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108TH YEAR I ©2011 THE MIAMI HERALD

INDEXTHE AMERICAS ............4AU.S. NEWS ...................5AOPINION........................7ACOMICS & PUZZLES ...6B

12 U.S. CITIZENS KILLED IN BLAST IN AFGHANISTAN, 3A

U.S. EMBASSY ATTACK HIGHLIGHTS BALKAN ISLAMISTS, 6A

CHINA ASKED FOR HELP IN EURO RESCUE,BUSINESS FRONT

CARDS PULL OFF UNLIKELY WORLD SERIES WIN,SPORTS FRONT

After Iraq exit, U.S. planningbuildup in Persian Gulf

Western action in Syria will burn region,Assad says

Romance blossoms amid Gadhafi’s ashesFugitive recalls experience of four decades on the run

BY THOM SHANKER AND STEVEN LEE MYERSNew York Times Service

MacDILL AIR FORCE BASE, Fla. — The Obama administration plans to bolster the U.S. military presence in the Persian Gulf after it with-draws the remaining troops from Iraq this year, according to offi cials and diplomats. That repositioning could include new combat forces in Kuwait able to respond to a collapse of security in Iraq or a military con-frontation with Iran.

The plans, under discussion for months, gained new urgency after U.S. President Barack Obama’s an-nouncement this month that the last U.S. soldiers would be brought home from Iraq by the end of De-cember. Ending the eight-year war was a central pledge of his presi-dential campaign, but U.S. military offi cers and diplomats, as well as offi cials of several countries in the region, worry that the withdrawal could leave instability or worse in its wake.

After unsuccessfully pressing both the Obama administration and the Iraqi government to per-mit as many as 20,000 U.S. troops to remain in Iraq beyond 2011, the Pentagon is now drawing up an alternative.

In addition to negotiations over maintaining a ground combat pres-ence in Kuwait, the United States is considering sending more naval warships through international wa-ters in the region.

With an eye on the threat of a bel-ligerent Iran, the administration is also seeking to expand military ties with the six nations in the Gulf Co-operation Council — Saudi Arabia, Kuwait, Bahrain, Qatar, the United Arab Emirates and Oman. While the United States has close bilateral military relationships with each, the administration and the military are trying to foster a new “security ar-chitecture” for the Persian Gulf that would integrate air and naval patrols and missile defense.

The size of the standby U.S. combat force to be based in Ku-wait remains the subject of nego-tiations, with an answer expected in coming days.

BY BASSEM MROUEAssociated Press

BEIRUT — Syria’s President Bashar al Assad warned against Western intervention in his coun-try’s 7-month-old uprising, saying such action would trigger an “earth-quake” that “would burn the whole region.”

Assad’s comments, published in an interview with Britain’s Sun-day Telegraph, were made against a backdrop of growing calls from anti-regime protesters for a no-fl y zone over Syria and increasingly frequent clashes between government troops and army defectors, which left at least 30 troops dead late Saturday.

“Syria is the hub now in this re-gion. It is the fault line, and if you play with the ground you will cause an earthquake,” Assad said. “Do you want to see another Afghanistan, or tens of Afghanistans?”

Assad’s remarks appeared to re-fl ect his regime’s increasing con-cern about foreign intervention in the country’s crisis after the recent death of Libyan dictator Moam-mar Gadhafi , who was toppled by a popular uprising backed by NATO airstrikes.

Syrian opposition leaders have

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BY ELLEN KNICKMEYERForeign Policy

JANZOUR, Libya — When it comes to love, Moammar Gadhafi ’s Libya was unlucky for unmarried 33-year-old truck driver Ahmed Nori Faqiar. His looks would have benefi ted if his parents could ever have sprung for a dentist. Lack of means forced him to live unhappily at his childhood home well into adulthood. Marriage, a home of his own, kids — all are dreams that the wiry Libyan had long ago steeled himself to stop hoping for.

“Before, I was not even daring to look at girls as wife material, be-cause I knew I could not afford” to get married, say Faqiar now.

These days, though, Faqiar wears the mismatched camoufl age of Lib-ya’s rebels and a dashing bandana on his head, pirate-style. He carries a gun. He is a veteran of battles for Libyans’ freedom from Gadhafi ’s regime — and it’s the women who are talking to him.

“Girls around the area come up to you and say, ‘Thank you! You made us proud, you made us hap-py,’ ” Faqiar told me one night re-cently. He spoke on the sidelines of a camel and couscous feast that the people in this Tripoli suburb threw

for several thousand young rebels, after slaughtering 10 camels.

From a specially raised dais, speakers praised the young rebel fi ghters late into the evening. Hun-dreds of excited young women and girls in head scarves mingled near rifl e-toting young men, a novelty in this conservative country that was

overwhelming to members of both genders in the crowd that night. “It’s like a wedding!” Faqiar exclaimed, shaking his head in surprise.

Relations between Libyan men and women — deeply distorted by the eccentric Libyan leader’s refusal

TURN TO LIBYA, 2A•

BY RAPHAEL MINDER AND JAMES BARRONNew York Times Service

CASAS NOVAS, Portugal — George Wright, the fugitive mur-derer who was captured in Por-tugal last month, 39 years after hijacking a jetliner and demand-ing a $1 million ransom, said he fi gured U.S. authorities had given up the chase long ago. But, he said, he never stopped worrying that they would come knocking.

