Sabri Khalil al-Banna (; May 1937 – 16 August 2002), known by his nom de guerre Abu Nidal ("father of struggle"),; translates it as "father of the struggle". was a Palestinian militant. He was the founder of Fatah: The Revolutionary Council (), a militant Palestinian splinter group more commonly known as the Abu Nidal Organization (ANO). Abu Nidal formed the ANO in October 1974 after splitting from Yasser Arafat's Fatah faction within the Palestine Liberation Organization (PLO).
Abu Nidal is believed to have ordered attacks in 20 countries, killing over 300 and injuring over 650 while acting as a freelance contractor. The group's operations included the Rome and Vienna airport attacks on 27 December 1985, when gunmen opened fire on passengers in simultaneous shootings at El Al ticket counters, killing 20. At the height of its militancy in the 1970s and 1980s, the ANO was widely regarded as the most ruthless of the Palestinian groups.Chamberlin, Paul Thomas (2012). The Global Offensive: The United States, the Palestine Liberation Organization, and the Making of the Post-Cold War Order. New York: Oxford University Press, 173.Partrick, Neil (2015) . "Abu Nidal", in Martha Crenshaw and John Pimlott (eds.), International Encyclopedia of Terrorism. London: Routledge, 326–327. Palestinian leadership long suspected that Israeli Mossad had infiltrated the ANO, with Abu Nidal himself allegedly having been on the CIA payroll at some point.
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.
Early life
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 (now Ashkelon in Israel).; for orange groves, The family lived in luxury in a three-storey stone house near the beach, later used as an Israeli military court.; for the military court, image between 122 and 123. Muhammad Khalil al-Banna, Abu Nidal's brother, told Yossi Melman:
Khalil al-Banna's wealth allowed him to take several wives. In an interview with Der Spiegel, Sabri stated his father had 13 wives, 17 sons and 8 daughters. Melman writes that Sabri's mother, an Alawite, was the eighth wife. She had been one of the family's maids as a 16-year-old girl. The family disapproved of the marriage, according to Patrick Seale and, as a result, Sabri Khalil's 12th child, was apparently looked down on by his older siblings, although in later life the relationships were repaired.
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. His brothers took him out of the mission school and enrolled him instead in a prestigious, private Muslim school in Jerusalem, now known as Umariya Elementary School, which he attended for about two years.
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 limited the family's income. In Jaffa there were food shortages, truck bombings, and an Irgun militia mortar bombardment.Morris, Benny (2004). The Birth of the Palestinian Refugee Problem Revisited. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 212–213. Melman writes that the al-Banna family had had good relations with the Jewish community. Abu Nidal's brother told Melman that their father had been a friend of Avraham Shapira, a founder of the Jewish defense organization, Hashomer, stating, "He would visit [Shapira] in his home in Petah Tikva, or Shapira riding his horse would visit our home in Jaffa. I also remember how we visited Dr. Weizmann [later first president of Israel] in his home in Rehovot." However, these relationships did not help them weather the war.
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. Melman writes that the family spent nine months living in tents, depending on UNRWA for an allowance of oil, rice, and potatoes. The experience had a powerful effect on Abu Nidal.;
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 re-establish themselves, Melman writes. Their orange groves were gone, now part of the new state of Israel. The family moved to Nablus in the West Bank, then under Jordanian control. In 1955, Abu Nidal graduated from high school, joined the Arab Socialist Ba'ath Party, and began a degree in engineering at Cairo University, but he left after two years without a degree. In 1960, he made his way to Saudi Arabia, where he established himself as a painter and electrician, and worked as a casual laborer for Aramco.; His brother told Melman that Abu Nidal would return to Nablus from Saudi Arabia every year to visit his mother. It was during one such visit in 1962 that he met his wife, whose family had also fled Jaffa. Their marriage produced a son and two daughters.
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".Seale 1992, 56. Acquaintances said that he was capable of hard work and had a mind for finances. Salah Khalaf (Abu Iyad), the deputy chief of Fatah who was assassinated by the ANO in 1991, knew him well in the late 1960s when he took Abu Nidal under his wing. He told Seale: 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. He was extremely good company, with a sharp tongue and an inclination to dismiss most of humanity as spies and traitors. I rather liked that! I discovered he was very ambitious, perhaps more than his abilities warranted, and also very excitable. He sometimes worked himself up into such a state that he lost all powers of reasoning.
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, followed by 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. Members' wives (the ANO was an all-male group) were not allowed to befriend each other, and Abu Nidal's expected his wife to live in isolation without friends.
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 in 1967. He returned to Nablus with his wife and family, and joined Yasser Arafat's Fatah faction of the PLO. Working as an odd-job man, he was committed to Palestinian politics but was not particularly active until Israel won the 1967 Six-Day War, capturing the Golan Heights, the West Bank, and the Gaza Strip. Melman writes that "the entrance of the Israel Defense Forces tanks into Nablus was a traumatic experience for him. The conquest aroused him to action."
After moving to Amman, Jordan, he set up a trading company called Impex, which acted as a front for Fatah and served as a meeting place and conduit for funds. This became a hallmark of Abu Nidal's career. ANO-controlled companies made him a rich man through legitimate business, and functioned as cover for arms deals and mercenary activities.
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.; In 1968, Abu Iyad appointed him as the Fatah representative in Khartoum, Sudan. Later, at Abu Nidal's insistence, he was appointed to the same position in Baghdad in July 1970. He arrived two months before "Black September", when more than 10 days of fighting King Hussein's army drove the Palestinian fedayeens out of Jordan, with the loss of thousands of lives. Abu Nidal's absence from Jordan at a time, Seale writes, when it was clear that King Hussein was about to act against the Palestinians, raised suspicion within the movement that Abu Nidal was interested only in saving himself.
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 ("the Punishment"). On 5 September 1973, five gunmen entered the Saudi embassy in Paris, took 15 hostages, and threatened to blow up the building if Abu Daoud was not released.; The gunmen flew to Kuwait two days later on a Syrian Air flight, still holding five hostages, then to Riyadh, threatening to throw the hostages out of the aircraft. They surrendered and released the hostages on 8 September. Abu Daoud was released from prison two weeks later; Seale writes that the Kuwaiti government paid King Hussein $12 million for his release.
On the day of the attack, 56 heads of state were meeting in Algiers for the fourth Non-Aligned Movement conference. 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. One of the hostage-takers admitted that he had been told to fly the hostages around until the conference was over.
Abu Nidal had carried out the operation without Fatah's permission. Abu Iyad (Arafat's deputy) and Mahmoud Abbas (later President of the Palestinian Authority), flew to Iraq to reason with Abu Nidal and explain that hostage-taking harmed the movement. Abu Iyad told Seale that an Iraqi official at the meeting said, "Why are you attacking Abu Nidal? The operation was ours! We asked him to mount it for us." Abbas was furious and left the meeting with the other PLO delegates. From that point on, the PLO regarded Abu Nidal as under the control of the Iraqi government.
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 and the hijacking was intended to warn them not to go ahead with it. In response, in March or July 1974, Arafat expelled Abu Nidal from Fatah.; (Melman writes that it was March 1974, Seale that it was July).