A Fist in the Hornet's Nest by Richard Engel

Author:Richard Engel
Language: eng
Format: mobi
ISBN: 9781401399276
Publisher: Hachette Books
Published: 0101-01-01T00:00:00+00:00

I met Abu Abbas in Baghdad shortly before the war at the headquarters of his group, the Palestinian Liberation Front (PLF). The office was a spacious villa guarded by three men with assault rifles and surrounded by a high cement wall. Parked in the villa’s courtyard was a high-end BMW and a Land Rover, evidence that Abu Abbas—in Iraq since 1994—had grown rich in his new home, mainly from the oil smuggling business he was involved in with Saddam’s son Uday.

Abu Abbas, a strong man with broad shoulders, a thick mustache and a deep voice, greeted me in his office with a firm handshake. After a coffee and chitchat about the impending war—which he thought was unavoidable—Abu Abbas proudly told me that he was mainly responsible for channeling money from Iraq to the families of Palestinian suicide bombers in the West Bank and Gaza Strip. The money came from Saddam. It was his way of supporting the intifada. Relatives of suicide bombers were given checks for between $10,000 and $25,000, according to Abu Abbas’s representative in the Palestinian territories, Rakad Salim, whom I’d interviewed in Ramallah shortly before he was arrested by Israeli forces in October 2002.

In Baghdad, Abu Abbas seemed somewhat nervous about the approaching war despite his calm, sturdy demeanor. He asked me several times if I thought the war was really coming and how far I thought the United States was prepared to go. Abu Abbas had good reason to worry. He was wanted by Italian authorities for the 1985 hijacking of the Italian cruise ship the Achille Lauro and the murder of Leon Klinghoffer, a sixty-nine-year-old wheelchair-bound Jewish-American passenger. Abu Abbas told me his men had never intended to hijack the Achille Lauro, but planned to use weapons they’d smuggled on board to carry out an attack at the Israeli port of Haifa. Abu Abbas said his men had only commandeered the cruise ship after they were discovered by the ship’s security while at sea.

Abu Abbas was ultimately arrested shortly after the fall of Baghdad. He’d tried to flee to Syria, but was turned away at the border and later picked up near Baghdad by US special forces.

The fact that Abu Abbas had operated so openly in a society as controlled as Iraq’s is evidence that Saddam Hussein didn’t consider him a threat. Saddam’s relationship with Abu Nidal, a man whom British Middle East expert and author Patrick Seale described as “a gun for hire,” was significantly different.

Abu Nidal had a long history with Iraq. He was based in Baghdad in the mid-1970s when Yasser Arafat’s Fatah movement expelled him for being too radical and for allegedly plotting to murder his Palestinian opponents. Saddam Hussein found the then stranded and enraged Abu Nidal (an Arabic nom de guerre that means “father of resistance”) to be a useful operative to settle scores with Iraq’s longtime rival Syria. Saddam, however, expelled Abu Nidal from the country in 1983 to win US support for Iraq’s war with Iran. Abu Nidal moved to Syria and then to Libya, offering his services as a world-class hit man.

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