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See Also in
Notorious Lives

Mohammed Atta al-Sayed

Osama Bin Laden

Khalid Shaikh Mohammed

Zacarias Moussaoui

Ilich Ramírez Sánchez.

Great Lives from History: Notorious Lives

Abu Nidal

by Eric Metchik

Palestinian terrorist

Cause of notoriety: Abu Nidal is considered responsible for terrorist acts in twenty countries and the deaths or injuries of more than nine hundred people.

Active: 1973-1991

Locale: Iraq, Syria, Libya, and Egypt

Early Life

Abu Nidal (AH-bew nee-DAHL) was the twelfth child in his family (eleven were born to his stepmother; he was the child of a sixteen-year-old maid). His father was a prosperous Palestinian merchant specializing in citrus fruit. When his father died in 1945, the rest of the family turned against Abu Nidal, and his mother was thrown out of the family home. He dropped out of third grade, and his childhood pain may have sown the seeds for his later cruelty.

Abu Nidal grew up during the tumultuous period of the birth of Israel, and his family moved to Nablus on the West Bank, then ruled by Jordan. There he became involved in the radical Ba’th Party, which nurtured Arab nationalist aspirations. After this party was crushed in Jordan by King Hussein, Abu Nidal moved to Riyadh, Saudi Arabia, where he went into business and founded a small terrorist cell. He became heavily involved in Yasir Arafat’s Fatah movement. Following the June, 1967, war, he was expelled by Saudi Arabia as a subversive and went to Amman, Jordan. There he aligned himself with Palestinian guerrillas planning violent attacks against the Israelis.

Criminal Career

Abu Nidal gained notoriety for establishing a terrorist network that carried out a series of attacks starting in 1973, after a split with Arafat and the Palestine Liberation Organization (PLO). These included embassy attacks in Europe, airplane hijackings, and assassinations of Arab political figures seen as hostile to the Palestinian national cause.

The first incident, an attack on the Saudi embassy in Paris on September 5, 1973, set the tone for many that followed. Thirteen hostages were taken, and the terrorists threatened to bomb the building unless Jordan would agree to release prisoner Abu Dawud, one of the masterminds of the 1972 “Black September” kidnappings and murders of eleven Israeli Olympic athletes in Munich. The standoff ended with a surrender after three days, but in the interim Kuwait agreed to pay King Hussein twelve million dollars for his release of Dawud.

Following this incident, PLO officials tried to reason with Abu Nidal that these types of attacks did not further the Palestinian cause, and in fact set it back. Iraq claimed credit for ordering the embassy attack and said that Abu Nidal’s group had been contracted to put the plan into action. Any reputation as a visionary that Abu Nidal might have enjoyed waned, and he came to be viewed as simply a “terrorist for sale” to the highest bidder.

One especially high-profile incident served to confirm this assessment. On December 27, 1985, the El Al (Israeli national airline) ticket counters in Rome and Vienna were attacked by Abu Nidal operatives, who threw grenades and fired at random in an attempt to kill as many people as possible. Eighteen victims died in these attacks; scores of others were wounded.

The random cruelty of this act marked Abu Nidal as sadistic and psychopathic, tendencies that came to bear on the treatment even of those within his organization. No one was allowed to leave the group, and most members were suspected of disloyalty, even of serving as double agents. The most primitive forms of torture were used to interrogate them, and large groups were killed and buried in mass graves in the late 1980’s.

Abu Nidal died on August 16, 2002, in a luxury villa in Baghdad. Iraqi forces surrounded the house, allegedly on the orders of Iraqi dictator Saddam Hussein, who felt threatened by him. There were conflicting reports as to whether Abu Nidal shot himself to death or was killed by the Iraqi gunmen.

Impact

Abu Nidal’s acts of terrorism served to weaken Arafat’s Fatah organization. They also promoted radicalization of Arab terrorist groups, inspiring them to commit acts in foreign countries on a scale that had not been previously envisaged. Abu Nidal’s resistance to advice from more moderate Arabs concerning the futility of his approach in furthering the cause of a Palestinian state served as a model to others who succeeded him and continued with similar tactics. Much about Abu Nidal remains unclear, even after his death. One scenario concerns possible Israeli infiltration of his organization and its effects on the trajectory of the terrorist activities.

Further Reading

1 

Melman, Yossi. The Master Terrorist: The True Story of Abu-Nidal. New York: Adama Books, 1986. A detailed analysis of Abu Nidal’s methodology, including an accounting of each terrorist act perpetrated by his group.

2 

Post, Jerrold M. “When Hatred Is Bred in the Bone: Psycho-cultural Foundations of Contemporary Terrorism.” Political Psychology 26, no. 4 (2005): 615-636. A psychological analysis of terrorism in the Abu Nidal organization.

3 

Seale, Patrick. Abu Nidal: A Gun for Hire. New York: Random House, 1992. A comparative analysis of all aspects of Abu Nidal’s terrorist activities, including their historical and political development. The author is considered to be the official biographer of Abu Nidal.

Citation Types

Type
Format
MLA 9th
Metchik, Eric. "Abu Nidal." Great Lives from History: Notorious Lives, edited by Carl L. Bankston III, Salem Press, 2007. Salem Online, online.salempress.com/articleDetails.do?articleName=GLN_1003.
APA 7th
Metchik, E. (2007). Abu Nidal. In C. L. Bankston III (Ed.), Great Lives from History: Notorious Lives. Salem Press. online.salempress.com.
CMOS 17th
Metchik, Eric. "Abu Nidal." Edited by Carl L. Bankston III. Great Lives from History: Notorious Lives. Hackensack: Salem Press, 2007. Accessed December 14, 2025. online.salempress.com.