Fatah - Armed Factions

Armed Factions

Fatah has maintained a number of militant groups since its founding. Its mainstream military branch is al-Assifa. Fatah is generally considered to have had a strong involvement in terrorism in the past, though unlike its rival Islamist faction Hamas, Fatah is no longer regarded as a terrorist organization by any government. Fatah used to be designated terrorist under Israeli law and was considered terrorist by the United States Department of State and United States Congress until it renounced terrorism in 1988.

Fatah has since its inception created, led or sponsored a number of armed groups and militias, some of which have had an official standing as the movement's armed wing, and some of which have not been publicly or even internally recognized as such. The group has also dominated various PLO and Palestinian Authority forces and security services which were/are not officially tied to Fatah, but in practice have served as wholly pro-Fatah armed units, and been staffed largely by members. The original name for Fatah's armed wing was al-Assifa (The Storm), and this was also the name Fatah first used in its communiques, trying for some time to conceal its identity. This name has since been applied more generally to Fatah armed forces, and does not correspond to a single unit today. Other militant groups associated with Fatah include:

• Force 17 – Force 17 was created by Yassir Arafat, and plays a role akin to the Presidential Guard for senior Fatah leaders.
• Black September – Black September was a group formed by leading Fatah members in 1971, following the "Black September" events in Jordan, to clandestinely organize attacks that Fatah did not want to be openly associated with. These included strikes against leading Jordanian politicians, as a means of exacting vengeance and raising the price for attacking the Palestinian movement; and also, most controversially, for "international operations" (e.g. the Munich Olympics attack), intended both to put pressure on the US, European countries and Israel, and to raise the visibility of the Palestinian cause, and to upstage radical rivals such as the PFLP. Fatah publicly disassociated itself from the group, but it is widely believed that it enjoyed Arafat's direct or tacit backing. It was discontinued in 1973–1974, as Fatah's political line shifted again, and the Black September operations and the strategy behind them were seen as having become a political liability, rather than an asset.
• Fatah Hawks – The Fatah Hawks was an armed militia active mainly until the mid-90s.
• Tanzim – The Tanzim (Organization) was a branch of Fatah under the leadership of Marwan Barghouti, with roots in the activism of the First Intifada, which carried out armed attacks in the early days of the Second Intifada. It has later been subsumed by or sidlined by the al-Aqsa Martyrs' Brigade.
• Al-Aqsa Martyrs' Brigades – The al-Aqsa Martyrs Brigades were created in the Second Intifada to bolster the organization's militant standing vis-à-vis the rival Hamas movement, which had taken the lead in attacks on Israel after 1993, and was gaining rapidly in popularity with the advent of the Intifada. The Brigades are locally organized and have been said to suffer from poor cohesion and internal discipline, at times ignoring ceasefires and other initiatives announced by the central Fatah leadership. They are generally seen as tied to the "young guard" of Fatah politics, organizing young members on the street level, but it is not clear that they form a faction in themselves inside Fatah politics; rather, different Brigades units may be tied to different Fatah factional leaders.