Popular Front for the Liberation of Palestine – General Command
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Popular Front for the Liberation of Palestine - General Command
الجبهة الشعبية لتحرير فلسطين – القيادة العامة |
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| General Secretary | Ahmed Jibril |
| Founder | Ahmed Jibril |
| Founded | 1968 |
| Headquarters | Damascus, Syria |
| Paramilitary wings | Jihad Jibril Brigades |
| Ideology |
Arab nationalism Palestinian nationalism |
| International affiliation | Linked to the Syrian Government |
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| Website | |
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The Popular Front for the Liberation of Palestine – General Command (Arabic: الجبهة الشعبية لتحرير فلسطين – القيادة العامة) or PFLP-GC is a Palestinian nationalist militant organisation based in Syria. It was founded in 1968 by Ahmed Jibril after splitting from the Popular Front for the Liberation of Palestine (PFLP). In the 1970s and 1980s it was involved in the Palestinian insurgency in South Lebanon and launched a number of attacks against Israeli soldiers and civilians; including the Avivim school bus massacre (1970), the bombing of Swissair Flight 330 (1970), the Kiryat Shmona massacre (1974) and the Night of the Gliders (1987). Since the late 1980s it has been largely inactive, but during the Syrian Civil War it has been fighting on the side of the Syrian government.
The group has a paramilitary wing called the Jihad Jibril Brigades.
Jibril joined with George Habash in 1967 as more or less an equal partner in the PFLP leadership. When he quickly tired of the group's lack of field initiative, he was therefore still able to leave while retaining a significant retainer of his previous supporters. One of his most hated enemies within the group, Naif Hawatmeh, unintentionally provided him with the pretext: While Jibril wrestled with Habash over why the Popular Front was so dependent on theoretical discussion rather than armed struggle, Hawatmeh tried to influence the PFLP in the direction of an ideology as leftist as possible.
Jibril decided that Hawatmeh's theorizing was chafing the PFLP and producing an organization of impotent intellectuals, and declared as such when he formed the General Command. Habash, he stated, had become a puppet to the professors of the exile, the elite among the refugees who were well-educated and wealthy, yet preached class revolution to the masses in the camps.
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