The
Black September Organization (
Arabic ????? ????? ???????,
munazzamat aylul al-aswad) was a
Palestinian militant group (against civilians and non-military targets), founded in 1970. The group's name derives from the
Black September conflict begun on 16 September 1970, when
King Hussein of
Jordan declared military rule in response to a
fedayeen coup d’état to seize his kingdom — resulting in the deaths or expulsion of thousands of Palestinians from Jordan. The BSO began as a small cell of
Fatah men determined to take revenge upon King Hussein and the Jordanian army. Recruits from the
PFLP,
as-Sa'iqa, and other groups also joined.
The BSO is notorious for the kidnap and murder of eleven Israeli athletes and officials, and the murder of a German policeman, during the 1972 Olympic Games in Munich, Germany.
There is disagreement among historians, journalists, and primary sources about the nature of the BSO and the extent to which it was controlled by Fatah, the PLO faction controlled at the time by Yasser Arafat.
In his book Stateless, Salah Khalaf (Abu Iyad), Arafat's chief of security and a founding member of Fatah, wrote that "Black September was not a terrorist organization, but was rather an auxiliary unit of the resistance movement, at a time when the latter was unable to fully realize its military and political potential. The members of the organization always denied any ties between their organization and Fatah or the PLO."
