Abu Nidal Organisation

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Group.png Abu Nidal Organisation  Rdf-entity.pngRdf-icon.png
Rome airport 1985.jpg
Aftermath in a fast food restaurant in the Leonardo da Vinci International Airport in Rome after a 1985 Abu Nidal attack
Formation1974
FounderAbu Nidal.gif Abu Nidal
Extinction1997
Palestinian terrorist group infiltrated and steered by Mossad.

The Abu Nidal Organisation (ANO) was a "terrorist" organisation that for two decades carried out worldwide hijackings, assassinations, kidnappings. It was responsible for 90 such attacks between 1974 and 1992. Known as one of the most uncompromisingly militant and brutal Palestinian groups, and with and official name meant to be confused with the PLO, it was also a convenient tool for Mossad, which had infiltrated its highest echelons of leadership and was able to select targets. Broadly speaking, such targets included moderate PLO leaders interested in dialogue with Israel; attacks meant to compromise PLO's position in Europe and Africa; and sabotaging the Palestinian resistance after the 1982 Israeli invasion of Lebanon. The last part included recruiting several hundred Palestinians to a militia, for then to mass execute 600 of them.

Background

The Abu Nidal Organisation (ANO) is the most common name for the 'Palestinian nationalist militant group with the formal name Fatah – The Revolutionary Council (named deliberately to be confusing with the bigger Fatah, i.e PLO). It was created by a split from Yasser Arafat's Fatah faction of the PLO in 1974.[1] The split happened after Arafat started making peace overtures to Israel[2], indicating the PLO was willing to accept a 2-state solution. Any such agreement would necessarily mean the abandonment of territory, a solution unacceptable to the Israeli deep state, which had started the 1967 war in order to conquer new lands.

ANO moved its headquarters several times as it changed patrons, from Iraq to Syria, ending up in Lebanon and Libya. Notacibly missing was any presence in the occupied territories of the West Bank and Gaza.

Infiltrated by Israel

According to Abu Nidal's biographer Patrick Seale, the ANO was an Israeli creation. Shortly after the the Israeli death squads Kidon (led by Mike Harari) stopped its assassinations of Palestinian leaders, roughly speaking after the exposure of its July 1973 Lillehammer assassination, the ANO took over the operation. According to Seale, it is almost certain leading people in the ANO "secretariat" (command and control) worked for the Israeli intelligence service Mossad. Seale spoke to many Arab intelligence officers, both Palestinian and in countries loyal to Israel, and to Western intelligence operatives. They believed Ghassan al-Ali, the second in command at the ANO, was Mossad, and that most likely Nidal himself had been "turned" by Mossad.[3]

Operations

Attacks include (selection):

Assassinations of moderate PLO leaders

Issam Sartawi (centre) was killed in 1983
  • October 1974: Abu Nidal tries to assassinate Mahmud Abbas, a close colleague of Yasser Arafat.
  • January 3, 1977: Abu NIdal kills Mahmud Salih, a PLO representative in Paris, France.
  • January 4, 1978: Assassination of Said Hammami, PLO representative in London, United Kingdom.
  • June 15, 1978: Assassination of Ali Yassin, PLO representative in Kuwait.
  • August 3, 1978: Yusif al-Din Qalaq, PLO representative in Paris, and like Hammami a prominent "dove", is killed by an Abu Nidal gunman.
  • August 5, 1978: PLO offices in Islamabad were raided by ANO militants, leaving four dead and an unknown number of wounded.[4][5]
  • April 22, 1980: PLO's Abu Iyad escapes an assassination attempt in Belgrade by Abu Nidal agents.
  • June 1, 1981: Killing of Naim Khader, the PLO representative in Belgium and another well-known dove.
  • August 1, 1981: Fatah chief Abu Daoud was shot multiple times in the Victoria Intercontinental Hotel in Warsaw, Poland, but survived. He later claimed the attempted assassination was carried out by a Palestinian double agent recruited by the Mossad. According to Polish sources, the suspected perpetrator was a person known as Daher Hussein. Samir Hassan Najmadeen, who was Abu Nidal's "accountant", was suspected of taking part in the operation.[6][7][8]
  • October 6, 1981: PLO officer Majed Abu Sharar was assassinated by a bomb hidden in his hotel room in Rome, Italy. ANO claimed he was "compromising the principles of the revolution".[9][10]
  • 1982: Assassination of PLO official in Madrid, Spain.
  • April 10, 1983: Noted PLO dove and Arafat aide Issam Sartawi was killed at the Socialist International conference in Albufeira, Portugal.[11][12] Sartawi had repeatedly called Abu Nidal an Israeli agent.[13]
  • December 26, 1984: Bombing of the home of veteran Fatah and PLO leader Hani al-Hassan (a.k.a. Abu Tariq, Abu al-Hassan), in Amman, Jordan.
  • December 29, 1984: Assassination in Amman of former Hebron mayor and West Bank moderate Fahd Qawasma, who had previously been deported by Israel for alleged incitement to violence.
  • January 14, 1991: Assassination in Tunis of Abu Iyad, a top-ranking Fatah leader, who was Arafat's closest aide and the PLO's second-in-command. Also killed is the PLO Western (Israel) Sector commander Abu Hul and one of their bodyguards.[14]

