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Israel-Palestine-Jordan

Amid tensions, Fatah offshoot accuses Islamist rivals of turning West Bank into Syria

2023-09-21

[IsraelTimes] In video, Tanzim militia accuses factions of seditious ties to Iran; PA officials accuse Hamas, a contraction of the Arabic words for "frothing at the mouth", of working with Salafi-jihadist forces in Leb
...an Iranian colony situated on the eastern Mediterranean, conveniently adjacent to Israel. Formerly inhabited by hardy Phoenecian traders, its official language is now Arabic, with the usual unpleasant side effects. The Leb civil war, between 1975 and 1990, lasted a little over 145 years and produced 120,000 fatalities. The average length of a ceasefire was measured in seconds. The Lebs maintain a precarious sectarian balance among Shiites, Sunnis, and about a dozeen flavors of Christians. It is the home of Hezbollah, which periodically starts a war with the Zionist Entity, gets Beirut pounded to rubble, and then declares victory and has a parade. The Lebs have the curious habit of periodically murdering their heads of state or prime ministers...
camp.

In a video circulating on social media since Tuesday, a dozen turbans of the pro-Fatah Tanzim militia accused a rival Islamist gang of turning the West Bank into "Syria, Yemen
...an area of the Arabian Peninsula sometimes mistaken for a country. It is populated by more antagonistic tribes and factions than you can keep track of...
and Iraq" — three Middle East countries wracked by civil wars over the past decade, with the involvement of Tehran.

In their video statement, the Tanzim members accused the Jenin Battalion — a local wing of the Paleostinian Islamic Jihad
...created after many members of the Egyptian Moslem Brotherhood decided the organization was becoming too moderate. Operations were conducted out of Egypt until 1981 when the group was exiled after the assassination of President Anwar Sadat. They worked out of Gaza until they were exiled to Lebanon in 1987, where they clove tightly to Hezbollah. In 1989 they moved to Damascus, where they remain a subsidiary of Hezbollah...
terror group — of conspiring with "Persian Shi’ite Iran" against Fatah, the "only Sunni weapon in the Arab homeland," in a bid to sow strife and chaos among the Paleostinian people.

The Tanzim militia is an armed offshoot of Fatah founded in 1995 by Yasser Arafat to counter rival Paleostinian Islamist groups. The militia, officially headed by Marwan Barghouti who is imprisoned in Israel for deadly terror attacks, has sought to siphon support from Islamist groups towards the PA leadership.

The Tanzim message introduced an atypical anti-Shiite element in Fatah’s rhetoric against opposing factions, evoking common anti-Shiite canards such as their "insulting the Companions of the Prophet [Muhammad]" — a reference to a theological dispute between Sunnis and Shiites on the legitimate successors to the Prophet.

Both the PIJ and Hamas, Fatah’s most prominent Islamist rivals, have made no secret of their close collaboration with Tehran, which supplies them with money and weaponry. Leaders of the two groups met with Iranian President Ebrahim Raisi in Damascus in May and again with Iranian Foreign Minister Hossein Amirabdollahian in early September in Beirut. Last year, PIJ chief Ziad Nakhaleh said his organization took "direct orders" from the Quds Force’s late commander Qassem Soleimani

and that rockets it used to attack Israel were provided by Iran.

The video statement came amid escalating tensions between the PA’s security services and terror groups in the northern West Bank. The Jenin Battalion is suspected of being behind recent attacks against PA security forces, which included shooting toward their headquarters in Jenin and a shooting against a patrol car of the customs police on September 18, in which four agents were maimed.

In response, the PA announced it had compiled a list of 30 Jenin Battalion members it is about to arrest, including some who are on Israel’s top wanted list, continuing an ongoing crackdown on the terror group.

The Jenin Battalion is also responsible for Tuesday’s festivities with the IDF in the Jenin refugee camp, in which four operatives were killed.

The Tanzim video came one day after the Fatah branch in Jenin issued a statement accusing its internal enemies of collaboration with an "Iranian-Islamic State
...formerly ISIS or ISIL, depending on your preference. Before that they were al-Qaeda in Iraq, as shaped by Abu Musab Zarqawi. They're really very devout, committing every atrocity they can find in the Koran and inventing a few more. They fling Allah around with every other sentence, but to hear western pols talk they're not really Moslems....
" axis (a contradiction, as Islamic State was born out of antagonism to Shiites and has carried out terror attacks inside Iran).

The allegation indicated an attempt by PA officials to group together radical Islamist rivals on multiple fronts. For nearly two months, Fatah forces have been engaged in another armed confrontation outside the West Bank, in the Ein el-Hilweh Paleostinian refugee camp in southern Lebanon, which erupted when a Fatah general was killed in late July.

Whee. A war of all against all.

Analysts on the PA’s Awda TV channel have claimed that the festivities between Fatah security forces and Islamist groups have been fueled by terrorist Salafi-jihadi elements infiltrating into Lebanon from Syria, with links to Islamic State and al-Qaeda. Such radical groups are referred to in Arabic as takfiri

...an adherent of takfir wal hijra, an offshoot of Salafism that regards everybody who doesn't agree with them as apostates who most be killed...
, for their practice of excommunicating (takfir) any Moslem who does not subjugate themselves to their turban interpretation of religion.

The presence of such turban groups is an established fact in Ein el-Hilweh, for instance, the camp was the birthplace of a radical Salafi group called Osbat al-Ansar, which was declared a terror organization after 9/11 for its ties to al-Qaeda, and bombed nightclubs and liquor stores in an attempt to establish an Islamic state in Lebanon.

Various PA sources have accused Hamas members in the Lebanese camp of having entered into a collaboration with jihadist groups. In an editorial in the PA’s official newspaper al-Hayat al-Jadida, Fatah Revolutionary Council member Muwaffaq Matar accused the "Islamic State-like" Hamas of using the support of other more radical terror groups in Ein el-Hilweh to advance its plans to control the Paleostinian political and security leadership, at the expense of the real goal — the struggle for Paleostinian "liberation."

Posted by:trailing wife

#1 Syria. I vote for Syria (sans Russians).

Posted by: Grom the Reflective 2023-09-21 00:58

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