Alan Johnston and Hamas

A major defeat in the war to defend the free world

Melanie Phillips

01 August 2007

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Shortly after the release of Alan Johnston from Gaza the website of Conflicts Forum, a group advocating engagement with Islamists and which is run by the former MI6 officer Alastair Crooke, posted a fascinating transcript.

Although its early attacks were sponsored by Yasser Arafat and the ‘Fatah Tanzim’, the PRC has traditionally hired itself out to the highest bidder. After Arafat’s death in 2005 it forged a strategic alliance with Hamas which provides it with funding, training, arms and ammunition. The PRC has often served as a front for Hamas, which has outsourced to it numerous terror operations against both Israel and Fatah. As with the kidnapping of Alan Johnston, these operations have afforded Hamas several levels of plausible deniability.

The PRC was established in 2000 by various ideologues including a terrorist called Abu Samhadana. Its armed wing was behind the October 2003 bombing of an American convoy in Gaza. Before the Israelis killed him last year, Hamas offered Samhadana the position of security minister. After he was killed Dagmoush took over the PRC’s armed wing, rebranded it the ‘Army of Islam’ and identified it with Sunni extremist factions. Last year a PRC leader, Abu Yussuf al Qoqa, admitted that his organisation was ‘fully co-ordinated’ with Hamas, aided it in practical and political matters and identified with its Islamic ideology.

Since 2005 the PRC/Army of Islam has been attacking Fatah on behalf of Hamas. On 7 September 2005, under the leadership of Dagmoush — with assistance from senior Hamas operatives — the PRC murdered Moussa Arafat, Fatah’s former commander of military intelligence in Gaza and Mahmoud Abbas’s special adviser.

When al Qoqa was killed last year, the PRC blamed Fatah and Dahlan. Last year, it announced the establishment of a special unit to assassinate Dahlan; and recently Dagmoush claimed that he and Hamas had planned to assassinate Dahlan on at least five occasions.

The PRC, Army of Islam and Hamas also acted together in kidnapping the Fox News television crew last year and the Israeli soldier Gilad Shalit, who has now been handed over to the sole keeping of Hamas.

Since the PRC has acted as Hamas’s hit-squad against Fatah and Dahlan, Dagmoush would hardly have kidnapped Johnston at their behest. That event seems instead to be but the most spectacular in the series of co-ordinated PRC/Hamas operations carried out under the aegis of the Army of Islam.