A silly unsourced section I ve removed the following paragraph In 1999 Assad had his right hand man Mustafa Tlass make an on the record statement labelling Arafat the son of a whore in addition to comparing him to a strip tease dancer and a black cat calling him a coward and finally pointing out that the Palestinian leader was getting uglier An effective strategy was undermining Arafat through support for radical groups both outside and inside the PLO This way Syria secured some influence over PLO politics and was also able to literally blow up any attempts at negotiation with the US and Israel through pushing for terrorist attacks The PLO s As Sa iqa faction was and is completely controlled by Syria and under Hafez groups such as the PFLP GC were also turned into clients In later years Syria focused on supporting non PLO Islamist groups such as Hamas and Islamic Jihad One no sources are provided and two it seems that the insults traded where very unlikely span style font size smaller class autosigned Preceding unsigned comment added by