Marines evacuate 21 Americans from Lebanon to Cyprus

[thedrifter]

Marines evacuate 21 Americans from Lebanon to Cyprus
By Zeina Karam
THE ASSOCIATED PRESS
07/17/2006

BEIRUT, LEBANON

Two Marine Corps helicopters evacuated 21 Americans from Lebanon to Cyprus on Sunday. But U.S. officials urged others to wait for a formal evacuation plan before they tried to leave.

The U.S. citizens evacuated Sunday included a family of four with a sick child and four students, said Maura Harty, assistant secretary of state for consular affairs.

She said the United States had received hundreds of phone calls from Americans in Lebanon and had urged them against trying to travel by land to Syria.

U.S. security teams landed at the U.S. Embassy earlier Sunday to plan the evacuation for any of the 25,000 Americans in Lebanon who wish to leave.

Israeli airstrikes targeting runways have closed Beirut's international airport. Israel has also imposed a naval blockade on the country and has made road travel dangerous by targeting the main highway between Lebanon and neighboring Syria.

Israel began striking Lebanon after Hezbollah guerrillas captured two Israeli soldiers in a cross-border raid Wednesday.

The U.S. Embassy sits on a fortified hilltop in Beirut. The site buzzed with activity Sunday. Witnesses said two helicopters had flown in from over the Mediterranean and landed on the embassy grounds. Two more helicopters flew from the sea to the embassy later in the afternoon, witnesses said.

Air Force Lt. Sharbe Clark, a spokeswoman for U.S. Central Command in Washington, said survey and assessment teams had arrived to help with evacuation plans.

The U.S. said Saturday that it was working on a plan to evacuate American citizens from Lebanon to Cyprus. American officials believe only some of the 25,000 Americans in Lebanon will want to leave.

"We obviously have plans and contingency plans should we need to bring people out," Secretary of State Condoleezza Rice said at the Group of Eight summit in Russia. "I get reports on this every couple of hours as to how this is going. Our ambassador, who is on the ground, will obviously do what we need to protect Americans."

U.S. officials made contingency plans to evacuate people unable to leave on their own. Family members and nonemergency American employees of the U.S. Embassy in Lebanon have been given permission to leave.

About 350 people - most of them Europeans - were evacuated Saturday night and early Sunday from Lebanon to Cyprus on Italian military flights.

France has about 17,000 of its citizens living in Lebanon and at least 4,000 currently visiting. The French government planned to begin ferrying to Cyprus on Sunday any who wished to leave. Air transport would take evacuees to Paris.

Britain dispatched two warships toward the Middle East on Sunday in preparation for the potential evacuation of Britons.

Ellie

[thedrifter]

N.C.-based Marines aid evacuation of Americans in Lebanon
7/17/2006 9:52 AM
By: Associated Press


CAMP LEJEUNE, N.C. -- Camp Lejeune Marines have helped evacuate United States citizens from Lebanon as tensions escalate between that country and Israel.

A military spokesman says helicopters from the 24th Marine Expeditionary Unit flew 21 people aboard two CH-53 Super Stallion helicopters to Cyprus on Sunday afternoon.

The 24th is based aboard amphibious landing ships, including the USS Iwo Jima, but about 100 troops worked from a British Royal Air Force base on Cyprus for the operation.

Colonel Ron Johnson is the unit commander, and he says the US ambassador requested the Marines' assistance. Johnson says his unit could be called on for more evacuations.

The unit of about 2200 Marines and sailors left the North Carolina coast the first week of June bound for the Mediterranean area.

The unit had returned in February 2005 from a seven-month deployment to Iraq, its third to that region since the terrorist attacks of September 2001.

Ellie

[thedrifter]

Ship to evacuate Americans from Lebanon

By HAMZA HENDAWI and GEORGE PSYLLIDES, Associated Press Writers
Mon Jul 17, 3:08 PM ET

A commercial ship escorted by a U.S. destroyer will start evacuating some Americans from war-torn Lebanon on Tuesday and more military helicopters will be used to fly others direct to Cyprus, a U.S. official said Monday.

The plans stepped up as Israel appeared to be allowing evacuation ships through its blockade of Lebanon.

At the Pentagon, spokesman Bryan Whitman said the commercial ship, the Orient Queen, which can carry up to 750 people, will take evacuees to Cyprus. A U.S. Navy destroyer, the USS Gonzalez, will escort it and the USS Iwo Jima may do so as well, he said.