Attacks against Jewish targets

Some of the attacks against civilian Jewish targets abroad are of more uncertain background. While Israeli agents had struck Jewish targets on occasion, it was relatively rare before the 1980s. The attacks might then not have been done on behalf of Mossad. Others were clearly designed to create maximum political damage to the PLO. A conspicuous fact is that Israel, known for its swift and hard-hitting retaliation attacks, never retaliated against Abu Nidal.

  • August 29, 1981: 1981 Vienna synagogue attack: Two men attacked a Vienna synagogue with machine guns. Two civilians were killed and 23 wounded, including three policemen. The attackers were arrested and imprisoned.[15]
  • May 1, 1981: Assassination of councilman Heinz Nittel in Vienna, Austria. Nittel was President of the Austrian-Israeli Friendship Association and had been involved in the peace process in Israel.[16][17] He was also a friend of Austrian Chancellor Bruno Kreisky, who had been a friend of the PLO and the Palestinian cause.

Attacks to damage Palestinian standing

  • October 1977: Second assassination attempt on Syrian foreign minister Abdul Halim Khaddam at Abu Dhabi Airport. The attack was on behalf of Iraq. During the attack, the foreign minister of the United Arab Emirates Saif Ghobash was killed by accident. The killing of Ghobash seriously damages PLO's future standing in the UAE.
  • August 9, 1982: During an attack on Goldenberg Restaurant in the Jewish quarter of Paris, six people are killed and 22 wounded.[18]
  • May 14, 1984: A bomb blast in Attica, Greece, left more than 53 people injured.[19][20]
  • September 16, 1985: Grenades were thrown into a popular tourist attraction, the Cafe de Paris in Rome, Italy, wounding 38 people.[21] The attack is justified by calling the place the nonsensical "a den of American-British intelligence services".[22]
  • December 27, 1985: Attacks on Israeli El Al airport counters in Rome and Vienna. 18 dead, 111 wounded. Austria and Italy were the 2 countries with which the PLO had the closest relations. Behind the scenes, leaders of these countries had were attempting to bring together Palestinian and Israeli leaders interested in a peaceful understanding. The bombs created a violent anti-Arab feeling in the West, the damage to the PLO was immense.<[23]
  • September 6, 1986: Gunmen stormed the Neve Shalom synagogue in Istanbul, Turkey during the Sabbath. They shot 22 people dead and set fire to the building before being killed in the (possibly deliberate) detonation of a grenade.[24]
  • May 15, 1988: Simultaneous gun and grenade attacks on the Acropole Hotel and the Sudan Club in Khartoum aimed at Western diplomats and their families. Four Britons, three Americans and two Sudanese killed, 21 people wounded.[25] The attack alienated Sudan, a country which had long and feverently supported the Palestinian cause.[26]
  • May 11, 1988: A large truck bomb explodes close to the Israeli embassy in Nicosia, Cyprus. Nidal claimed the bomb was targeted at the embassy, but exploded 200 meters from the embassy building, which was undamaged. The driver is one of the three people killed, apparently when an accomplice remotely detonated the device early. 19 people were injured.[27] The attack dealt a heavy blow to Cypriot public opinion for the Palestinians, in the country probably most sympathetic to the cause. In response, Cypriot authorities tightened control over Palestinians coming in or out, and several were expelled. [28]
  • July 11, 1988: A car bomb explodes "prematurely" at a pier in Athens, killing two ANO members, including Samih Muhammad Khudr, who might have been killed because he questioned the sense of the following attack. This is followed by an attack on the cruise ship City of Poros, which leaves nine dead and 98 wounded. The attacks alienated Greek sympathy for the Palestinian cause[29] Prime Minister Andreas Papandreou was the European leader who had most effectively defended the Arabs against Israel's charge of terrorism.

Helping Israel in Lebanon war

By 1982, Israel had decided to invade Lebanon, but lacked a pretext. Five times between July 1981 and June 1982, Israel massed troops on the border, but called them back because the Palestinians refused to fight. Nidal created that pretext.

