the Egyptian Muslim Brotherhood, and was briefly imprisoned for his membership with the organization, as it was prohibited in Egypt. In 1956, a few months after his release from prison, he received military training in Cairo. He also studied architectural engineering at the University of Alexandria, but he did not graduate. Al-Wazir was detained once again in 1957 for leading raids against Israel and was exiled to Saudi Arabia, finding work as a schoolteacher. He continued to teach after moving to Kuwait in 1959. Formation of Fatah Al-Wazir used his time in Kuwait to further his ties with Arafat and other fellow Palestinian exiles he had met in Egypt. He and his comrades founded Fatah, a Palestinian nationalist guerrilla and political organization, sometime between 1959 and 1960. He moved to Beirut after being put in charge of editing the newly formed organization's monthly magazine Filastinuna, Nida' al-Hayat ("Our Palestine, the Call to Life"), as he was "the only one with a flair for writing." He settled in Algeria in 1962, after a delegation of Fatah leaders, including Arafat and Farouk Kaddoumi, were invited there by Algerian President Ahmed Ben Bella. Al-Wazir remained there, opened a Fatah office and military training camp in Algiers and was included in an Algerian-Fatah delegation to Beijing in 1964. During his visit, he presented Fatah's ideas to various leaders of the People's Republic of China, including premier Zhou Enlai, and thus inaugurated Fatah's good relationship with China. He also toured other East Asian countries, establishing relations with North Korea and the Viet Cong. Al-Wazir supposedly "charmed Che Guevara" during Guevara's speech in Algiers. With his guerrilla credentials and his contacts with arms-supplying nations, he was assigned the role of recruiting and training fighters, thus establishing Fatah's armed wing al-Assifa (the Storm). While in Algiers, he recruited Abu Ali Iyad who became his deputy and one of the high-ranking commanders of al-Assifa in Syria and Jordan. Syria and post-Six-Day War Al-Wazir and the Fatah leadership settled in Damascus, Syria in 1965, in order take advantage of the large number of Palestine Liberation Army (PLA) members there. On 9 May 1966, he and Arafat were detained by Syrian police loyal to air marshal Hafez al-Assad after an incident where a pro-Syrian Palestinian leader, Yusuf Orabi was thrown out of the window of a three-story building and killed. Al-Wazir and Arafat were either considering uniting Fatah with Orabi's