Historical Dictionary of Terrorism Third Edition

PHALANGE • 531be allowed to leave for asylum in Cuba. However, the captors grewnervous as it became evident to all that government forces were tunnelingbeneath the residence compound, and talks between captorsand negotiators would start and stop fitfully throughout March. At3:30 p.m. on 22 April 1997, as the female captors were watchingtelevision and several of their male comrades were playing soccer inthe living room, about 150 counterterrorist Peruvian troops initiatedtheir rescue action by exploding a charge set under the living room,killing the eight soccer players and giving the rescue team access tothe residence. Néstor Cerpa was shot to death as he was racing up thestairs in order to slay the hostages. Those remaining terrorists whowere not killed in the initial assault were summarily executed, andonly two soldiers and one hostage, the former Supreme Court JusticeCarlos Giusti Acuña, were killed as a result of the raid.With this successful raid and the killing of the top leader of theMRTA, the organization was largely destroyed, with fewer than 100cadres remaining at large.PESHMERGA. A Kurdish word meaning “(one who puts himself) infront of death,” peshmerga is a generic term used to refer to Kurdishguerrilla fighters among the Kurdish Workers’ Party (PKK), KurdistanDemocratic Party, and other Kurdish armed groups, whether ofleftist or nationalistic complexion. Like the Arabic term Fida’i (plural,Fida’iyin; also spelled Fedayeen, meaning “one who offers [self-]sacrifice), the term has been so generally appropriated by variousand often opposing Kurdish groups that, by itself, it gives little clearidentification of which group a particular peshmerga may represent.PHALANGE. The Lebanese Phalangist Party, also known by itsArabic name, the Kata’ib, was a right-wing Lebanese militia withthe aims of preserving the dominant political and social position ofMaronite Christians within Lebanon, repressing other confessionalor political groups that might challenge Maronite supremacy, andpreserving the independence and territorial integrity of Lebanon fromencroachment by Syria, the Palestinians, or other outsiders. The Phalangewas founded by Pierre Gemayel in 1936 on the model of otherPhalangist groups in Spain and Italy, which were Fascist paramilitarypolitical parties. By the 1970s the relative growth in the population ofthe non-Maronite groups in Lebanon and the transformation of southernLebanon into a bastion for al Fatah guerrillas made Maronite