Word: fedayeen
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...refugee camp, are trained in commando techniques. They are given rigorous calisthenics and obstacle-course training, taught to handle rifles and machine guns, and instructed where the larynx, heart, liver and intestines are located, the better to thrust a dagger in the right place. Daughters of dead fedayeen are sent to schools run by the "Martyr Family Welfare Service," where they are taught to chant: "I have broken mv chains. I am the daughter of Fatah! We are all commandos." Refugee women are trained in first aid and in handling weapons...
These days El Fatah hardly has time to fight as it copes with the avalanche of aid. Stacks of bandages, food and ammunition are piled everywhere. Sometimes the arriving shipments include beer. It is not drunk; the fedayeen sell it and use the money to purchase arms. Some of the fedayeen weapons are purchased directly, but some are contributed by Arab governments, particularly Egypt, Iraq and Syria, which help out in other ways as well. A Syrian raider captured by the Israelis revealed that he had been trained by Egyptian army officers...
There is no evidence of direct Russian aid to the fedayeen. Any aid they might want to offer can be funneled through the Arab governments. Direct Soviet aid might endanger the Kremlin's ties with those governments. Also, Moscow may well view the fedayeen as a dangerous and uncontrollable factor in the Middle East equation. While the Soviets may or may not want a genuine peace in the area, they clearly do not want a new war now-and another likely humiliating Arab defeat that could destroy their influence in the region...
...fedayeen getting aid or inspiration from the world's other main revolutionary fount, Peking. "We read
...really relevant," says a young raider. To the fedayeen, the model and example is the Algerian revolution. For ideology, they look to its apostle, Frantz Fanon, the late Martinique-born Negro psychiatrist, who preached in The Wretched of the Earth that for oppressed and colonized people of the world "violence is a cleansing force. It frees the native from his inferiority complex and from his despair and inaction; it makes him fearless and restores his self-respect...