A BROTHERHOOD OF TERROR

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There are now nearly 20,000 fedayeen in Jordan v. scant hundred or so before the war—and their ranks are swelling daily. Whereas all guerrilla operations used to be controlled by the disreputable (and now discredited) Palestine Liberation Army, there are at least halt dozen independent fedayeen organizations, most of them less interested in playing Arab politics (as was the P.L.A.) than in fielding effective guerrillas. The largest, and to all appearances the most dynamic, of them all is Asita (thunderstorm), the paramilitary arm of a broader political group named El Fatah, whose commandos call themselves storm troopers.

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Asifa's storm troopers have little in common with the illiterate and ill-equipped irregulars who used to sneak into Israel. Roughly half of them are college graduates or students, and all are rotated regularly in and out their civilian jobs, a practice that makes guerrilla fight ing more attractive and assures Asifa penetration into all levels of civilian life. They undergo formal guerrilla train mg at bases such as the Karamah refugee camp, which was the mam target of last week's Israeli assault. To main tain a semblance of secrecy, Asifa is organized into c. like "elements" of 30 to 40 men, each of which takes orders only from a central high command. It also tor-bids its members to use their correct names, assigns each a number or pseudonym instead.

The secrecy is not entirely effective. Somehow, Israeli intelligence gets wind of Asifa operations with such regularity that up till now some 80% of all infiltrators have been killed or captured. The ones who do get through, however, do enough damage to keep Israeli life thoroughly on edge—such as last week's bombing of ; busload of children and even attacks on coastal Tel Aviv. It is an open secret that Asifa has marked Defense Minister Moshe Dayan for assassination and has sent a top agent into Israel to do the job. And, if the organization's leaders are to be believed, they will soon have enough available guerrilla power to stage sustained attacks on small Israeli army units.