“Knowing the Americans, I always feared that they had their antennas up,” he said in a two-hour interview in this village out-side Lisbon, Portugal, where he was arrested last month.

Sitting at his kitchen table, he wore sweat pants, plastic sandals and the ankle bracelet ordered by a Portuguese judge who moved him from a Lisbon jail to house arrest while he fi ghts extradition to the United States.

Wright, 68, was convicted in a 1962 murder in New Jersey — an armed robbery that netted him $70 but left Walter Patterson, a gas station owner and decorated

World War II veteran with two daughters, dead. He escaped from a state prison in 1970, and in 1972, dressed as a priest, he, with four others, hijacked a Miami-bound jetliner and demanded it be fl own to Algeria. He pulled a gun from a hollowed-out Bible he had car-ried aboard and held it to a fl ight attendant’s head.

The interview provided an account of his odyssey since the hijacking. Wright — who is fi ght-ing extradition under his assumed Portuguese identity of Jose Luis Jorge dos Santos — talked about how he had married a Portuguese woman he met at a nightclub more than 30 years ago and done odd jobs, working as a teacher in Western Africa and more re-cently decorating houses, as well as selling chicken and handicraft in Portugal. Wright said he lifted weights and rode an exercise bi-cycle before breakfast most days, and read the Bible — “I got rebap-tized in 2002,” he said.

But he remained defi ant toward

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JOAO PINA/NEW YORK TIMES SERVICE

Libyan women celebrate the fall of Moammar Gadhafi at Martyr’s Square in Tripoli, Libya.

TYLER HICKS/NEW YORK TIMES SERVICE

Syria’s President Bashar Assad said, ‘any problem in Syria will burn the whole region. If the plan is to divide Syria, that is to divide the whole region.’

BY WILLIAM BOOTH AND NICK MIROFFWashington Post Service

SANTIAGO DE LOS CA-BALLEROS, Mexico — He was the barefoot son of a peasant who became one of the richest moguls in the world, a billion-aire entrepreneur with a third-grade education. He controls a vast drug distribution empire that spans six continents, but he still carries his own AK-47. He is generous and feared, a mass murderer and a folk hero. He is a ghost who has become a legend.

In the fi fth year of a terrible war in Mexico that has exhaust-ed the military, consumed the presidency of Felipe Calderon and left more than 43,000 dead in drug violence, Joaquin “El Chapo” Guzman, the founder of the Sinaloa cartel, reignssupreme.

His pursuers compare him to Al Capone, Butch Cassidy or Osama bin Laden. But none of these gets it quite right. Guz-man is the single largest suppli-er of illegal drugs to the United States, and though he is in hid-ing, he is not on the run.

Ten years after he escaped from prison in a laundry basket on the eve of his extradition to the United States, Chapo is more powerful than ever: His networks are deeper, his territory is expanding, and his supplies of cocaine, marijuana, heroin and methamphet-amine are essentially undiminished, ac-cording to U.S. and Mexican agents and offi cials, who were grinding their teeth at the news that Guzman’s 22-year-old beauty queen wife was able to travel in August to a Los Angeles County hospital, where she gave birth to healthy twins.

Calderon, reportedly des-perate to nail his nemesis and prove himself a winning com-mander in chief in an increas-ingly unpopular war that might cost his party the presidency, has raised the stakes to demand that Chapo be taken down be-fore he leaves offi ce next year.

As a sign of the intensifi ed effort, Mexico now operates at least three full-time capture-kill units solely dedicated to ending

the reign of Guzman, said offi -cials with direct knowledge of the groups. These special oper-ations teams — one each in the Mexican army, navy and federal police — have been vetted to work alongside agents with the U.S. Drug Enforcement Admin-istration, who have supplied de-tailed intelligence about Guz-man’s possible locations.

Calderon and his top law enforcement offi cials say they have come close to getting Guz-man — within an hour or two — several times in the past two years.

Despite such assertions, Cal-deron has been dogged by per-ceptions among many Mexicans that his administration, especially his military, has gone easy on Guzman’s car-tel, or even that it’s helping him, while it goes af-ter his biggest rival, Los

Zetas, a rising criminal power in the country.

“He’s protected by the gov-ernment,” said Javier Valdez, a top editor of the Sinaloa-based journal Rio Doce, adding that he doesn’t think any urgent ef-fort is underway to fi nd Chapo.

Guzman, one of the most wanted criminals in North America, has proven impossible to catch — even as U.S. drones penetrate Mexican airspace, and Mexican security forces, supplied with sophisticated U.S. eavesdropping equipment, scan the ether for the sound of his encrypted voice. His pursu-ers suspect he is most likely in a

mountain stronghold here in the Sierra Madre range

of northwest Mexico, a hardscrabble back-water of Mexican hillbillies that gives new meaning to the words “poor” and “remote.”

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‘Lord of the mountains’10 years on, Mexican drug lord still dodges capture

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