Fedayeen

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The Arabic term fedayeen (from Arabic الفدائي al-fidāʾī  'the one who sacrifices', pluralالفدائيون al-fidāʾiyyūn orالفدائيين al-fidāʾiyyīn ) basically denotes members of religious or political groups who are willing to sacrifice their lives for one another or their cause.

The word was coined in its original form by the assassins , who mostly accepted their own death with their assassination attempts.

Middle East after 1948

During and after the first Israeli-Arab war in 1948/49, many Arab residents of Palestine had fled to neighboring countries or were expelled there. Estimates of their number range from around 750,000 to 800,000. Most civilians were asked by Arab troops to leave their homes; a minority was displaced by Israeli forces. The majority fled for fear of war. The Arab refugees lived in refugee camps in Jordan , Syria , Lebanon and Egypt . Small groups came together that hid among the refugees in the camps and carried out terrorist attacks on the other side of the Israeli border. Egypt trained these "fedayeen" and armed them. It was not until 1953 that Israel struck back with acts of retaliation. In 1956, during the Suez Crisis, the Fedayeen provided Israel with a reason to occupy the Sinai Peninsula and shut down their bases in Egypt.

As a result, several Palestinian fedayeen organizations emerged with different ideological focuses and a different degree of independence from the host countries in which they maintained their bases. The best known of these was Fatah , founded in 1959 under the leadership of Yasser Arafat , one of the member groups of the Palestine Liberation Organization (PLO) founded in 1964 .

After the Six Day War in 1967, the Fedayeen began fighting Israel outside of the Middle East . The Palestinian terrorists were viewed by many left groups in the West as champions of the international world revolution and idealized accordingly. The large number of volunteer fighters soon became a threat not only to Israel, but also to the Arab nation-states in which the PLO settled. During Black September 1970, the PLO was driven out of Jordan, after which many of the fedayeen went to Lebanon. There they influenced the unstable balance of power in the multiethnic country and were seen as a decisive factor in the outbreak of the Lebanese civil war .

Iraq

In addition, Saddam Hussein also called his bodyguards Fedayeen (see also: Saddam Fedayeen ).

Iran

The Fedajin-e Islam , an Iranian organization, have been involved in various assassinations since it was founded in 1948 by Ayatollah Abol-Ghasem Kashani . B. against Prime Minister Ali Razmara and Prime Minister Hossein Ala . During the Islamic Revolution , this "unofficial" organization was temporarily led by Ayatollah Sadegh Khalkali .

literature

Individual evidence

  1. ^ The Encyclopaedia of Islam. New Edition sv FIDĀʾĪ
  2. ^ Benny Morris: 1948 - A History of the First Arab-Israeli War. New Haven 2008, pp. 407-415, pp. 77, pp. 159 f.
  3. ^ Rashid Khalidi: The Palestinians and 1948: the underlying causes of failure. In: Eugene L. Rodan, Avi Shlaim (Eds.): The War for Palestine. 2nd Edition. Cambridge 2007, p. 12 ff.
  4. ↑ Nadine Picaudou: The Historiography of the 1948 Wars. In: Jacques Semelin: Online Encyclopedia of Mass Violence. 2008, pp. 2-14.
  5. ↑ Bruce Hoffman: Terrorism - The Undeclared War: New Dangers of Political Violence. Frankfurt 2006, ISBN 3-10-033010-2 , p. 113.
  6. ^ Benny Morris: The Birth of the Palestinian Refugee Problem Revisited. 2nd Edition. Cambridge 2004, p. 89 f.
  7. ↑ Bruce Hoffman: Terrorism - The Undeclared War: New Dangers of Political Violence. Frankfurt 2006, ISBN 3-10-033010-2 , p. 113 ff.
  8. ^ David Schiller: A Battlegroup Divided: The Palestinian Fedayeen. In: David C. Rapaport (Ed.): Inside Terrorist Organizations. Frank Cass, London 2001, pp. 90-108, here: pp. 94ff. (English)
  9. ↑ Sabine Damir-Geilsdorf (2004): War in the Name of Islam? Negotiations and transformations of religious concepts using the example of the Islamic "actions of martyrs" in the Palestine conflict.