Historical Dictionary of Terrorism Third Edition

192 • FEDAYEENas U.S. spies and denouncing the government of President MuhammadKhatami for its encouragement of cultural exchanges betweenAmericans and Iranians.3. The Palestinian Fedayeen. With the rise in Palestinian terroristand guerrilla attacks on Israel and Israeli targets, the term Fedayeencame to be used by Palestinians to designate guerrilla fighters attackingIsrael without being exclusively reserved for the fighters of anysingle Palestinian group. The organizations that sponsor Fedayeenfighters dominate the Palestine Liberation Organization (PLO) andare known as tanzimat.4. The Fedayan-i Khalq-i Iran. The People’s Fedayan of Iran was aMarxist guerrilla group that split from the Iranian Communist Party in1963. Its members were mainly university students who received guerrillatraining in PLO camps in Lebanon and South Yemen. On 8 February1971 the Fedayan tried to start a guerrilla war against the Iraniangovernment in the forested regions around Siahkhal in Gilan Province,on the Caspian Sea, but were crushed by regular army troops. Thesurvivors of the Siahkhal affair tried then to organize urban guerrillawarfare but accomplished little until the revolution of 1978–1979gave them the opportunity to participate in street fighting and attackson police and army barracks. Following the victory of the revolution,the Fedayan’s open following grew to include as many as 50,000 adherents.In the face of widespread popular support for the regime ofthe Ayatollah Ruhallah Khomeini, the Fedayan temporized in themistaken expectation that the situation would ripen in favor of anotherrevolution along Marxist lines. This temporizing cost the Fedayan thesupport of disaffected Iranian middle-class students and intellectuals,who were attracted instead to the rival Mujahideen-i Khalq, which tooka more forthright stand against the clerical regime.Internal dissent over the group’s relationship with the clericalregime led to a split into a minority faction that advocated armedstruggle with the regime and a majority faction that continued totemporize. With the crackdown on the Mujahideen in June 1981,other armed leftist groups, such as the Fedayan-i Khalq, were crushedas well. Many surviving Fedayan joined other leftists in an abortiveguerrilla campaign in the region of Amol near the Caspian Sea inwhich, in a curious replay of the Siahkhal affair of the previous decade,they were crushed on 9 November 1981 by army troops and theIslamic Revolutionary Guards Corps (IRGC).