There are some 25,000 Americans in Lebanon, and the U.S. Embassy has already advised those who wish to leave that they should prepare their bags — one each person, weighing no more than 30 pounds — and be ready for announcements on how to leave.

Thus far, three CH-53 Super Stallion helicopters — each with a passenger capacity of 36 — are available to fly evacuees from Beirut to a British air base on Cyprus, Whitman said, and more choppers will be made available on Tuesday.

On Sunday, two CH-53s from the 24th Marine Expeditionary Unit, which has been conducting an exercise with Jordanian forces, evacuated 21 Americans from the U.S. Embassy compound in Beirut, and Whitman said more flights were taking place Monday. He declined to provide more details about Monday's flights, citing security reasons.

More than 100 Marines were in Cyprus from the North Carolina-based unit, which is based aboard amphibious landing ships, including the Iwo Jima.

Some Americans have privately driven to Syria in recent days and from there flown to Jordan, although the U.S. government has advised Americans not to leave through Syria.

A U.S. Embassy statement released Monday instructed American citizens to be ready to leave, but did not say how it planned to evacuate them. Further instructions, it added, would be publicized both in local media and on the Embassy's web site.

The State and Defense departments were coordinating to ensure that the evacuation is "safe and carried out in an orderly fashion," the Embassy statement said.

Meanwhile, on the nearby Mediterranean island nation of Cyprus, the government there made preparations to help with the evacuation of the thousands expected to be brought out of Lebanon by the United States and European countries.

"At this stage we don't have an exact number of people. ... We'll surely have four or five ships this week alone," said Foreign Ministry official Omiros Mavromatis.

An Italian ship carrying nearly 400 evacuees was expected in the Cyprus port of Larnaca by Monday evening. The evacuees were headed to Beirut on a convoy of 17 buses.

Greece also was sending a navy frigate to a Lebanese port to pick up 100 people and has three additional warships on standby.

France, which has more than 20,000 citizens in Lebanon, chartered a Greek ferry to pick up as many as 1,200 French and other European citizens in Lebanon. Hundreds of French, mostly of Lebanese origin or partners in mixed marriages, were expected to begin boarding the ferry late Monday.

"Who knows when this will end," said Habib al-Saad, who was seeing his three sons off. "If any of our Arab leaders had a brain this would have been resolved a long time ago. But they don't," al-Saad said as his sons — Marwan, 20, Thomas, 17, and Pierre, 10 — looking bewildered and anxious — listened to their father in silence.

"I am not worried about them," al-Saad said. "They will look after themselves."

Overall in Lebanon, hundreds of thousands were on the move, leaving areas considered dangerous for the relative safety of the hills east of Beirut, the eastern Bekaa valley and northern Lebanon.

Wisam Musalam, a statistics student in Lyons, France, was standing in line outside the French Culture Center, waiting to register his name for evacuation. He is not a French national, but has a residence permit in France.

"Slowly, slowly we will become like the Palestinians," he said. "A nation of refugees."

Among other developments:

• About 850 Swedes among about 5,000 in Lebanon have been evacuated, largely to the city of Aleppo in northern Syria. Sweden also chartered three ships to bring Swedes from Beirut to Cyprus, but was awaiting security guarantees from the warring parties.

• A British aircraft carrier and another warship — both already in the Mediterranean — set off Sunday on a three-day trip to the Middle East in preparation for the possible evacuation of Britons. A British Foreign Office spokesman said the first wave of Britons — children, elderly and ill people — left Sunday aboard the helicopter that also transported European Union foreign policy chief Javier Solana.

• Denmark began evacuating some 2,300 people by bus to Damascus, Syria. So far, some 700 have returned home, the Danish government said.

• Russia's Foreign Ministry said there were more than 1,400 Russian citizens in Lebanon and more than 1,000 were ready to leave.

___

George Psyllides in Nicosia, Cyprus, and Robert Burns in Washington contributed to this report

Ellie

[thedrifter]

Evacuations from Beirut pick up speed

By LAUREN FRAYER and HAMZA HENDAWI, Associated Press Writers
2 hours, 52 minutes ago

U.S. Marines pushed baby carriages and lifted children into transport boats Friday as Americans desperate to flee the Israeli bombardment of Lebanon lined up near Beirut's port as a massive evacuation operation picked up speed.

Up to 5,000 U.S. citizens are slated to leave — the largest number in three days.

The boats ferried the Americans from a Lebanese military base north of Beirut to warships waiting offshore.

