Sabri Khalil al-Banna (May 1937 - 16 August 2002), known by his nom de guerre Abu Nidal, was the founder of Fatah: The Revolutionary Council, a militant Palestinian splinter group more commonly known as the Abu Nidal Organization (ANO). At the height of its militancy in the 1970s and 1980s, the ANO was widely regarded as the most ruthless of the Palestinian groups.
Abu Nidal ("father of struggle") formed the ANO in October 1974 after a split from Yasser Arafat's Fatah faction within the Palestine Liberation Organization (PLO). Acting as a freelance contractor, Abu Nidal is believed to have ordered attacks in 20 countries, killing over 300 and injuring over 650. +more
Abu Nidal died after a shooting in his Baghdad apartment in August 2002. Palestinian sources believed he was killed on the orders of Saddam Hussein, while Iraqi officials insisted he had committed suicide during an interrogation. +more
Early life
Family, early education
Sabri Khalil al-Banna was born in May 1937 in Jaffa, on the Mediterranean coast of what was then the British Mandate of Palestine. His father, Hajj Khalil al-Banna, owned 6,000 acres (24 km2) of orange groves situated between Jaffa and Majdal, today Ashkelon in Israel. +more
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Khalil al-Banna's wealth allowed him to take several wives. According to Sabri in an interview with Der Spiegel, his father had 13 wives, 17 sons and eight daughters. +more
In 1944 or 1945, his father sent him to Collège des Frères de Jaffa, a French mission school, which he attended for one year. When his father died in 1945, when Sabri was seven years old, the family turned his mother out of the house. +more
1948 Palestine War
On 29 November 1947, the United Nations resolved to partition Palestine into an Arab and Jewish state. Fighting broke out immediately, and the disruption of the citrus-fruit business hit the family's income. +more
Just before Israeli troops took Jaffa in April 1948, the family fled to their house near Majdal, but Israeli troops arrived there too, and the family fled again. This time they went to the Bureij refugee camp in the Gaza Strip, then under Egyptian control. +more
Move to Nablus and Saudi Arabia
The al-Banna family's commercial experience, and the money they had managed to take with them, meant they could set themselves up in business again, Melman writes. Their orange groves had gone, now part of the new state of Israel. +more
Personality
Abu Nidal was often in poor health, according to Seale, and tended to dress in zip-up jackets and old trousers, drinking whisky every night in his later years. He became, writes Seale, a "master of disguises and subterfuge, trusting no one, lonely and self-protective, [living] like a mole, hidden away from public view". +more
He had been recommended to me as a man of energy and enthusiasm, but he seemed shy when we met. It was only on further acquaintance that I noticed other traits. +more
Seale suggests that Abu Nidal's childhood explained his personality, described as chaotic by Abu Iyad and as psychopathic by Issam Sartawi, the late Palestinian heart surgeon. His siblings' scorn, the loss of his father, and his mother's removal from the family home when he was seven, then the loss of his home and status in the conflict with Israel, created a mental world of plots and counterplots, reflected in his tyrannical leadership of the ANO. +more
Political life
Impex, Black September
In Saudi Arabia, Abu Nidal helped found a small group of young Palestinians who called themselves the Palestine Secret Organization. The activism cost him his job and home: Aramco fired him, and the Saudi government imprisoned then expelled him. +more
After moving to Amman, Jordan, he set up a trading company called Impex, which acted as a front for Fatah, serving as a meeting place and conduit for funds. This became a hallmark of Abu Nidal's career. +more
When Fatah asked him to choose a nom de guerre, he chose Abu Nidal ("father of struggle") after his son, Nidal. Those who knew him at the time said he was a well-organized leader, not a guerrilla; during fighting between the Palestinian fedayeens and King Hussein's troops, he stayed in his office. +more
First operation
Shortly after Black September, Abu Nidal began accusing the PLO, over his Voice of Palestine radio station in Iraq, of cowardice for having agreed to a ceasefire with Hussein. During Fatah's Third Congress in Damascus in 1971, he joined Palestinian activist and writer Naji Allush and Abu Daoud (leader of the Black September Organization responsible for the 1972 Munich Massacre) in calling for greater democracy within Fatah and revenge against King Hussein.
