The Abu Nidal Organization (ANO) is the most common name for the Palestinian nationalist militant group Fatah – The Revolutionary Council (Fatah al-Majles al-Thawry). The ANO is named after its founder Abu Nidal. It was created by a split from Yasser Arafat's Fatah faction of the PLO in 1974. The group has been designated as a terrorist organization by the United States, the United Kingdom, Japan, Israel, Canada, and the European Union. The ANO was secular and anti-Western, but was not particularly associated with any ideology, or at least no such foundation was communicated. The organization was strongly linked with Abu Nidal's personal agenda. The group carried out hijackings, assassinations and kidnappings of diplomats, and attacks on synagogues – 90 attacks during the period 1974–1992. Nidal died in Baghdad in 2002. Formation and background The Abu Nidal Organization was established by Sabri Khalil al-Bannah (Abu Nidal), a Palestinian Arab nationalist and a former Ba'ath party member. Al-Bannah established his faction within the PLO, just prior the Black September in Jordan, and following internal disagreements within the PLO. During Fatah's Third Congress in Damascus in 1971, he emerged as the leader of a leftist alliance against Yasser Arafat. Abu Nidal's first independent operation took place on September 5, 1973, when five gunmen using the name Al-Iqab ("The Punishment") seized the Saudi embassy in Paris, taking 11 hostages and threatening to blow up the building if Abu Dawud was not released from jail in Jordan, where he had been arrested in February 1973 for an attempt on King Hussein's life. Following the incident, Mahmoud Abbas of the PLO took flight to Iraq to meet Abu Nidal. In the meeting Abbas became so angry, that he stormed out of the meeting, followed by the other PLO delegates, and from that point on, the PLO regarded Abu Nidal as a mercenary. Two months later, just after the October 1973 Yom Kippur War, during discussions about convening a peace conference in Geneva, the Abu Nidal Organization (ANO) hijacked a KLM airliner, using the name of the Arab Nationalist Youth Organization. The operation was intended to send a signal to Fatah not to send representatives to any peace conference. In response, Arafat officially expelled Abu Nidal from Fatah in March 1974, and the rift between the two groups, and the two men, was complete. In June the same year, ANO formed the Rejectionist Front, a political