Syria Reported Moving to Oust Lebanon’s Aoun

Tank-led Syrian troops closed in on major routes leading to rebel Maj. Gen. Michel Aoun’s enclave Thursday, and police said an attack appeared imminent to evict Aoun from Lebanon’s Christian heartland.

Hours earlier, President Elias Hrawi, Lebanon’s internationally recognized chief of state, had asked Damascus for help to crush Aoun’s resistance to his government. Aoun commands about 15,000 mainly Christian troops from the presidential palace in East Beirut. He refuses to recognize Hrawi and rejects an Arab-sponsored peace pact for Lebanon.

Police said a dozen columns of Syrian T-62 tanks and thousands of soldiers moved up to combat positions to support Hrawi’s army along a five-mile front from southern Beirut to the central mountains east of the capital.

France was making an 11th-hour mediation bid to persuade Aoun to abandon the palace and leave for Paris, a Hrawi government source said. The source said that French Ambassador Rene Ala was in radio contact with Aoun, urging him to “spare Lebanon another blood bath.”

“If and when Ambassador Ala tells us his effort failed, our forces, backed by the Syrian army, will attack,” he said. He mentioned no deadline.

Aoun’s radio station instructed inhabitants of his enclave, home for 150,000 Christians, to ring church bells all night to “protest what looks like an imminent military thrust.”

The Syrians maintain 40,000 troops in Lebanon under a 1976 Arab League mandate to end the long civil war between Muslims and Christians.

For the last three weeks, 20,000 Hrawi troops and Syrian soldiers have ringed Aoun’s 80-square-mile bastion in a bid to starve the maverick general into submission.

Aoun has vowed to fight unto death if attacked.