In Damascus this week a 300-lb., illiterate ex-god named Suleiman Effendi Murshed, 38, eased himself for the first time into his seat in the Chamber of Deputies and prepared to think politically. Cannily aligning himself with the moderates, he set out to show the folks back in the bare, brutal hills behind Latakia in northern Syria that their god had done well to trade in his robes for a Deputy's toga. He and every other Deputy, new & old, had one program: independence from the French.
This pig-faced idol of 30,000 trusting Alaouites is...
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