In February 1973, Abu Daoud was arrested in Jordan for an attempt on King Hussein's life. This led to Abu Nidal's first operation, using the name Al-Iqab ("the Punishment"). +more
On the day of the attack, 56 heads of state were meeting in Algiers for the 4th conference of the Non-Aligned Movement. According to Seale, the Saudi Embassy operation had been commissioned by Iraq's president, Ahmed Hasan al-Bakr, as a distraction because he was jealous that Algeria was hosting the conference. +more
Abu Nidal had carried out the operation without the permission of Fatah. Abu Iyad (Arafat's deputy) and Mahmoud Abbas (later President of the Palestinian Authority), flew to Iraq to reason with Abu Nidal that hostage-taking harmed the movement. +more
Expulsion from Fatah
Two months later, in November 1973 (just after the Yom Kippur War in October), the ANO hijacked KLM Flight 861, this time using the name Arab Nationalist Youth Organization. Fatah had been discussing convening a peace conference in Geneva; the hijacking was intended to warn them not to go ahead with it. +more
In October 1974 Abu Nidal formed the ANO, calling it Fatah: The Revolutionary Council. In November that year a Fatah court sentenced him to death in absentia for the attempted assassination of Mahmoud Abbas. +more
ANO
Nature of the organization
In addition to Fatah: The Revolutionary Council, the ANO called itself the Palestinian National Liberation Movement, Black June (for actions against Syria), Black September (for actions against Jordan), the Revolutionary Arab Brigades, the Revolutionary Organization of Socialist Muslims, the Egyptian Revolution, Revolutionary Egypt, Al-Asifa ("the Storm," a name also used by Fatah), Al-Iqab ("the Punishment"), and the Arab Nationalist Youth Organization.
The group had up to 500 members, chosen from young men in the Palestinian refugee camps and in Lebanon, who were promised good pay and help looking after their families. They would be sent to training camps in whichever country was hosting the ANO at the time (Syria, Iraq or Libya), then organized into small cells. +more
Seale writes that recruits were asked to write out their life stories, including names and addresses of family and friends, then sign a paper saying they agreed to execution if discovered to have intelligence connections. If suspected, they would be asked to rewrite the whole story, without discrepancies. +more
Committee for Revolutionary Justice
There were reports of purges throughout the 1970s and 1980s. Around 600 ANO members were killed in Lebanon and Libya, including 171 in one night in November 1987, when they were lined up, shot and thrown into a mass grave. +more
Members were routinely tortured by the "Committee for Revolutionary Justice" until they confessed to disloyalty. Seale writes that reports of torture included hanging a man naked, whipping him until he was unconscious, reviving him with cold water, then rubbing salt or chili powder into his wounds. +more
Intelligence Directorate
The Intelligence Directorate was formed in 1985 to oversee special operations. It had four subcommittees: the Committee for Special Missions, the Foreign Intelligence Committee, the Counterespionage Committee and the Lebanon Committee. +more
Committee for Special Missions
The job of the Committee for Special Missions was to choose targets. It had started life as the Military Committee, headed by Naji Abu al-Fawaris, who had led the attack on Heinz Nittel, head of the Israel-Austria Friendship League, who was shot and killed in 1981. +more
Operations and relationships
Shlomo Argov
On 3 June 1982, ANO operative Hussein Ghassan Said shot Shlomo Argov, the Israeli ambassador to Britain, once in the head as he left the Dorchester Hotel in London. Said was accompanied by Nawaf al-Rosan, an Iraqi intelligence officer, and Marwan al-Banna, Abu Nidal's cousin. +more
Ariel Sharon, then Israel's defence minister, responded three days later by invading Lebanon, where the PLO was based, a reaction that Seale argues Abu Nidal had intended: The Israeli government had been preparing to invade and Abu Nidal provided a pretext. Der Spiegel put it to him in October 1985 that the assassination of Argov, when he knew Israel wanted to attack the PLO in Lebanon, made him appear to be working for the Israelis, in the view of Yasser Arafat. +more
What Arafat says about me doesn't bother me. Not only he, but also a whole list of Arab and world politicians claim that I am an agent of the Zionists or the CIA. +more
Rome and Vienna
Abu Nidal's most infamous operation was the 1985 attack on the Rome and Vienna airports. On 27 December, at 08:15 GMT, four gunmen opened fire on the El Al ticket counter at the Leonardo Da Vinci International Airport in Rome, killing 16 and wounding 99. +more
