential election, in which President Ali Abdullah Saleh was re-elected over Najeeb Qahtan al-Shaabi. The vote was boycotted by the opposition Socialist Party, which was not allowed to field a candidate.

Sept. 24: French Foreign Minister Hubert Vedrine called the U.S. “insensitive to the human catastrophe in Iraq.”

Sept. 25: An Iranian court banned the reformist newspaper Neshat and sentenced publisher Latif Safari to 2 years in prison.

• Postponing his sentence for six months for medical reasons, Turkey released leading human rights activist Akin Birdal, sentenced to two years in prison for calling for a negotiated end to Ankara’s anti-Kurdish campaign.

Sept. 26: By a reported 94 percent margin, Egyptian voters re-elected President Hosni Mubarak to a fourth six-year term.

Sept. 27: As Russian jets bombed the Chechnyan capital of Grozny for a fifth straight day, Defense Minister Igor Sergeyev said the bombing would continue until the Islamic separatist guerrillas were eliminated.

• In southern Lebanon, Israeli jets fired at least 15 missiles at villages in Iqlim al-Tuffah in retaliation for a Hezbollah roadside bomb which killed a top official of Israel’s proxy South Lebanon Army.

• Iraq said U.S. and British planes patroling the “no-fly” zones attacked a civilian target in the north and were fired on in the south.

• Voters in Tajikistan approved constitutional changes extending the president’s term and allowing the opposition to establish Islamic political parties.

Sept. 28: A grenade attack on a Serbian farmers market near the Kosovo capital of Pristina killed two people and wounded at least 39.

• Rejecting Kurdish peace overtures, Turkey’s armed forces vowed to continue the military campaign against separatist guerrillas.

• In Washington, Turkish Prime Minister Bulent Ecevit accepted President Clinton’s offer to send special envoy to Cyprus Alfred Moses to Turkey as early as the following week.

• Afghanistan’s ruling Taliban militia captured the northern river port town of Sher Khan Bandar on the border with Tajikistan.

Sept. 30: For a second night riot police clashed with thousands of anti-Milosevic demonstrators attempting to march on the Yugoslav president’s home in Belgrade.

• Mustafa Zubari, deputy chief of the Popular Front for the Liberation of Palestine, a rival to the PLO’s Fatah group headed by Palestinian President Arafat, returned to the West Bank after 32 years in exile.

• Russian ground troops entered Chechnya, advancing some six miles into the breakaway republic.

• Amid rumors of a change in command, Pakistani Prime Minister Nawaz Sharif extended for another two years the term of Gen. Pervez Musharraf as chairman of the Joint Chiefs of Staff Committee.