Last week I speculated that the well-planned, but casualty free triple bombing of an Athens police station was in fact an al-Qaeda probe.

Now, Reuters reports that another bomb went off at an Athenian bank. At the HSBC bank branch across the street a similar bomb was discovered. Maybe it is just coincidence, but HSBC's headquarters in Turkey were hit on November 20, in a wave of suicide bombings that struck the British consulate in Istanbul two minutes later and had struck two synagogues in Turkey five days prior. Dozens were killed in the attacks which were linked to Zarqawi and al-Qaeda. (A further odd coincidence, the article linked to above also carries advertisements for HSBC bank.)

The Greek Prime Minister insists that it is a local affair and has nothing to do with the Olympics. But the Greek police "have not made any arrests and have said they know little about the [Revolutionary Struggle] group."

I speculated that the leftist rhetoric in the letter claiming responsibility for the bombing could be an al-Qaeda feint. Let us hope that the Greek authorities know more than they are letting on and that their professed ignorance is in fact a clever ploy.

The consolidation of the Palestinian factions under Hezbollah and its sponsors Syria and Iran is becoming a bit of an obsession with me. I've published yet another article on the issue.

The latest development, as reported by the Jerusalem Post is that Syria is going to allow the Fatah to open an office in Damascus. Assad the elder tried to kill Arafat a few times, and was constantly trying to destroy him as the leader of the PLO. Syria's core ideological fixation is greater Syria - which includes Lebanon, Jordan, Israel (including the West Bank and Gaza) and a province of Turkey. Assad tried to dominate the PLO to make it a tool for his vision. An independent PLO, on the other hand, undermined this vision.

Young Assad does not have the same personal vendetta, and has even allowed Fatah to hold rallies in Syria at the Yarmouk refugee camp. But it might also indicate Arafat's weakness - surrounded by Israel, his organization falling apart. He is looking for support in any direction he can find it - including an old enemy. His weakness is Syria's gain.

Interestingly, the deal was brokered by Farouq Kadoumi, one of the last survivors of the original Fatah founders. Kadoumi never recognized the Oslo process and refused to leave Tunisia. In the 1990s the peace process was the primary focus of the PLO foreign policy and consequently Abu Mazen took control of most of the PLO's foreign affairs. Kadoumi (a.k.a. Abu Lutf) was left only with the Syria portfolio.

The new Fatah office in Damascus fits nicely into the scheme of Fatah being drawn into the orbit of Hezbollah-Syria-Iran. But here is the neat bit. In an August-September article for the Middle East Intelligence Bulletin, the Washington Institute's Matt Levitt wrote:

Palestinian terrorist cells established by Lebanon-based Hezbollah and IRGC operatives were organized into a network known as the Return Brigades (Kata'ib al-Awda). The operational and political objectives of the Hezbollah-run, Iranian-funded network were confirmed by confessions from various Return Brigades operatives arrested around September 2002. Chief among these was Ghaleb Abdel Hafiz Abdel Kader Ikbariya, a PA activist from Shweike near Tulkarm.

In his confession, Ikbariya said that IRGC commanders had begun to establish a new organization comprised of a military wing and a political wing. The military wing was tasked with conducting terror attacks (e.g., the suicide attack Ikbariya himself was caught planning together with Fatah leaders in Jordan and IRGC commanders in Lebanon) while the political wing would "infiltrate representatives into the PA and the Palestinian security mechanisms" to take over "when and if the current Fatah infrastructure collapses." Although the two were supposed to be compartmentalized from each other, overlap between the terrorist and political wings led to the arrest of several political activists - like Ikbariya - for their roles in terrorist plots. Ikbariya claimed that his handlers, Bassem Soudki Ahmad Yassin and Fouad Bilbeisi (both senior Fatah leaders in Amman), reported not only to the IRGC but also to Fatah Central Committee member Mohammad Amouri and Palestine Liberation Organization Political Department chief Farouq Kadoumi.

That Kadoumi was pushing a Fatah-Syria rapprochement is no surprise - he'd been working on it throughout the 1990s. But he may have a hand in the operational links between Fatah and Hezbollah. Kadoumi is a possible successor to Arafat and we may be hearing more from him soon.