"It is very well organized, but as you can imagine with large crowds, it takes time," said George Tarzi, 55, a jeweler from New York who said he had been waiting for seven hours to get on a boat.

U.S. officials, still smarting from criticism over delays in starting the effort, have said about 8,000 of the 25,000 Americans in Lebanon — many dual citizens who live there permanently — had registered for evacuation. They suggested the operation could be wrapped up sooner than expected, perhaps as early as Saturday.

The USS Trenton, normally a troop transport, was anchored off Lebanon, ready to carry 1,775 Americans to the nearby Mediterranean island of Cyprus. A commercial vessel, the Saudi-owned Rahmah, was to take another 1,400 Americans to Turkey, and the USS Nashville, which carried 1,200 Americans to Cyprus Thursday night, was returning to Lebanon to pick up 1,000 more evacuees.

Helicopters shuttled mostly elderly people and those with health problems at a pace of about 400 per day directly to Cyprus from the U.S. Embassy. About 3,000 Americans had been evacuated as of Thursday, according to figures provided by U.S. officials in Beirut and Cyprus.

Cyprus is in the middle of its peak tourist season and the sudden influx has put a strain on its hotels, but officials said they were not yet having problems with food, medicine or accommodations.

"We need help in the sense that we need more planes. We are receiving more people than are leaving. The problem is how to coordinate the arrival of the ships with the departure of the planes," said Alexander Zenon, general manager of the Cypriot Foreign Ministry.

U.S. Marines landed Thursday in Beirut for their first mission here in more than two decades — since a 1983 bombing of their barracks that killed 241 Americans. The troops helped load evacuees onto the boats, carrying babies and luggage and working security. Brig. Gen. Carl B. Jensen said 200 Marines were involved in the operation.

"For the U.S. Marine Corps, Beirut will always be hallowed ground. No Marine can set foot on Lebanon without memories flooding," Jensen said.

The Americans joined some 25,000 foreigners who have fled Lebanon since Hezbollah guerrillas captured two Israeli soldiers in a cross-border raid on July 12, setting off the Israeli offensive. Hezbollah has responded by raining rockets onto Israel.

"We're really sad because we're leaving this way," said Maha Maher, 38, of Oklahoma City, Okla., who was visiting family in Beirut with her two sons. "All that we wish is peace for Lebanon, because it's a great country. The Lebanese people are paying the price, and we feel sorry for this."

About 200 Canadians, most of Lebanese descent, also assembled near the Beirut port waiting to be evacuated, many wearing hats or covering their heads with towels in the sweltering heat.

Many of them said they were warned that not everyone would be able to leave Friday. An estimated 50,000 Canadian citizens are in Lebanon.

Lama Ghandour, a 38-year-old mother of three from Ottawa, has not been back in Canada in 10 years and did not want to leave but was doing so for the sake of her children.

She traveled to Beirut from the southern city of Nabatiyeh in southern Lebanon, which together with the eastern Bekaa Valley and Beirut's southern suburbs have been hardest hit in Israel's 10-day offensive.

"I called the embassy the first day of the fighting and said we wanted to leave. They told us to stay put until we hear from them. I kept calling them every day and then we decided to come to Beirut," she said.

Many of those leaving expressed frustration at the pace of the evacuation.

"I never thought I'd live to see Canada treat people like this," said Zeinab Farhat, 46, of Fort McMurray, Alberta, who waited in line for nearly 10 hours Thursday without learning whether she would be able to depart.

"I keep thinking I'll wake up from this horrible dream," she said, crying.

Most foreigners are leaving by sea, as the overland route to Syria was deemed to be too dangerous and Israel knocked Beirut's airport out of service last week by bombing its runways.

American officials made clear that fears about Americans traveling on roads in Beirut, especially at night, and to Syria had led to some of the delays.

At a Cyprus camp for evacuees waiting to return to the United States, Rima Fawaz recalled her children's trauma at seeing warfare for the first time.

The family was vacationing with relatives in southern Lebanon when the fighting began. She and her husband fled north in a car with their two children and five nieces and nephews. They were about 100 yards from a bridge when it exploded, killing and wounding many people. In a panic, they tried to turn around and crashed their car.

"The kids started crying, they were sick. One almost passed out," said Fawaz, 35, of Tampa, Fla. "The kids saw the wounded and the dead, and that's when they went crazy. My little boy kept saying 'please tell me this is fireworks, I don't want to die.'"

Ellie