The poll was controversial because al-Hinnawi, who came from the ancient city of Aleppo in the north, had banned the semi-nomadic Bedu tribesmen of eastern Syria from voting on the grounds that they were vulnerable to foreign manipulation from beyond the country’s porous desert borders. This tension between the settled peoples of the urbanised, fertile west and the wild nomads of the eastern desert was one of several that now made Syrian politics so volatile. The tribesmen were deeply angry that they had been disenfranchised – Stirling was well aware of it, because he had gone deep into the
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