Ghazi Canaan

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Ghazi Kanaan ( Arabic غازي كنعان Ghāzī Kanaʿān ; * 1942 ; † October 12, 2005 in Damascus ) was a Syrian politician and general .

Life

Ghazi Kanaan was born in a small mountain village and entered the military . After training at the Military Academy in Homs , he rose quickly and became the city's security chief. During the Lebanese Civil War , Canaan was appointed Syrian intelligence chief in Lebanon and played an influential role in the country's politics as the representative of Assad.

From October 2004 until his death he was Minister of the Interior of his country. From 1982 to 2002 he was head of the parts of the Syrian secret service operating in Lebanon , which he also commanded as a minister until the Syrian withdrawal from Lebanon in April 2005.

Rumor has it that he was involved in the attack on the vehicle convoy of former Lebanese Prime Minister Rafiq al-Hariri on February 14, 2005 in Beirut , which Kanaan denied several times. This attack and the subsequent protests in the population led to a withdrawal of Syrian troops from Lebanon, demanded by the USA . The foreign accounts of Ghazi Kanaan, among other things, have been frozen since the attack. The German UN investigator Detlev Mehlis , who heard Kanaan as a witness, among other things, investigated the attack . The results of Mehlis' investigation were handed over to UN Secretary General Kofi Annan at the end of October 2005 .

Canaan was shot in the mouth in his Damascus office on October 12, 2005. After a day-long investigation, chief investigator Muhammad al-Luaji put the case on file. Regarding the cause of death, he said: "Both the examination of body and fingerprints, as well as the statements of employees - including his chief adviser General Walid Abaza - indicate that it was suicide ."

Canaan was married and had four sons and two daughters. Two of his sons studied at George Washington University in Washington, DC. His son Yarob is married to the daughter of Jamil al-Assad , a brother of the late Syrian President Hafiz al-Assad .

Individual evidence

  1. Sami Moubayed: Steel an Silk Men and Women Who Shaped Syria 1900-2000 , Seattle, 2006, pp. 62/63.
  2. a b c BBC : Obituary: Ghazi Kanaan. October 12, 2005, accessed June 21, 2010.
  3. a b The Guardian : Obituary: Major-General Ghazi Kanaan. October 18, 2005, accessed June 21, 2010.
  4. Shmuel Bar: Bashar's Syria: The Regime and its Strategic Worldview. In: Comparative Strategy, 25, 2006, Special Issue, p. 381.