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For the U.S., it was no ordinary skyjacking, no incident involving some troubled soul who needed to be jollied or sweet-talked or strong-armed out of a free ride to Havana or Timbuktu. It was an American plane, Trans World Airlines' Flight 847 on its leg from Athens to Rome, with 153 passengers and crew members aboard, at least 100 of whom were Americans. Most important, the hijackers were identified by an accomplice as members of Islamic Jihad (or Holy War), the shadowy Shi'ite Muslim organization that is regarded as a sort of umbrella for various fundamentalist terror groups operating in Lebanon and other Middle East countries. Sympathetic to Iran's revolutionary ruler, the Ayatullah Ruhollah Khomeini, and quite possibly subsidized by the Iranian leadership, Islamic Jihad and its confederates are blamed for many of the suicide bombing missions that have afflicted American and other Western military bases and diplomatic missions in the Middle East in the past two years.
On a political level, the hijackers of Flight 847 called for the release not only of the Lebanese Shi'ites still held by Israel, but of a few others imprisoned in Cyprus and Kuwait. They also demanded the immediate withdrawal of Israeli forces from southern Lebanon (a pullout has been under way since January and, except for patrols and forays back into the border area, is now virtually complete) and international condemnation of the U.S. and Israel. In a broader sense, the Shi'ites of Lebanon, newly radicalized by the violence that has plagued their country, particularly since the Israeli invasion of June 1982, are seeking a fairer shake after generations of neglect and discrimination by Lebanon's wealthier and more powerful Maronite Christians and Sunni Muslims. Beyond all that, the Shi'ite fanatical fringe, inspired by the example of the Iranian revolution, wants to destroy the last vestiges of Western "decadence" in the Islamic world, particularly the presence of the U.S., that "Great Satan." Whether the hijackers of Flight 847 fitted into that category, or were exemplars of a more classical political terrorism, bent on achieving specific ends in the region, was not yet known.
This was the first hijacking of an American airliner in the Middle East since Ronald Reagan took office in January 1981, and the Administration was deeply disturbed. It was convinced that the hijackers of Flight 847 were in the same league as the ones who seized a Kuwaiti airliner last December, took it to Tehran and eventually killed two American passengers. That incident ended when the Iranians sent a platoon of security men aboard the plane dressed as a maintenance crew. The hijackers were arrested, but there is no evidence that they were ever brought to justice.