Birth: NULL/NULL/1935 Death:NULL/NULL/2021
Born in Ramleh in 1935; fled with his family to Syria during the 1948 events; graduated from Britain’s Royal Military Academy at Sandhurst; returned to Syria and became an army officer, then a captain, in the Syrian army; established the Palestine Liberation Front in 1959, which launched a number of military operations inside Israel and kept close ties to the Syrian army; cooperated with Fateh briefly in 1965, but merged his group into creating the Popular Front for the Liberation of Palestine (PFLP), which emanated from the ANM in Dec. 1967; was head of a military committee responsible for breaking the siege on Tal Az-Za’tar in 1967; following disagreements with the PFLP’s Marxist turn in Nov. 1968 and disillusioned with its emphasis on ideology over action, vowed to launch more military operations and formed the PFLP-General Command (GC) in Oct. 1968; serves as its Sec.-Gen. ever since; suffered a major setback in 1977, when the PFLP-GC split; after the Israeli invasion into Lebanon in 1982; was ordered to leave Lebanon in July 1993 and relocated to Damascus, Syria; denounced the DoP, the subsequent Oslo process and the PLO leadership involved in both, predicting that the accords will “trigger a civil war in Palestine” and “liquidate the [first] Intifada”; was asked by Syrian Pres. Hafez Al-Assad in Aug. 1996 to leave Syria and relocate in Iran; lost a son, Jihad (38), in a car bombing in Lebanon in May 2002. Died on 7 July 2021 in a Damascus hospital.
