The Abu Nidal Organization (ANO) was a secular international terrorist group that was founded in 1974 by the late Sabri al-Banna (a.k.a. Abu Nidal), who had joined Yasser Arafat‘s Palestine Liberation Organization (PLO) in 1967 and also spent some time representing Arafat’s Fatah faction in Sudan and Iraq. ANO was also known by a number of alternative names, including: the Al-Fatah Revolutionary Council, the Arab Fedayeen Cells, the Arab Revolutionary Brigades, Black June, Black September (for attacks on Jordanian targets), the Egyptian Revolution, the Fatah Revolutionary Council, the Organization of Jund al Haq, the Palestine Revolutionary Council, Revolutionary Council of Fatah, and the Revolutionary Organization of Socialist Muslims.

From its inception, ANO’s top priorities were to bring about the permanent destruction of Israel and to derail any diplomatic progress that the PLO or any other Arab regimes (as in Jordan or Egypt) might make in their dealings with the Jewish state. Abu Nidal flatly rejected Israel’s right to exist and committed himself to that country’s annihilation by any means necessary, preferably “armed struggle.” Efforts to achieve this goal via bargaining and political gradualism were anathema to Nidal. Thus did he angrily sever his ties to the PLO in 1974, when the latter began to pursue some incremental political resolutions to its conflict with Israel.

Nidal’s philosophical and strategic break from the PLO prompted him in 1974 to form, with help from Iraq, the Fatah Revolutionary Council, a.k.a. the Abu Nidal Organization. ANO’s first order of business was to launch a series of attacks against PLO targets whose political views were deemed too mild. Though ANO’s 1974 attempt to have Arafat assassinated was unsuccessful, the group did manage to kill a number of his confidants—e.g., the 1991 murder of Arafat’s closest aide in Tunisia—and other ostensibly “moderate” Palestinians. Years later, in September 1997, Palestinian police arrested four men from the Hebron area who were allegedly involved in yet another Abu Nidal plot to kill Arafat.

During different time periods, ANO was sponsored and supported — with safe haven, training, logistical assistance, and financial aid — by the governments of Iraq, Syria, and Libya.

ANO was headquartered in Baghdad from 1974 until 1983, when Iraqi President Saddam Hussein expelled the group in an attempt to persuade the United States to provide military support for Iraq in its war against Iran, a conflict which had begun three years earlier.

After leaving Iraq, ANO moved its base of operations to Syria until 1987, at which time that country likewise banished the organization, probably under U.S. pressure to distance itself from terrorists. This caused ANO to relocate yet again, this time to Libya.

When Libya, seeking to rid itself of international sanctions, eventually expelled ANO from its borders in 1998, ANO leader Abu Nidal found refuge in Iraq, which had reestablished a friendly relationship with ANO once the Iran-Iraq War ended in 1988. After 1998, Abu Nidal stayed in Iraq until the end of his life in 2002.

All told, ANO mounted terrorist operations in more than twenty countries—including a wide range of Western, Israeli, and Arab targets—killing about 300 people and wounding at least 600 more. At various times, the group also served as a mercenary terrorist force for radical Arab regimes. According to the Council on Foreign Relations: “In the mid-1980s, the group [ANO] was seen as the world’s most dangerous terrorist organization.” And indeed, it was in the Eighties that ANO was officially designated as a terrorist entity by the United States government. Among its most infamous attacks were:

• a June 1982 attempt to assassinate Israeli ambassador Shlomo Argov in London, an incident which helped trigger Israel’s invasion of Lebanon;
• simultaneous attacks by gunmen on U.S. and Israeli airport counters in Rome and Vienna on December 27, 1985, leaving 19 people dead and approximately 140 wounded;
• a September 5, 1986 attempted hijacking of a Pan Am airliner while it was still on the ground with 379 people aboard in Karachi, Pakistan;  23 people died and 130+ were injured (the hijackers had originally intended to crash the aircraft into the Israeli defense ministry in a suicide mission);
• a bomb that exploded on TWA Flight 840 as it traveled from Rome to Athens on April 2, 1986, killing 4 U.S. citizens – including a 9-month-old infant girl as well as her mother and grandmother – and injuring 5 others;
• a September 1986 shooting at the Neve Shalom synagogue in Istanbul, Turkey, that killed 22;
• a 1988 attack on a Greek passenger ferry called the City of Poros, killing 9 people and injuring nearly 100;
• the January 1991 assassination of Abu Iyad (the PLO’s second-in-command after Arafat) and another PLO official in Tunis; and
• the 1994 assassination of senior Jordanian diplomat Naeb Imran Maaytah in Beirut.

But by the late 1980s, ANO’s relevance as a terrorist threat in various nations was dwindling; it did not stage any major attacks against a Western target thereafter. Nor were any major attacks positively attributed to the group anywhere in the world after Abu Nidal’s death in 2002, though Jordanian officials reported their apprehension of an ANO member suspected of planning violence in their country in 2008. In 1999, Egypt and Libya closed down ANO offices in their countries.

As of 2003, ANO consisted of perhaps a mere 400 people based mostly in Iraq — plus several hundred militia men in cells located in Lebanon’s Palestinian refugee camps; it also had a presence in Sudan and Syria.

In light of its protracted inactivity since the start of the 21st century, ANO is now considered to be largely defunct. On May 10, 2017, U.S. Secretary of State Rex Tillerson announced: “Based upon a review of the Administrative Record assembled in this matter, and in consultation with the Attorney General and the Secretary of the Treasury, I conclude that the circumstances that were the basis for the designation of the Abu Nidal Organization as foreign terrorist organization have changed in such a manner as to warrant revocation of the designation.”

Further Reading:

Abu Nidal Organization
By The Council on Foreign Relations
May 27, 2009

Abu Nidal Organization
By Iraqi News
2003