Black September: origins, Munich massacre and Israeli retaliation

Black September, Arabic Aylūl al-Aswad, also called Black September Organization (BSO)

The group was founded in 1971 to seek retribution on Jordan's military and to assassinate Jordan's King Hussein after they forcefully confronted the Palestine Liberation Organization (PLO) during an attempt to seize power from the monarch in September 1970.

Up to 15,000 Palestinian militants and civilians were killed; swaths of Palestinian towns and refugee camps, where the PLO had amassed weapons, were leveled. The PLO leadership was decimated, and between 50,000-100,000 people were left homeless.

Besides seeding Lebanon's civil war and disintegration, the Jordanian-Palestinian war of 1970 led to the creation of the Palestinian Black September movement, a commando faction that broke away from the PLO and directed several terrorist plots to avenge Palestinians' losses in Jordan. The assassination of Jordanian Prime Minister Wasif al-Tel in Cairo on Nov. 28, 1971, and, most notoriously

During the 1972 Summer Olympics at Munich, in the early morning of September 5, a group of Palestinian terrorists storms the Olympic Village apartment of the Israeli athletes, killing two and taking nine others hostage.

Israel, in turn, unleashed its own operation against Black September as Israeli Prime Minister Golda Meir ordered the creation of a hit squad that fanned out in Europe and the Middle East and assassinated numerous Palestinian and Arab operatives. Some were connected with Black September.