Email
Password
(Forgot Password?)
Authorities have increased the number of outposts to one every 400 yards in some zones along the 354-mile border, a Syrian officer said Saturday, stating each outpost was staffed with a half-dozen soldiers.
"There is no infiltration (into Iraq) here," the officer said, speaking on condition of anonymity with Syrian military regulations. However, several Iraqis have been caught smuggling ammunition and tobacco into Syria, he said.
Jump to full article »
Gunmen fired on a Lebanese army post near the border with Syria, the first such incident since troops deployed last month to control the frontier, the official National News Agency reported on Friday.
It said the shooting took place overnight in the Wadi Khaled area . . .
The Lebanese army has beefed up its presence on the Syrian border to prevent arms from reaching Hizbollah as demanded by a U.N. Security Council resolution . . . Smugglers use the Wadi Khaled area to transport items such as cement, diesel and tobacco across the border.
Syrians are among the world's heaviest smokers, according to a research study published Friday which said more than half of men and nearly a quarter of women puff cigarettes.
"The percentage of cigarette smokers in Syria is as high as 60 percent in men and 24 percent in women," said the results of the Aleppo-based Syrian Centre Smoking Research study published Friday in the Al-Thawra daily.
In addition, "twenty percent of men and six percent of women smoke water pipes," the study added.
Health officials are renewing their efforts to encourage villagers in southern Syria to stop smoking following the initial success of a pilot project in the area. Almost a third of those who had initially given up smoking had started again.
Although largely successful, the programme to combat smoking, run by the Health Ministry and the World Health Organization (WHO), needs to be monitored closely, health officials say.
According to the officials, around 90 percent of the 4,200 inhabitants of Akraba village, in the Dar'a governorate, 100 km south of the capital Damascus, had stopped smoking. This followed campaigns run since 1996, to raise villagers' awareness of the dangers of smoking through the Healthy Villages Programme (HVP).
A symposium to fight smoking on Thursday discussed smoking negative aspects on individuals particularly on children and adults and on society as a whole pointing out that Syria has taken several procedures to confront this problem.
Syria and Lebanon are to build a joint Tobacco factory in the Bekaa valley to make a financial profit for both countries, Syrian and Lebanese official Saturday announced.
Secretary General of the Syrian -Lebanese Supreme Council Nasri Khouri said a decision was taken on the project two years before by the council where the Lebanese side made a feasibility study fully adopted by Syrians.
Director General of the Tobacco Institution Faysal Sommaq voiced optimism noting that the economic feasibility of the project is very good and saying he is convinced it would make a joint profit and would positively be reflected on the two countries finance and economy.
Results
Data indicate that unlike initiation of cigarette smoking, which shows a clear age-related pattern, the nineties was the starting point for most of waterpipe smoking implicating this time period for the beginning of the waterpipe epidemic in Syria.
Conclusion
The introduction of new flavored and aromatic waterpipe tobacco (Maassel), and the proliferation of satellite and electronic media during the nineties may have helped spread the new hype all over the Arab World.
Conclusions. Cigarette smoking is mainly a problem of male students, whose narghile smoking is likely to be dramatically increasing as well, sometimes practiced as a substitute for cigarettes. The findings that most smokers in this sample are interested in quitting smoking and have tried unsuccessfully to do so indicate that cessation support for youths in this country is urgently needed.
Smoking tobacco using a water pipe - also called a hookah -- generally is viewed in a more positive light than smoking cigarettes, particularly for women, according to one of the first studies to look at the effect of social attitudes and gender on water pipe and cigarette smoking.
The study, published in the April issue of Preventive Medicine, involved two surveys that were given last year to 587 male and female students at Aleppo University in Syria and 268 customers at Aleppo cafes and restaurants that permit customers to smoke using hookahs filled with fruit-flavored tobacco. The surveys found that hookah users, especially women, were particularly enthusiastic about what they viewed as the hookah's positive aspects, including its traditional, familiar, social and attractive look.
The surveys were conducted by the Syrian Center for Tobacco Studies, a National Institutes of Health-funded tobacco-control research center that involves collaboration among researchers from Virginia Commonwealth University, the Aleppo School of Medicine and the University of Memphis.
Damascus, Syria -- Everyone here seems to be smoking, or choking, or both.
If the Arabs ever get wise to the ways of the West, they'll bring suit against U.S. tobacco companies and turn the litigation into a trans-national cash cow. Because just about everyone here smokes. . . .
My first clue that I was in for an equally smoky time in Syria came at the border, when I walked into a large holding room for people waiting to be processed through Customs. A big sign read, "No Smoking" in English. Next to those words on the same sign were a couple of lines of Arabic writing, which at first I assumed delivered the same no-smoking message.
But then I noticed that several people inside the room were, in fact, puffing away. And I also noticed that there were ashtrays everywhere.
A Syrian man caught smoking a cigarette during the Muslim fasting month of Ramadan has been handed a suspended jail sentence of one month - a punishment criticized by a human rights group.
Tawfiq Breik Hneidi, 36, is the first Syrian arrested for smoking in public in 50 years during Ramadan when Muslims abstain from eating, drinking, smoking and having sex from dawn to dusk.
A University of Memphis doctor will head a team of researchers who have received $1.7 million federal grant to fight smoking addiction in Syria, the Associated Press reports.
A five-year National Institutes of Health grant will help launch the Syrian Center for Tobacco Studies, where researchers will devise smoking cessation programs and train Syrian researchers.
Dr. Kenneth Ward, the project's principal researcher, says he hopes possible war in Iraq won't disrupt plans to visit Syria this summer.
Other researchers include Dr. Wasim Maziak, a Syrian physician and epidemiologist and research fellow at Germany's University of Munster.
But thanks to a $1.7 million, five-year international grant, this week they took a crash course on tobacco use in Syria. It didn't include the Marlboro Man.
The money is earmarked to launch the Syrian Center for Tobacco Studies, an effort that will include crafting smoking cessation programs for the Middle Eastern nation and training Syrian researchers. Dr. Kenneth Ward of the University of Memphis Center for Community Health is the study's principal investigator. Other researchers include Maziak, a Syrian physician and epidemiologist, and Dr. Tom Eissenburg of Virginia Commonwealth University.
Battling tobacco in Syria means helping Syrians kick cigarettes as well as the smoking done in cafes, homes and restaurants using a form of tobacco known as narghile and the water pipe or hookah Americans might recognize from Lewis Carroll's Alice in Wonderland.
Police clashed Tuesday with villagers trying to protect a man accused of smuggling cigarettes along the Lebanon-Syria border, and at least nine people were injured by stones or ricocheting bullets, security officials said.
Police captured Adnan Yassin after chasing his car through a mountainous area with smuggled cigarettes. Soon after, residents of the Lebanese border village of Majdal Anjar went to the scene to intervene on Yassin's behalf and began throwing stones at police and customs officers
Syrian groups opposed to a U.S. attack on Iraq urged their countrymen on Tuesday to boycott American cigarettes, saying Arab people would not stand silent in the face of any U.S. military action.
''(We) call on the Arab Syrian masses to participate in the Arab boycott on American cigarettes,'' the groups said in a statement. ''The Arab masses...will not stand with their hands tied ahead of the new American aggression against Iraq or any other Arab country.''
The groups include the National Committee to Boycott U.S. Goods and Interests.
The call for a boycott of cigarettes -- one of the few U.S. products available in Syria -- mirrors similar movements in Lebanon, Egypt and other Arab countries to protest what Arabs see as U.S. support for Israel against the Palestinians.