Word: jordanians
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Just who started the battle between the swaggering guerrillas and Jordanian soldiers loyal to Hussein is unclear. The guerrillas were members of the ultra-militant Popular Front for the Liberation of Palestine, which is led by a radical Arab Christian physician named George Habash, an exponent of terror tactics against civilians, including children. In the small town of Zarka, twelve miles north of Amman, quarrels broke out between guerrillas and soldiers of the Saiqa (Thunderbolt) Regiment, a unit especially faithful to Hussein. Both sides were armed, and the confrontation quickly expanded into episodes of violence. By the time it ended...
Shopkeepers pulled down their metal shutters and fled for home; Arabs wearing kaffiyehs that looked like the headdress issued to Jordanian army troops took them off to be safe. Roadblocks suddenly appeared. The army began rounding up guerrillas and brought up artillery to shell the refugee camps...
...Jordan that Palestinian Arabs fled in 1948 when Israel won its war of independence and established a Jewish state: in 1967. tens of thousands more Arabs fled across the Jordan River after Israel occupied the West Bank. Those who could afford to, settled in Jordanian communities; the penniless have been housed in vast refugee camps that are now practically independent city-states and hotbeds of Palestine nationalism. Both groups are ardently Palestinian and pro-fedayeen. Hussein thus finds himself ruling a nation of 2,200,000 people of whom fully two-thirds consider themselves Palestinian rather than Jordanian. Nevertheless...
...civil war. The Red Crescent (the Arab Red Cross) estimated 200 dead and 500 wounded. "There was so much shooting," said one medical worker, "that we couldn't even bury the dead." About 50 wounded were treated in hospitals in Damascus, where they were taken by ambulance when Jordanian hospitals became overcrowded...
...There are two Palestinian states now. One is in Jordan, one is in Israel. One is Arab one Jewish. We are ready to negotiate with Jordan. We have placed no conditions on who will negotiate for Jordan. Many of the Jordanian population are Palestinian. If they would change the government. Jordan would become a Palestinian state. We would be willing to give up part of the West Bank to this Palestinian state for the sake of peace. Why do we have to negotiate with a third force? There is no room for a third Palestinian state...