Syria's longtime Foreign Minister Walid Al-Moallem, a top diplomat and staunch defender of Syrian President Bashar Assad's violent crackdown on peaceful protesters that soon deteriorated into civil war, died on Monday. He was 79. He had suffered from poor health and heart problems during the last years of his life, although there were no immediate details on the cause of his death. Al-Moallem was a close confidant of Assad known for his loyalty and hardline position against the opposition. A soft-spoken, jovial man with a dry sense of humor, Al-Moallem was also known for his ability to defuse tensions with a joke. During the current crisis, he often held news conferences in Damascus detailing the Syrian government's position. Unwavering in the face of international criticism, he repeatedly vowed that the opposition, which he said was part of a Western conspiracy against Syria for its anti-Israel stances, would be crushed. Born to a Sunni Muslim family in Damascus in 1941, Al-Moallem attended public schools in Syria and later traveled to Egypt, where he studied at Cairo University, graduating in 1963 with a bachelor's degree in economics. He returned to Syria and began work at the foreign ministry in 1964, rising to the top post in 2005. His first mission outside the country as a diplomat in the 1960s was to open the Syrian embassy in the African nation of Tanzania. In 1966 he moved to work in the Syrian Embassy in the Saudi city of Jiddah and a year later he moved to the Syrian Embassy in Madrid. In 1972, he headed the Syrian mission to London and in 1975 moved to Romania, where he spent five years as ambassador. He then returned to Damascus, where he headed the ministry's documentation office until 1984 when he was named as the head of the foreign minister's office. He was appointed as Syria's ambassador to Washington in 1990, spending nine years in the United States. During that time, Syria held several rounds of peace talks with Israel. In 2005, he was appointed foreign minister at a time when Damascus was isolated by Arab and Western nations following the assassination of former Lebanese Prime Minister Rafik Hariri. Many Lebanese, Arabs, and Western governments blamed Syria for the massive blast that killed Hariri — accusations that Damascus repeatedly denied. Syria was forced to end nearly three decades of domination and military presence in its smaller neighbor and pulled out its troops in April that year. In 2006, Al-Moallem became the most senior politician to visit Lebanon after Syrian troops withdrew. He attended an Arab foreign ministers meeting during the 34-day war between Israel and Lebanon's militant Hezbollah group, a strong ally of Syria. "I wish I were a fighter with the resistance," Al-Moallem said in Beirut at the time, triggering criticism from anti-Syrian Lebanese activists who poked fun at him as being overweight and unfit to fight. After the uprising against Assad began in March 2011, Al-Moallem was tasked with holding news conferences in Damascus to defend the government's position. He traveled regularly to Moscow and Iran, key backers of the Syrian government, to meet with officials there. — Agencies
