Word: fedayeen
(lookup in dictionary)
(lookup stats)
Dates: all
Sort By: most recent first
(reverse)
...Fedayeen Power. Even those highly tentative talks have stirred the revolutionary feelings of the commandos, or fedayeen, who are adamantly opposed to dealings of any sort with Israel. They wield political power in Jor dan far out of proportion to their numbers, which probably total no more than 5,000 active terrorists. They have the fervent support of Jordan's 700,000 displaced Palestinians, who owe no particular allegiance to the Hashemite Hussein, and the open sympathy of many officers in the Jordanian army...
More and more, the commandos operate as a state within a state. They occupy the Jordan River's East Bank and defy government requests that camouflage-uniformed fedayeen stay off the streets of Amman. When a Bedouin army unit tried to disarm a group of commandos at a checkpoint outside the capital last week, Fedayeen Leader Yasser Arafat rolled up two jeeploads of commandos and threatened to shoot his way through. The army backed down...
Along the bristling Jordan River line, Israelis thwarted a planned fedayeen commando strike by landing the "first punch. A burst of Jordanian shells fired at riverbank settlements on the eve of the anniversary drew a ferocious artillery and air bombardment riposte from the Israelis...
...longer has the power even to hold them in check. Last month he dispatched 20 carloads of troops and police to order a guerrilla unit to leave the refugee camp at Karamah. When it arrived, the column was surrounded by machine-gun-toting commandos, quickly withdrew when the fedayeen commander delivered a matter-of-fact announcement: "You have three minutes to decide whether you leave or die." The rest of the Arab world has taken up the fedayeen with nearly unanimous vigor. Iraq and Syria offer training programs for several thousand commandos. The Persian Gulf states, led by Kuwait, raise...
There are now nearly 20,000 fedayeen in Jordan v. scant hundred or so before the war-and their ranks are swelling daily. Whereas all guerrilla operations used to be controlled by the disreputable (and now discredited) Palestine Liberation Army, there are at least halt dozen independent fedayeen organizations, most of them less interested in playing Arab politics (as was the P.L.A.) than in fielding effective guerrillas. The largest, and to all appearances the most dynamic, of them all is Asita (thunderstorm), the paramilitary arm of a broader political group named El Fatah, whose commandos call themselves storm troopers...