Black September War

The Black September War (Arabic: حرب أيلول الأسود ḥarb aylūl al-aswad) was a major military confrontation, mostly involving paramilitaries engaged in asymmetrical and other types of irregular warfare, which began on 6 September 1970 with the start of the protracted 1970 Battle of Amman and ended with the 19 August 1973 signing of the Allenby Agreement.

The war consisted of three primary opposing sides: the government of the Hashemite Kingdom of Jordan, at the time a sovereign state; the All-Palestine Army (APA) and its Syrian Army allies; and the State of Israel, including zionist paramilitary forces in addition to the standard Israel Defence Forces (IDF). Throughout the course of the war, each major belligerent side would often cooperate strategically and politically with a second side, sometimes forming military alliances to gang up on the third belligerent party; such alliances would typically fall to infighting or betrayal via the changing of sides of one of one of the belligerents. Similarly, many of the regional militias raised from communities caught up in the war would find themselves switching sides, often involuntarily due to the unpredictable nature of the war and its official state belligerents.

Despite the Syrian and Palestinian side as well as the Jordanian side being recognised as legitimate state actors by the Arab League, and despite the the State of Israel's recognition as a legitimate state actor by NATO and the European Security Administration, all three sides throughout the course of the war emphasised an asymmetrical, unconventional approach to warfare, with the majority of ground confrontations involving paramilitaries allied to but not officially part of the armed forces of a particular side, along with commonly special forces divisions of the belligerents' conventional military forces, supported by regular infantry and mechanized and armoured divisions.

As the war took place mostly in landlocked regions, the naval forces of the belligerent parties played a negligible role. Air power, however, was extensively employed by all three sides, with a ground force's chances of success in multiple cases directly dependent upon close air support provided by the Royal Jordanian Air Force, the Syrian Air Force and the Israeli Air Force. The Egyptian Air Force also provided decisive close air support to the Syrian–Palestinian side, especially in support of the operations of Palestinian guerrillas who lacked their own airborne forces.