  • June 3, 1982: Attempted assassination in London of Shlomo Argov, Israeli ambassador to the United Kingdom. The Israeli government blamed the PLO for the attack, and this was one of the incidents which provoked the large-scale invasion of Lebanon on June 6. Argov was permanently disabled and died of his injuries 21 years later.[30]
  • An ANO defector and former field commander in Lebanon told how he was ordered to mount cross border operations against Israel. To him "it seemed crazy to provoke Israel", but he started preparing anyway, even though ground operations was not what ANO was used to. The operation was cancelled after the Argov affair and the following Israeli invasion.[31]
  • In July 1989, ANO in a similar way was ordered to immediately mount operations against Israel, at a time when all other militant factions showed restraint, knowing that Israel was waiting for a pretext. The commander on the ground refused to carry out the order.[32]
  • Starting in November 1987, Abu Nidal started an "orgy of murder" against his own people, killing over 600 of his own men, between a third and half of his total membership. 171 were killed in a single night in November 1987, on the fabricated charge of being Jordanian agents. According to a defector, they were lined up over a trench and machine-gunned, before being buried by a bulldozer.Others were taken to camps in Libya and tortured and executed there.[33]


  • August 20, 1983: Ma'mun Mraish, one of the PLO's most able commanders, principally concerned with smuggling men and weapons into the occupied territories, was shot in Athens, Greece. Nidal, aware that this would reflect badly on his organisation, did not want his part in the affair to come out.[34]

Others

The group also did a number of mercenary operations, blackmail operations against corporations and governments, as well as operations on behalf of the the host country (Iraq, Syria, Libya).

Infiltration

Having bases in among other places Libya and Iraq, the ANO managed to significantly infiltrate the Libyan intelligence services. Nidal boasted that "he had his hand gripped tight around the Libyans' throat and that he knew so much about them that they would never get rid of him". To demonstartate his sense of immunity, he would tell scurrilous stories about Qaddafi's love life[35]

In 1986, the US bombed Libya, including Qaddafi's residence. The targets for the smart bombs could only have been found with the help of someone inside Libya. Israeli intelligence had provided continuous updates on Qaddafi's whereabouts, the last only 2 hours and 45 minutes before the raids. Abu Nidal's organization, working closely with Libyan intelligence, could easily have given this information to the Israelis.


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References

  1. ↑ "Abu Nidal Organisation (ANO)"
  2. ↑ https://www.joelsinger.org/my-first-encounter-with-yasser-arafat/
  3. ↑ Seale, page 45 and 152
  4. ↑ https://www.nytimes.com/1978/08/06/archives/4-slain-in-pakistan-in-a-raid-on-plo-iraqis-suspected-terrorists.html
  5. ↑ https://www.start.umd.edu/gtd/search/IncidentSummary.aspx?gtdid=197808050001
  6. ↑ https://news.google.com/newspapers?id=vn4xAAAAIBAJ&sjid=z6QFAAAAIBAJ&pg=1201,2333085&dq=daoud&hl=en
  7. ↑ https://polska1918-89.pl/pdf/miedzynarodowi-terrorysci-w-prl---historia-niewymuszonej-wspolpracy,2525.pdf
  8. ↑ https://www.polska1918-89.pl/pdf/szakal-w-warszawie-,2105.pdf
  9. ↑ MIPT Terrorism Knowledge Base
  10. ↑ https://yaf.ps/page-1122-en.html
  11. ↑ MIPT Terrorism Knowledge Base
  12. ↑ https://www.jewishvirtuallibrary.org/terrorist-attacks-attributed-to-abu-nidal-1972-1997
  13. ↑ Le Monde, January 22, 1982. Also Seale, page 172-173
  14. ↑ MIPT Terrorism Knowledge Base
  15. ↑ https://www.israelnationalnews.com/News/News.aspx/147611
  16. ↑ MIPT Terrorism Knowledge Base
  17. ↑ https://www.start.umd.edu/gtd/search/IncidentSummary.aspx?gtdid=198105010001
  18. ↑ MIPT Terrorism Knowledge Base
  19. ↑ https://www.nytimes.com/1984/05/15/world/around-the-world-explosion-in-athens-leaves-53-injured.html
  20. ↑ https://www.start.umd.edu/gtd/search/IncidentSummary.aspx?gtdid=198405140001
  21. ↑ MIPT Terrorism Knowledge Base
  22. ↑ Patrick Seale, Abu Nidal, A Gun for Hire (1992) ISBN 0-679-40066-4, page 237
  23. ↑ Seale page 246
  24. ↑ MIPT Terrorism Knowledge Base
  25. ↑ MIPT Terrorism Knowledge Base
  26. ↑ Seale, page 223
  27. ↑ MIPT Terrorism Knowledge Base
  28. ↑ Seale, page 222, 262
  29. ↑ Seale, page 222, 267
  30. ↑ MIPT Terrorism Knowledge Base
  31. ↑ Seale page 226
  32. ↑ Seale page 226
  33. ↑ Seale, page 288
  34. ↑ Seale, page 213
  35. ↑ Seale, page 262
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