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Friday, March 13, 2009

U.S. helps Palestinians form SWAT teams to control Fatah outlaws

RAMALLAH — The Palestinian Authority has formed a special team, with U.S. assistance, to control an outbreak of organized crime in the West Bank.   

PA sources said the security forces have assembled and overseen training of a special weapons and tactics, or SWAT, team for operations against Fatah-aligned drug dealers and gun-runners in the West Bank, Middle East Newsline reported.

The sources said the team was approved after Prime Minister Salam Fayyad and U.S. security adviser Lt. Gen. Keith Dayton agreed that Fatah gunmen, many of them linked to the security forces, would not be deterred by civilian police.

"Both the drug dealers and the weapons traders are heavily armed and connected to Fatah," a PA source said. "They would have no compunction to open fire against a poorly-trained or -equipped force."

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Fatah has been linked to extortion of businesses and individuals throughout the West Bank. On March 9, the luxury car of a senior PA official, Sports Ministry director-general Fathi Khader, was torched in his village near Nablus.

In 2008, the United States, under Dayton's supervision, trained more than 1,200 NSF and Presidential Guard officers at the International Police Facility in Jordan. The four-month training course included counter-insurgency, anti-crime and anti-riot instruction.

The PA has formed a SWAT team from new and veteran members of the security forces, the sources said. They said the team, which contained fewer than 100 members, was trained at a U.S.-financed facility in eastern Jordan near the Iraqi border and returned to the West Bank in March 2009.

"This is an elite squad that has been trained by the Jordanians to conduct missions beyond the current capabilities of PA forces," the source said. "They could be used against top criminals, Hamas squads and for hostage situations."

The SWAT team was said to have been sent to Jordan twice over the last six months for increasingly challenging instruction in weapons use and maintenance. They said the team was also trained to help protect the PA from any threat by Hamas.

In March, the PA launched a crackdown on both Hamas and Islamic Jihad. Both groups said a total of 70 members were arrested in the cities of Bethlehem, Hebron, Jenin, Kalkilya, Ramallah and Tulkarm, many of them released recently by Israel. On March 12, 30 Hamas prisoners were released by the PA.

The SWAT team has also responded to organized crime, some of whose members had been officers in PA security forces. The sources said the team raided a criminal safe house 48 hours after $50,000 was robbed from a bank in Bethlehem. The money was recovered.

The sources said Fayyad wants Palestinians to begin cooperating with PA security forces. They acknowledged that for years, PA police refused to respond to calls for help unless they were from prominent Palestinians.



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