Islamic Jihad

At 2:15 p.m. on Sept. 14, aboard the Croatian Airways flight from Amsterdam, a stout, round-faced man with a bushy beard and dreams of Islamic holy war in his head touched down in this Balkan city. In his 39 years, Talaat Fouad Kassem's extraordinary life had taken him from the poor south of his native Egypt to the anti-Communist struggle in Afghanistan, then to Europe.

By age 16, Iftikar Haider had learned to fire an AK-47 assault rifle, a rocket-propelled grenade launcher and an antiaircraft gun in the remote mountains of Afghanistan. Six years later, the young Pakistani man of modest means, a former cloth hawker in the bazaars of Peshawar, was ready to use his skills for real. Along with a dozen other Pakistanis, he crossed the Indian border at night, spoiling for a fight with Indian soldiers.

Palestinian police in Gaza City on Friday apprehended three men suspected of planning a bomb attack inside Israel but only after the officers were pelted with stones by enraged Palestinians who tried to prevent the arrests. It was an embarrassing illustration of the difficulties that Palestinian officials are experiencing as they try to keep the peace with the Israelis--and among their own people.

Radical Palestinian groups Wednesday scorned President Clinton's executive order freezing their assets and dubbing them "terrorists," saying they had no assets in the United States to be frozen and were "freedom fighters."

Eager to show resolve after the latest Middle East bombing, President Clinton announced a freeze Tuesday on the U.S. assets of 12 groups and 18 people believed linked to international terrorism and banned contributions to them.

A pair of suicide bombings aimed at Israeli buses in the Gaza Strip on Thursday injured so few people that they probably will be repeated, a senior Palestinian security official predicted. The only people killed in the morning attacks, which were one minute and half a mile apart near Jewish settlements, were the attackers. Eleven Israelis were slightly injured, including three soldiers. No one initially claimed responsibility for the bombings.

Calling on the militant Islamic Jihad movement to refrain from avenging the killing of its leader, the Palestine Liberation Organization warned Sunday that any attack on Israelis could delay the expansion of Palestinian self-rule in the West Bank.

A man believed to be Fathi Shikaki, the founder and leader of the Islamic Jihad movement that has carried out a series of fatal attacks on Israelis, was shot to death in Malta last week, Israeli television reported Saturday. Islamic Jihad sources in the Gaza Strip confirmed that Shikaki had been traveling from Libya to his home in Damascus, Syria, and stopped in Malta on Thursday. He never arrived in Damascus.

Airstrikes by Israel killed at least seven Palestinians in the Gaza Strip, as Prime Minister Ehud Olmert vowed to stop rocket attacks on the Jewish state. The Islamic militant group Hamas said two of its militants were killed and three were wounded in one strike. Another attack killed at least one Islamic Jihad militant, as well as a mother and child riding in a donkey cart, Palestinian hospital officials said. A third airstrike killed a militant leader and his wife. Militants in the Hamas-controlled territory have fired close to 100 rockets at southern Israel in the last two days following the killing of 18 Palestinians, most of them gunmen, in some of the heaviest fighting in months.

A senior commander of Islamic Jihad, a Palestinian group waging hostilities against Israel, was killed late Friday along with his wife, two of their children and three young militants in an explosion that flattened the family's home in the Gaza Strip, officials said. The 8:45 p.m. explosion damaged seven nearby homes in the Bureij refugee camp and wounded at least 30 people, 10 of them seriously, said Moawiya Hassanain, a Health Ministry official in Gaza.