Europe in the 1970s and 1980s was flooded with a wave of Islamic radicalism. Muslim terrorist organizations planted bombs, hijacked planes, murdered politicians ... They were often supported by various local nationalist, leftist and anarchist militias.
One of the most famous terrorist organizations of the time was the Palestinian "Black September". The group conducted its first spectacular action on November 28, 1971. It was then that four terrorists opened fire on Jordan's Prime Minister Wasfi at-Talla in broad daylight in front of the Cairo Sheraton Hotel.
Then one of the murderers knelt by the corpse of at-Talla and, in a ritual gesture, drank his blood flowing on the pavement. Already in December, the organization tried to carry out another coup. This time, the killers targeted the Jordanian ambassador to London, Zaid al-Rifai. However, the action ended in failure.
We belong to Black September!
However, the operations carried out in February 1972 were successful. In Hamburg, the warehouse of the company Ad. Strüver KG and the Esso gas station. In the Netherlands, the same fate befell the gas switching station. On May 9 of the same year, terrorists hijacked a Belgian "Sabena" passenger plane with 97 people on board. The hijacked machine landed at Lod Airport in Israel. The bandits then demanded the release of several hundred of their comrades held in Israeli prisons. However, the Jewish commandos recaptured the hostages. It was the first successful operation of this type in the world.
Relatives of the victims of the most famous "Black September" attack, which took place during the Olympic Games in Munich, waiting at the airport for the funeral procession.
The most barbaric action "Black September" was carried out during the Olympic Games in Munich on September 5, 1972. Terrorists attacked the Olympic village and took Israeli athletes hostage. As a result of an inept attempt to regain them by the German police, 11 Jews and 5 assassins were killed. People all over the globe experienced a shock then. The world of sport, previously associated with noble and pure competition, was attacked. Worse, the Israelis' drama was watched live by approximately 500 million TV viewers. It is hard to find a more meaningful propaganda success.
In September 1973, the Black September terrorists seized the Saudi Arabian embassy in Paris. They demanded the release of one of their members, Abu Daud, held in a Jordanian prison. The action, however, was unsuccessful. At the same time, the organization carried out another operation, this time in Rome. Five Palestinians armed with Striela-2 anti-aircraft missiles have blurred there in one of the buildings near the airport and planned to shoot down an Israeli passenger plane. Fortunately, the attack was thwarted by the Italian police.
Carlos aka Jackal
Venezuelan Ilich Ramirez Sanchez was baptized as a terrorist of all time, and his myth was strengthened by the media and… writers of sensational novels. He was a communist by conviction, and he learned his murderous trade in the 1960s in a terrorist training camp in Cuba. Then he landed at the Patrice Lumumba University in Moscow. However, he was removed from it, among other things, for his riotous lifestyle.
In the early 1970s, he joined the People's Palestinian Liberation Front. Then he also took the famous pseudonym - Carlos. His first action was to place a bomb on board a Swissair passenger jet flying from Zurich to Tel Aviv. As a result of its outbreak on February 21, 1970, 47 people were killed.
One of the more famous assassinations of Carlos was the attempt to kill Joseph Edward Sieff in London in December 1973. Sieff was a Jew, co-owner of the Marks &Spencer chain and vice president of the British Zionist Federation. Sanchez entered the businessman's house, confused his maid, and in the bathroom, at close range, fired a shot at the victim. However, the bomber's pistol jammed, forcing him to flee immediately.
Sieff survived. The bullet ricocheted off his teeth and lodged in his neck. But in Paris in 1975, Carlos got his way. He murdered two French secret service officers in cold blood. From that moment on, the French swore revenge against him.
The remains of the Swissair plane on which Carlos planted the bomb, killing as many as 47 people.
On December 21, 1975, an event took place that brought Carlos international fame. He was one of the members of a six-person terrorist commando that broke into the OPEC ministerial meeting in Vienna. The bandits killed 3 people, injured 7, and took 81 hostage. The Austrian authorities, fearing further victims, succumbed to blackmail and put the plane at the disposal of the criminals. This then circulated almost throughout the Middle East as more countries refused to accept it.
