Mia Bloom, Dying to Kill: the Global Phenomenon of Suicide Terror.
NY: Columbia University Press, (forthcoming March 2005).
1
Chapter 6 Terror 101: The Transnational Contagion Effects of Suicide Bombing
Twenty years ago, Claire Sterling linked countless terrorist organizations together
-- contending that they all provided each other with some level of support.
1
Sterling
demonstrated how an assortment of terrorist groups furnished one another with safe
houses, funding and operational support. More recently other authors, like Richard
English, have substantiated international terrorist connections by explaining how the IRA
(Irish Republican Army) received weapons from Libya, and cultivated connections in the
1970s with Lebanon, Syria, and East Germany.
2
The Popular Front for the Liberation of
Palestine (PFLP) was at the forefront of training other groups as diverse ideologically or
ethnically as the IRA, Germany’s Baader-Meinhof Group, the Italian Red Brigades, the
Japanese Red Army, Turkish left wing revolutionaries, and various European Right Wing
anti-government factions. She highlighted how groups seemingly unconnected
ideologically worked together closely, and used as an excellent example the Japanese
Red Army attack at Lod Airport in Israel in support of the Palestinian cause to underscore
the idea of strange bedfellows.
3
Leila Khaled, one of the PFLP’s most notorious operatives, corroborated this link
between organizations when she revealed that: “…the Popular Front sen[t] instructors to
Turkey in order to train Turkish youth in urban guerilla fighting, kidnappings, plane
hijackings, and other matters…in the same way as it train[ed] Ethiopians and
revolutionaries from underdeveloped countries.”
4
1
Claire Sterling, The Terror Network, NY: Holt, Reinhart, and Winston, 1981, 10.
2
Richard English, Armed Struggle: the History of the IRA. NY: Oxford University Press, 2003, 167.
3
Sterling, 126
4
Leila Khaled Interview in Hurriyet May 26, 1971 cited in Sterling, op.cit., 124
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Convention