Salah Khalaf

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Salah Mesbah Khalaf (Arabic صلاح خلف), also known as Abu Iyad (Arabic أبو إياد) (born 1933 – January 14, 1991) was deputy chief and head of intelligence for the Palestine Liberation Organization, and the second most senior official of Fatah after Yasser Arafat.

Salah Khalaf was a literature student from Gaza however he moved to Cairo in the early 1950s. There he became a card-carrying member of the Muslim Brotherhood. In 1951, he met Yasser Arafat at the al-Azhar University during a meeting of the General Union of Palestinian Students. In 1958 he founded the organization of Fatah with Arafat and other Gazan Palestinians in Kuwait.[1]

Khalaf opposed Arafat's alliance with Saddam Hussein and vouched to stay neutral during the Persian Gulf War in 1991. He was assassinated in Tunis in the same year by an Abu Nidal operative.[1] He was accused by Israel and the United States of having founded the Black September organization.

[edit] Further reading

My Home, My Land: A Narrative of the Palestinian Struggle, Abu Iyad with Eric Rouleau, New York 1981, ISBN 0812909364

[edit] Notes

  1. ^ a b Aburish, Said K. (1998). From Defender to Dictator. New York: Bloomsbury Publishing. ISBN 1-58234-049-8. 
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