Blood and Rage_ A Cultural History of Terrorism - Michael Burleigh [116]
With Israeli and US approval, in June 1976 twelve thousand Syrian troops moved into Lebanon. Under their protective cover, the Maronites attacked the vast Palestinian refugee camp at Tal al-Zaatar. After a siege of fifty-two days the thirty thousand inhabitants were forced to surrender, some of them being killed as they departed. Following some eighteen months of fighting, Saudi mediation resulted in Lebanon being carved into spheres of influence, all supposedly guaranteed by a Syrian Arab Deterrent Force. The PLO alone had lost an estimated five thousand casualties. They soon included their local protector, Kamal Jumblatt, who felt Assad’s vengeance when he was shot dead at a Syrian roadblock in March 1977. Iraq also unleashed Abu Nidal against the Syrians, who had committed the major sin of turning their guns against the Palestinians in Lebanon. He dubbed his campaign of bomb and gun attacks against such Syrian interests as airline offices and embassies around Europe and the Middle East ‘Black June’ after the date of the Syrian invasion of Lebanon. This culminated in an attempt to assassinate the Syrian foreign minister at Abu Dhabi airport, an attack that resulted in the death of the United Arab Emirates minister of state for foreign affairs. After Saddam Hussein came to power and went to war with Iran, Abu Nidal was used to assassinate exiled Iraqi dissidents, in between his endeavours to kill such senior PLO leaders as Abu Iyad, whose men came to Baghdad attempting to kill Nidal in turn.
They had good reason, for, commencing in January 1978, Abu Nidal had launched a campaign of assassination against PLO moderates, especially those in contact with Israeli peaceniks or who advocated a two-state solution to the Israeli-Palestinian problem. In that month the PLO’s representative in London, Sa’id Hammani, was shot dead by Kayid Hussein, one of Abu Nidal’s Tunisian gunmen. That summer Abu Nidal’s organisation struck at Ali Yassin, Fatah’s spokesman in Kuwait, Izz al-Din Qalaq, its man in France, and narrowly missed Yusif Abu Hantash, in the PLO’s Islamabad offices. In 1981 they killed Heinz Nittal, a Vienna city councillor and close friend of chancellor Kreisky, in a clear warning that the latter should halt his attempts to develop Israeli-Palestinian dialogue. The PLO knew exactly who was to blame, firing rockets into the Iraqi embassy in Beirut and attacking Nidal’s offices in Tripoli. Although some claim that Nidal’s ‘strategy’ was being ‘manipulated’ by Israeli agents secreted within his organisation, this seems unlikely, given that his terrorists simultaneously carried out attacks against soft Israeli and Jewish targets across Europe, that being a euphemism for shooting up worshippers in a Viennese synagogue and throwing grenades into a party of schoolchildren in Antwerp. In April 1983 Nidal’s men murdered the prominent PLO dove Isam Sartawi at a socialist conference in Portugal. These killings were carried out by gunmen who had survived the rigours of Abu Nidal’s various training camps. Since Abu Nidal at one point thought that his own wife was a CIA agent, one can only imagine the levels of paranoia that prevailed in these hellholes, recreations of camps he had himself received training at in China and North Korea. He insisted on the old Communist practice of making recruits constantly rewrite their autobiographies, with the slightest inconsistency resulting in bouts of monstrous torture in Section