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18/01/2005 | Gunmen for God: Palestine's militias, a profile

Bradley Burston

Now that the Palestinian elections are over, the real campaign begins.

For Mahmoud Abbas, it is the campaign swing of his life. The voters in question range from undecided to hostile.

 

The central plank of the Abbas platform is based on a mutual Israeli-Palestinian truce these voters do not want.

They are Palestine's armies of the night, the gunmen for God who will, in accomodation or in blood, seal the fate of Mahmoud Abbas.

They vote with their AK-47s. And it is their ballots that count.

The following is the first of a three-part profile of the principal armed groups of the intifada.

PALESTINIAN AUTHORITY SECURITY FORCES

FOUNDED:
1993, with the signing of the Oslo agreement. Formed in practice from units of the Palestine Liberation Army, the PLO's principal armed force, then in exile in Tunis, along with born-and-bred Palestinians from the territories who led street fighting during the first intifada (1987-1993).

FORCES UNDER ARMS: Under the terms of the September 1995 Oslo II interim accord, the number of armed police and agents in the PA security forces was not to exceed a maximum of 30,000.

But arms smuggling via Egypt to Gaza, across the Dead Sea from Jordan, and even purchases from Israeli criminals, quietly swelled both the arsenal and, in time, the numbers of Palestinians issued AK-47 and M-16 assault rifles.

"On the basis of official reports of the Palestinians and of international bodies, they have already admitted to having a total of 57,000 armed men in the Palestinian security forces in the West Bank and Gaza," says Haaretz territories commentator Arnon Regular.

COMMAND: The dozen arms of the PA security forces reported directly to Yasser Arafat until shortly before his death in November. But the command structure had already frayed considerably during the intifada, its feuding senior and regional commanders like Mohammed Dahlan and Musa Arafat increasingly taking on the roles of warlords, acting as financial and operational patrons for cells of the Al Aqsa Martyrs Brigades and other localized militant units.

The command structure encompasses a number of vestiges from the former PLO period, including remnants of Force 17, once Arafat's personal guard and later a part of the elite PA Presidential Security, which is suspected of a number of terror shootings in the early period of the intifada, when its members became a main target of Israeli counter-raids.

AL AQSA MARTYRS BRIGADES

FORCES UNDER ARMS: Current estimates range from 5,000 to 10,000.

FOUNDED: Early 2001, named for the Palestinians killed in rioting at the Al-Aqsa Mosque a day after the visit of then-opposition leader Ariel Sharon in September 2000.

PEDIGREE: Formed from local and regional units of the Fatah Tanzim, or Organization, effectively headed by then-secretary of the Fatah Higher Committee in the West Bank, Marwan Barghouti. The Tanzim was in large part led by and composed of members of the Palestinian police, security agents and PA administrative officials.

Months before the intifada erupted, the Tanzim had already established itself as the militia arm of Fatah, taking the lead in armed clashes with IDF troops at the meeting points of Oslo-defined Area A and Area B, the border of Palestinian and Israeli security jurisdictions. Once the intifada began, Tanzim snipers and other gunmen spearheaded attacks on and gun battles with Israelis, taking many more casualties than did Islamic and radical militants.

The close ties to the Fatah-dominated PA assured that the Tanzim, and later its Al Aqsa offshoots, enjoyed both relative autonomy and supplies of weaponry, ammunition and funding from a number of civilian and security departments of the Fatah-dominated PA.

RECRUITMENT: If one main source of Al Aqsa commanders was the reservoir of political cadres well-versed in Fatah political goals, another was the criminal element in the West Bank and Gaza Strip.

"Those who had been engaged in criminal activities, such as gun smuggling, underwent a 'laundering' process," says Regular. "Some of these had dealt with 'gray area' crimes, classed as criminal/nationalist activities."

Among the prominent examples of the latter, Regular says, were Tul Karm Al Aqsa commander Raed Karmi, blown to pieces in a remote-controlled explosion beside his safe house, and Hussein Ebayat of Bethlehem, arrested in the past by both Israel and the PA for smuggling weapons. Ebayat was killed when an Israeli helicopter gunship fired missiles at his moving car.

COMMAND: Loosely organized into the fiefdoms variously controlled by senior PA security officials and charismatic or extended-family-connected local commanders.

Many of the sub-groupings have renamed themselves for "martyrs" of the uprising, or have revived names of militant groups active in the first intifada, like the Fatah Hawks, in its current incarnation a Gaza Al Aqsa sub-group under the patronage and direction of Arafat's cousin and Dahlan arch-rival Musa Arafat.

But they remain in essence part of the same apparatus of local bands jockeying for internal position by periodic turf wars and competition in carrying out terror attacks.

In Al Aqsa jargon, the local cells are called "shops," a reference to the financial support each receives from Fatah-affiliated PA officials, until recently including Arafat himself.

"There was, and is, only partial coordination between the groupings
that exist in each region, and no central headquarters or command," says Regular.

As the intifada progressed - and Israeli military and Shin Bet pressure took out an entire "generation" of Fatah-steeped Al Aqsa commanders through assassination, lethal gun battles, and arrest - the character of the Al Aqsa command changed significantly.

IDEOLOGY: At first, Tanzim and Al Aqsa commanders were intensely political in outlook, hewing to the Fatah line of a two-state solution along 1967 borders.

Ominously for Israel, as younger leaders replaced those killed or jailed, the Al Aqsa Brigades took unmistakable inspiration from militant Islamists, adopting their methodology of suicide bombings within the 1967 borders of the Jewish state, and signaling sympathy for the radical Muslim ideology that rejected the existence of a Jewish state.

The new commanders, most aged 18-25, "were much more amenable to influences outside Fatah, such as Hezbollah," Regular says. "Suddenly, you saw [Fatah] terror attacks within Israel, something which had not happened for a generation."

Throughout the Oslo years, use of the words "Israel" and "Israelis" was commonplace within Fatah. "All at once, it turned out that Al Aqsa had changed the terminology, speaking instead of the 'Zionist [entity]' or of the 'Zionists.'"

Moreover, the Al Aqsa militants began to view all contact with Israelis as tantamount to collaboration, Regular continues.

Over time, "the internal narrative of these Al Aqsa groupings changed, going far beyond that of the official line of Fatah," Regular says. "Their political narrative, in short, has increasingly come to resemble that of Hamas and the Islamic Jihad."

Haaretz (Israel)

 



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