Popular Front for the Liberation of Palestine–General Command
Popular Front for the Liberation of Palestine–General Command | |
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Founder | Ahmed Jibril |
Headquarters | Damascus, Syria |
The Popular Front for the Liberation of Palestine–General Command (PFLP-GC) is a Palestinian nationalist militant organisation based in Syria that was founded in 1968 by former Syrian Arab Army captain Ahmed Jibril after splitting from the Popular Front for the Liberation of Palestine (PFLP) and claiming it wanted to focus more on fighting and less on politics.
Closely tied to both Syria and Iran, the PFLP-GC was strongly opposed to Yasser Arafat's PLO.
In the 1970s and 1980s, the PFLP-GC was involved in the Palestinian insurgency in South Lebanon and launched a number of attacks against Israeli soldiers and civilians, including the Avivim school bus massacre (1970), the bombing of Swissair Flight 330 (1970), the Kiryat Shmona massacre (1974) and the Night of the Gliders (1987).
On 24 December 1988, the Los Angeles Times reported:
- US intelligence and terrorism analysts, sifting through a jumble of circumstantial evidence on the possible cause of this week's Pan Am crash, are increasingly focusing their suspicion on two extremist Palestinian groups that oppose Palestine Liberation Organisation chief Yasser Arafat's decision to recognise Israel: the Popular Front for the Liberation of Palestine–General Command and Abu Nidal's Revolutionary Council of Fatah.[1]
Since the late 1980s, the PFLP-GC has been less active, but during the Syrian insurgency from 2011 supported President Bashar al-Assad's government.[2][3][4]
References
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