Created by a split from the Fatah in 1974, the Abu Nidal Organization (officially named Fatah - the Revolutionary Council) is an international organization named for its founder Abu Nidal. The group is also known as the Arab Revolutionary Brigades, Black September and the Revolutionary Organization of Socialist Muslims. It has an estimated members of several hundred.
It has carried out terrorist attacks in 20 countries, killing or injuring almost 900 persons. Targets include the United States, the United Kingdom, France, Israel, moderate Palestinians, the PLO, and various Arab countries. Major attacks included the Rome and Vienna Airport Attacks in December 1985, the Neve Shalom synagogue in Istanbul and the Pan AmFlight 73 hijacking in Karachi in September 1986, and the City of Poros day-excursion ship attack in Greece in July 1988. Suspected of assassinating PLO deputy chief Abu Iyad and PLO security chief Abu Hul in Tunis in January 1991. ANO assassinated a Jordanian diplomat in Lebanon in January 1994 and has been linked to the killing of the PLO representative there. The group has not attacked Western targets since the late 1980s.
The group maintained a presence in Iraq and Lebanon, its operations in Libya and Egypt were stopped by local authorities in 1999. The choking of funding from Middle Eastern governments caused the organization to slip away in obscurity.
The United States has claimed the group has received funding from the governments of Iraq, Libya, and (until 1987) Syria.
AbuNidal was born in May 1937 in the port of Jaffa on the Mediterranean coast of what was then the British Mandate of Palestine.
AbuNidal's first operation took place on September 5, 1973, when five gunmen seized the Saudi embassy in Paris, taking 13 hostages and threatening to blow up the building if Abu Dawud was not released from jail in Jordan, where he had been arrested in February 1973 for an attempt on the King's life.
AbuNidal is known to have entered Iraq in 1999 after being expelled from Libya by Muammar Gadaffi, who was distancing himself from terrorism in an effort to re-establish diplomatic relations with the U.S. and UK after the 1988 bombing of Pan Am Flight 103 over Lockerbie, Scotland, which Gadaffi is believed to have commissioned.
AbuNidal was with the PLO during its most active and tumultuous period, as the guerrilla organization tried and failed to take over the Jordanian state in 1970, then launched a wave of airline hijackings, assassinations and hostage-takings across the Middle East and Europe, including the 1972 Munich Olympics massacre.
AbuNidal was sentenced to death in absentia by a Fatah military court in late 1974, as his group began assassinating PLO representatives across Europe.
AbuNidal must have appreciated the irony when, as a result of his actions, the Israelis besieged Beirut and his mortal enemy Arafat and the PLO leadership were forced to move again, this time to far-off Tunisia.
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