Black September 1970 saw Jordan’s King Hussein move decisively against the PLO’s armed presence after years of dual authority and the Dawson’s Field hijackings. Pakistani Brigadier Muhammad Zia-ul-Haq, officially heading a non-combat training mission, was sent to assess the Syrian armoured threat, then stepped beyond his mandate to help direct Jordanian counter-operations against PLO positions in Amman and refugee camps. The fighting produced thousands of Palestinian casualties (estimates range widely) and expelled the PLO to Lebanon. Zia received Jordanian honours; the episode is often cited as a factor in his rapid promotion under Bhutto and his 1977 coup. The same officer later cultivated a pan-Islamic image that publicly embraced the Palestinian cause he had helped suppress, creating a lasting historical paradox.
This year’s September marks 56 years since Black September, the ten-day conflict between Jordan's army and Palestinian guerrilla factions that reshaped the Palestine Liberation Organisation’s (PLO) position in the Arab world. The anniversary is a useful moment to revisit a detail often left out of the story. It is about a Pakistani officer, Brigadier Muhammad Zia-ul-Haq, who played a significant operational role in this event that led to the loss of the lives of hundreds of Palestinian refugees. This role of Zia, who later rose to General’s rank, sits uneasily alongside the image he cultivated a decade later when he hosted PLO’s leader Yasser Arafat in Islamabad, or spoke of Palestinian suffering at international summits as Pakistan’s leader.
The Amman Crisis
By 1970, Jordan faced a crisis of dual authority. After the 1967 Six-Day War, Palestinian guerrilla factions were organised under the PLO. They had built a substantial armed presence in Amman and northern Jordan and operated checkpoints, and periodically clashed with Jordanian forces. Matters became worse when, in early September 1970, the Popular Front for the Liberation of Palestine (PFLP), PLO’s constituent group, hijacked four international airliners and three of them were forced to land at Dawson's Field near Zarqa, which was later blown up. When King Hussein moved to reassert state control on 17 September 1970, the confrontation turned into open urban warfare in Amman. Later, Syrian armoured units crossed into Jordan near Irbid in support of the Palestinian side.
Zia's Role
Zia had been stationed in Jordan since 1967, heading a training mission with an advisory, non-combat mandate. According to the Middle East scholar Bruce Riedel and Jack O'Connell, who was the CIA's station chief in Amman at the time, King Hussein sent Zia to the front lines to provide an objective on-the-ground appraisal. Zia judged that Jordan's own forces could handle the Syrian armour. However, later, rather than staying strictly in an advisory or observer capacity, Zia stepped in to take charge of parts of the Jordanian counter-offensive against the PLO positions, including Jabal el-Hussein and Al-Wehdat (Jabal Wahdat) refugee camps. Reportedly, under Zia's direct operational directions, Jordanian tanks and infantry divisions shelled and entered heavily populated Palestinian refugee camps and urban strongholds (such as those in Amman) to expel out the PLO. Because PLO guerrillas operated directly out of these camps, the heavy artillery fire resulted in immense civilian casualties among the non-combatants refugees as well. Due to this, many consider General Zia as the “Butcher of Palestinians.”
This conflict came to be known as Black September and estimates of Palestinian fatalities varied between 4,000 and 10,000. The PLO's armed presence in Jordan was effectively broken, and most of its remaining fighters relocated to Lebanon over the following year.
The (Favourable) Consequences for Zia
Zia-ul-Haq’s direct operational involvement in Black September went far beyond his official training remit. While his participation in an Arab state's internal conflict caused deep unease within Pakistan’s diplomatic and military establishments, it earned the gratitude of King Hussein of Jordan. Jordan later conferred the Order of Independence (Wisam al-Istiqlal) on Zia.
The anger over his actions back home because of his controversial role in the killing of the Palestinians did not hurt his career. Instead of being punished, Zia’s backing from foreign royals and Western allies mattered more than the rules of Pakistan's own institutions. In 1976, Prime Minister Zulfikar Ali Bhutto made Zia the head of the army, skipping over several more senior generals. One account mentions that Zia’s battlefield successes in Jordan were part of the reason why Bhutto promoted him to four-star general and army chief in 1976. Bhutto likely did this because he thought Zia was quiet, obedient, and not a threat to his power. But true to a familiar pattern in Pakistani history, Zia used his new post to overthrow Bhutto in a military coup just a year later.
Militarily, the Amman campaign involved deploying conventional armour and artillery against an irregular force in a dense urban setting. This approach comes in parallel in how Pakistan's military handled political opposition in East Pakistan in 1971.
Ideologically, the Palestinian factions in Amman were largely secular, left-leaning, and republican in orientation. This kind of profile also overlapped with the political currents Zia later confronted and targeted in Pakistan. After seizing power in 1977, his regime carried out brutal repression of the country's secular left and organised labour while promoting a more conservative religious identity for the state, a programme often referred to as "Islamisation" or, some even terms it, after his name— Ziaism.
Ironically, smarting under pressure from international community, which had almost boycotted him for his illegitimate usurpation of power, Zia seized the opportunity after Soviet incursion into Afghanistan in December 1979, to step in and midwife the ‘Jihad’ in Afghanistan against the godless communists, bankrolled by the US and Saudi Arabia. By the 1980s, General Zia reinvented himself as the champion of Pan-Islamism. The world had forgotten his bloody past in Jordan. It will not be incorrect to say that Zia leveraged state media and diplomatic statecraft in a way that led to historical amnesia over his Jordanian campaign.
The Black September episode does not fit neatly into narratives of pan-Islamic solidarity that Pakistan champions today. Sometimes military officers sent overseas to train foreign troops get pulled into local wars and do not personally care about the legitimacy of the political cause they fight for. But Zia’s case was different. He did not simply get caught up in someone else's fight; he stepped well outside his mandate to help direct it, was rewarded for doing so, and built the rest of his career on the strength of that reward. The pattern that emerges is not one of a bystander swept away by the turn of events. Rather, it is a willingness to use force decisively to serve the patron's interests. Years later, he cleverly changed his image, presenting himself as a protector of the very people on whom he had once inflicted atrocities, regardless of whether they were combatants or civilians.
History rarely offers such neat ironies. The same officer who helped shell Palestinian camps in Amman later draped himself in the language of Islamic solidarity and posed as the defender of the Palestinians. Zia’s career illustrates a colder logic: force is applied where it serves the patron of the moment, and memory is rewritten when power requires a different story. The blood of Black September has never been fully washed from the record; it has simply become inconvenient to remember for those who extol the virtues of Zia as a champion of Islam in Pakistan!
This article is authored by Mohammed Shoaib Raza, research scholar, School of International Studies, Jawaharlal Nehru University, New Delhi.
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