Austria and Italy had both been involved in trying to arrange peace talks. Sources close to Abu Nidal told Seale that Libyan intelligence had supplied the weapons. +more
United States bombing of Libya
On 15 April 1986, the US launched bombing raids from British bases against Tripoli and Benghazi, killing around 100, in retaliation for the bombing of a Berlin nightclub used by US service personnel. The dead were reported to include Hanna Gaddafi, the adoptive daughter of Libyan leader Muammar Gaddafi; two of his other children were injured. +more
Hindawi affair
On 17 April 1986-the day the bodies of the teachers were found and McCarthy was kidnapped-Ann Marie Murphy, a pregnant Irish chambermaid, was discovered in Heathrow airport with a Semtex bomb in the false bottom of one of her bags. She had been about to board an El Al flight from New York to Tel Aviv via London. +more
Pan Am Flight 73
On 5 September 1986, four ANO gunmen hijacked Pan Am Flight 73 at Karachi Airport on its way from Mumbai to New York, holding 389 passengers and crew for 16 hours in the plane on the tarmac before detonating grenades inside the cabin. Neerja Bhanot, the flight's senior purser, was able to open an emergency door, and most passengers escaped; 20 died, including Bhanot, and 120 were wounded. +more
Relationship with Gaddafi
Abu Nidal began to move his organization out of Syria to Libya in the summer of 1986, arriving there in March 1987. In June that year the Syrian government expelled him, in part because of the Hindawi affair and Pan Am Flight 73 hijacking. +more
Abu Nidal and Libya's leader, Muammar Gaddafi, allegedly became great friends, each holding what Marie Colvin and Sonya Murad called a "dangerous combination of an inferiority complex mixed with the belief that he was a man of great destiny". The relationship gave Abu Nidal a sponsor and Gaddafi a mercenary. +more
According to Abu Bakr, speaking to Al Hayat in 2002, Abu Nidal said he was behind the bombing of Pan Am Flight 103, which exploded over Lockerbie, Scotland, on 21 December 1988; a former head of security for Libyan Arab Airlines was later convicted. Abu Nidal reportedly said of Lockerbie, according to Seale: "We do have some involvement in this matter, but if anyone so much as mentions it, I will kill him with my own hands!" Seale writes that the ANO appeared to have no connection to it; one of Abu Nidal's associates told him, "If an American soldier tripped in some corner of the globe, Abu Nidal would instantly claim it as his own work. +more
Banking with BCCI
In the late 1980s British intelligence learned that the ANO held accounts with the Bank of Credit and Commerce International (BCCI) in London. BCCI was closed in July 1991 by banking regulators in six countries after evidence emerged of widespread fraud. +more
Assassination of Abu Iyad
On 14 January 1991 in Tunis, the night before US forces moved into Kuwait, the ANO assassinated Abu Iyad, head of PLO intelligence, along with Abu al-Hol, Fatah's chief of security, and Fakhri al-Umari, another Fatah aide; all three men were shot in Abu Iyad's home. The killer, Hamza Abu Zaid, confessed that an ANO operative had hired him. +more
Death
After Libyan intelligence operatives were charged with the Lockerbie bombing, Gaddafi tried to distance himself from terrorism. Abu Nidal was expelled from Libya in 1999, and in 2002 he returned to Iraq. +more
On 19 August 2002, the Palestinian newspaper al-Ayyam reported that Abu Nidal had died three days earlier of multiple gunshot wounds at his home in Baghdad, a house the newspaper said was owned by the Mukhabarat, the Iraqi secret service. Two days later, Iraq's chief of intelligence Taher Jalil Habbush handed out photographs of Abu Nidal's body to journalists, along with a medical report that said he had died after a bullet entered his mouth and exited through his skull. +more
Jane's reported in 2002 that Iraqi intelligence had found classified documents in his home about a US attack on Iraq. When they raided the house, fighting broke out between Abu Nidal's men and Iraqi intelligence. +more
In 2008 Robert Fisk obtained a report written in September 2002, for Saddam Hussein's "presidency intelligence office," by Iraq's "Special Intelligence Unit M4". The report said that the Iraqis had been interrogating Abu Nidal in his home as a suspected spy for Kuwait and Egypt, and indirectly for the United States, and that he had been asked by the Kuwaitis to find links between Iraq and Al-Qaeda. +more
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