SUMMARY
The Fatah Revolutionary Council (a.k.a. Abu Nidal’s Fatah and more commonly referred to as the Abu Nidal Organisation (ANO)) broke away from PLO (Palestine Liberation Organization) in the middle of the 1970s. The organisation grew and “was once one of the most feared transnational terrorist organizations in the world”. It kept offices in Syria and Libya and scored an agreement with Poland in 1979, granting them safe haven and training in return for a promise not to engage in terrorist activities within Poland or against any interests of the country. Other Soviet satellite states were also at points sponsoring the organisation in one way or the other.
From the late 1970s the group performed several terrorist attacks and assassinations around the globe. In November 1985 they hijacked an Egypt Air plane. When Egyptian commandoes attempted to storm the plane and release the hostages all passengers were killed. A month later another group of the Revolutionary Council attacked El Al ticket offices in Rome and Vienna, killing dozens of people. After the attack on a Pan Am plane in Karachi, Pakistan, the Pakistani government claimed that there was evidence that Syria had been assisting the group in the attack. After this event the USA somehow was able to convince Syria to drop its support and they asked the organisation to leave the country, relocating instead to Libya and Lebanon.
At this time the leader, Abu Nidal (a.k.a. Sabri al-Bana), had made himself and his organisation an enemy not only of the USA but also of PLO, Jordan, and Israel. There was a campaign from the enemies of Fatah Revolutionary Council to create paranoia in the organisation. Abu Nidal was reputed to be paranoid and in the late 1980s the campaign seems to have given results as Abu Nidal himself saw to it that part of the leadership close to him was assassinated. In 1989 a top man within the organisation in Lebanon, Abu Bakr, left for PLO. This led to violent conflict between the two organisations’ forces in Lebanon. In the early 1990s federal agents in the USA struck down on businesses that were believed to sponsor the Revolutionary Council. In 2000 the Revolutionary Council was expelled from Libya, where it had been situated for a number of years. The Abu Nidal Organisation was still, in November 2010, on the US FTO list over terrorist organisations, even though the leader, Abu Nidal, is believed to have committed suicide in Iraq 2002 as Iraqi police tried to have him arrested.
The Fatah Revolutionary Council has been involved in the non-state category of UCDP organised violence.
