Formation of Fatah
Al-Wazir used his time in Kuwait to further his ties with Arafat and other fellow Palestinian exiles he had met in Egypt. He and his comrades founded Fatah, a secular Palestinian nationalist guerrilla and political organization, sometime between 1959–60. He moved to Beirut after being put in charge of editing the newly-formed organization's monthly magazine Filastinuna, Nida' al-Hayat ("Our Palestine, the Call to Life"), as he was "the only one with a flair for writing."
He settled in Algeria in 1962, after a delegation of Fatah leaders, including Arafat and Farouk Kaddoumi, were invited there by Algerian President Ahmed Ben Bella. Al-Wazir remained there, opened a Fatah office and military training camp in Algiers and was included in an Algerian-Fatah delegation to Beijing in 1964. During his visit, he presented Fatah's ideas to various leaders of the People's Republic of China, including premier Zhou Enlai, and thus inaugurated Fatah's good relationship with China. He also toured other East Asian countries, establishing relations with North Korea and the Viet Cong. Al-Wazir supposedly "charmed Che Guevara" during Guevara's speech in Algiers. With his guerrilla credentials and his contacts with arms-supplying nations, he was assigned the role of recruiting and training fighters, thus establishing Fatah's armed wing al-Assifa (the Storm). While in Algiers, he recruited Abu Ali Iyad who became his deputy and one of the high-ranking commanders of al-Assifa in Syria and Jordan.
Read more about this topic: Khalil Al-Wazir
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