Militant's Claim that Arafat Can't End Attacks
If there is one thing that the Palestinian militant group Islamic Jihad does not fear, one of its leaders said today, it is the repressive force of Yasir Arafat and his Palestinian Authority.

"The Palestinian Authority is broken; its institutions are destroyed," the leader, Sheik Abdallah al-Shami, said calmly as he sat in the living room of his home here. "How can the Palestinian Authority assure the security of the Israelis when it cannot even protect its own people?"

On the other side of Israel, at Mr. Arafat's headquarters in the West Bank city of Ramallah, some of his aides were insisting that if they confirmed Islamic Jihad's involvement in the deadly attack on an Israeli intercity bus this morning, they would begin rounding up its members.

In an interview today, Mr. Shami offered such confirmation proudly. Other Islamic Jihad officials later said one of their militants from the West Bank town of Jenin, Hamzi Samudi, had pulled alongside the bus with his car and detonated his bomb, killing 17 passengers and injuring dozens.

Despite his nine previous arrests by Mr. Arafat's security forces, and eight others by the Israeli Army and security forces, Mr. Shami, a 45-year-old school teacher and Muslim cleric, said he was unperturbed.

"Every Palestinian is wanted by Israel," he said. "Does it make any sense that the Palestinian Authority would go out and arrest Palestinians on behalf of our enemy?"

The remarks underscored the difficulties that Mr. Arafat faces as he tries at once to overhaul his unwieldy security forces, meet international pressure to crack down on terrorists, govern more democratically, and satisfy Palestinian demands that he stand up to the Israeli government.

Palestinian militants — particularly members of Al Aksa Martyrs Brigades, an offshoot of Mr. Arafat's Fatah movement — admit that their forces in the West Bank have been battered by the continuing Israeli military offensive there, which is now in its third month.

But terrorism experts, diplomats and others said that Mr. Arafat's security forces, too, are in considerable disarray, and that it may often prove simpler for groups to engineer new suicide attacks than for the Palestinian security forces to mount effective operations against them.
http://www.nytimes.com/2002/06/06/international/middleeast/06JIHA.html