The machine landed only in Algeria, where the attackers handed themselves over to the local police. However, they were quickly transported to Libya. Ultimately, French intelligence established that the initiator of the kidnapping was Muammar Gaddafi. Libyan leaders were not in favor of talks about lowering oil prices in Vienna.
As the operation in Vienna failed, Carlos was excluded from the ranks of the People's Front for the Liberation of Palestine. So he created his own organization, becoming a mercenary terrorist. His clients included, among others:Saddam Hussein, Hafiz Al-Assad and Fidel Castro. In addition, he cooperated with such terrorist organizations as:the Italian Red Brigades or the German Red Army Faction.
Carlos's two Middle Eastern principals in one photo. On the left Iraqi leader Saddam Hussein, in the center Syrian leader Hafiz Al-Assad.
The subsequent actions of the "super-terrorist" include the unsuccessful attack on the French nuclear power plant Super-Phenix. The attack on the French high-speed TGV train, carried out on December 31, 1983, ended with a success, fortunately limited. Two people died as a result of the bomb explosion. Carlos was arrested by the French services only in 1994. He was sentenced to life imprisonment.
Abu Nidal and Abu Abbas
Equally infamous in those years was Abu Nidal, the uncompromising murderer responsible for a series of attacks in Europe. In one of them, on June 3, 1982, he tried to kill the Israeli ambassador Shlomo Argov in London. In December 1985, Abu Nidal struck the airports in Vienna and Rome. His men threw grenades into the crowd of passengers waiting in line at the ticket offices, then fired machine guns at them. 14 people were killed then and over a hundred were injured.
The attack on the Greek cruise ship "City of Poros", which took place on July 11, 1988 near Athens, was also loud. The bandits used grenades and machine guns again. As a result, 9 tourists died on board the cruise ship and 98 were injured.
Greek cruise ship City of Poros one month before the terrorist attack.
The Palestinian terrorist Abu Abbas was the leader of the group that hijacked the Italian passenger ship Achille Lauro on October 7, 1985, which was on a cruise with tourists between Mediterranean ports. There was also a group of Poles on board, including:the singer Wojciech Gąssowski and the dancer Małgorzata Potocka with the "Sabat" ballet group. In total, there were about 500 people on board at that time.
The Palestinians demanded that Israel release their comrades held in prisons. When the Jews refused, the bandits retaliated by murdering a 69-year-old Jewish American, Leon Klinghoffer, and then throwing his body into the sea.
As the whole drama took place off the coast of Egypt, the government of that country entered into negotiations with the hijackers. They managed to negotiate the release of the hostages in exchange for the plane. Thanks to him, the terrorists were supposed to go to Tunisia. But they never got there. On the way, the machine was intercepted by American fighters and forced to land in Sicily. The kidnappers were brought before an Italian court and were sentenced to many years in prison. The brain of the operation, Abu Abbas, was arrested on April 14, 2003 by US special forces in captured Baghdad. He died in prison a year later.
State - terrorist
Terrorism was the domain of not only various radical Islamic organizations. It was also successfully cultivated by the so-called "rogue states". Among them, especially in the 1980s, Libya was in the lead - ruled firmly by Colonel Muammar Gaddafi. In addition to sponsoring Islamic groups, the country also participated in direct actions through its secret service officers. Gaddafi, one could say, even declared war on the West. However, he started by "hunting" his own citizens.
In 1980-87, Gaddafi agents murdered 25 Libyan dissidents in Western Europe. An unprecedented event in history happened on April 17, 1984 in London. It was then that a hail of bullets rained down on Libyan emigrants holding a peaceful demonstration in front of the Libyan embassy. There were shots from the embassy buildings! 11 demonstrators were injured then and a young British policewoman was killed.
