NABLUS, West Bank — In the hours before his capture, Maged Masri paced the floor, smoked cigarettes and drank small cups of coffee. He was nervous. He knew his time was running out.
"I feel like I'm going to get caught," he told the family in whose house he'd sought refuge.
"Don't worry," one of them responded. "The army never comes here."
Little did they know that the Israeli army had already surrounded the neighborhood in an effort to find Masri, the last key commander of the Al Aqsa Martyrs Brigade who remained free.
Masri, 30, helped found the militia that, more than any other single force, transformed the Israeli-Palestinian conflict. The Al Aqsa Martyrs Brigade had a direct tie to Palestinian Authority President Yasser Arafat. It was loyal but not always obedient. It carried the tactic of suicide bombing out of the realm of radical Islamists to the wider, more- difficult-to-track secular mainstream. It militarized Palestinian resistance in ways never before seen in the West Bank and Gaza Strip.
Interviews with Masri and other militiamen over a period of 2 1/2 years revealed their group's evolution from a disjointed band of gunmen to the dominant guerrilla force in the fight for Palestinian independence.
For the time being, Israel's aggressive clampdown on Palestinians has gone a long way toward crushing the militancy. But it has also enraged and inspired future recruits who may yet strike back.
The Al Aqsa Martyrs Brigade was founded in the seething Balata refugee camp on the eastern flank of Nablus a few weeks after the current intifada, or Palestinian uprising, began in September 2000. Its founding members came from Arafat's Fatah movement. Some, but not all, had once supported the Oslo peace process with Israel but had concluded that it was no longer benefiting Palestinians. Israel had stopped turning over major portions of land by 1998, Jewish settlements in the West Bank continued to expand, and prosperity for Palestinians was mostly limited to a few senior, corrupt leaders.
The men who became members of the Al Aqsa Martyrs Brigade initially were as determined to overthrow the old Palestinian guard as they were to eject Israel. They had cut their teeth as teenagers throwing stones at Israeli soldiers in the 1980s, been hardened by time spent in Israeli prisons or in exile, and then trained as professional warriors after joining the Palestinian Authority's security forces in the mid-1990s.