An equally unusual event took place on June 27, 1980 at the Tyrrhenian Sea. On that day, the Italian Itavia DC-9 passenger jet was blown apart by an explosion, killing 81 people. The details of the accident have never been released because the Italian government has successfully covered it up. However, it is directly related to the disaster of the Libyan MiG-23, found in the mountains of Italian Calabria.
The remains of the DC-9 plane, which was torn apart by an explosion in the Tyrrhenian Sea in 1980, deposited in an Italian museum.
Two machines of this type were to take off in order to intercept a French plane transporting weapons for Libyan opponents. Gaddafi had been previously warned about the French initiative by the Italian services. A fight ensued between the MiGs and the French fighters covering the transport. One of the Libyans was shot down, and the stray rocket also hit the unlucky DC-9. Interestingly, his flight was monitored by Italian military radars, which at that critical moment were to suffer a "failure" and no record of the shot down has survived.
Another place where Libyan agents made their mark was West Berlin. On April 5, 1986, a bomb exploded in the La Belle disco, fashionable among American soldiers. It was Gaddafi's retaliation for the Libyans' defeat of the American fleet in the Gulf of Great Sirte, which had taken place 11 days earlier. Two American soldiers and a Turkish girl were killed in the attack. 229 other people were injured.
On December 21, 1988, the most famous attack involving the Libyan services was undoubtedly the case. It was then that a bomb on board a Pan Am Boeing 747 exploded over the Scottish town of Lockerbie. As a result of this catastrophe, 270 people died. A similar event also happened a few months later. On September 19, 1989, a French UTA DC-10 passenger jet exploded over the Sahara desert. 170 passengers and crew members were killed. One of the organizers of this attack was Muammar Gaddafi's brother-in-law.
Lockerbie wreckage just after crashing over Scotland.
Two decades of fear
European terrorist organizations willingly collaborated with Islamic fighters. One of them was the leftist Red Army Faction (RAF) founded in West Germany in the late 1960s, also known from the names of its founders as the Baader-Meinhof group. Members of this organization underwent training in Al-Fatah camps in Jordan. The main targets of their activities were the heads of West German corporations and officers of the American army.
In total, 34 people were killed and several hundred injured in the RAF series of attacks. Among other things, the group had a failed attempt to assassinate the commander-in-chief of NATO forces in Europe, General Alexander Haig. One of her last victims was Alfred Herrhausen, president of Deutsche Bank, murdered in a carefully prepared bomb attack on November 30, 1989.
The first violin in the RAF was played by Gudrun Ensslin and Urlike Meinhof, tough and uncompromising terrorists. Although they were not Muslim, their attitude was very similar to the heroines of the book "Wives of Jihadists" by Matthieu Suc. These women were related to the terrorists who attacked the editorial office of the Parisian weekly "Charlie Hebdo" in January 2015. They amazed the writer with their uncompromising attitude towards French investigators. The German women were almost the same as the jihadists - after their arrest, none of them broke.
Are modern jihadists following in the footsteps of RAF members? Pictured is Ulrike Meinhof as a young journalist in 1976.
More than 16,000 acts of terrorism have been recorded in Europe since 1970. Most of them were carried out in the 70's and 80's. During these two decades, nearly 5,000 people were killed in attacks. The years 1980 and 1988 were record-breaking in this respect, when about 400 inhabitants of our continent lost their lives. Until the mid-1990s, there were an average of 10 attacks per day. It may be surprising, then, but Europe of the last twenty years is a much safer place than in the decades that preceded it.
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Their names are Izzana, Diane, Sumja and they shared their lives with terrorists. The media and the police have long ignored these women, considering them to be victims cut off from the world by a veil, but today they have become the only chance to understand the world of jihadists.
All these women - converts, emigrants or the highest French aristocracy, are united by the fact that hidden under the niqab, they saw men radicalize and armor themselves.
The extraordinary book "Wives of Jihadists" is about them.