ASALA terrorist campaign against Turkish targets §

The Armenian Secret Army for the Liberation of Armenia (ASALA) was a Marxist-Leninist diaspora militant organisation that conducted an armed campaign against Turkish targets, and against several other states it deemed complicit, between 1975 and 1991. Its founders, principally Hagop Hagopian (Harutiun Tagushian, an Armenian born in Iraq) and Kevork Ajemian, organised the group in Beirut in early 1975, drawing on the wider Palestinian-aligned far-left milieu of the Lebanese civil war and on disaffected ARF youth.

ASALA's stated aims were genocide recognition, reparations, and "the liberation of Armenian lands" from Turkey, framed within a Third-Worldist anti-imperialist programme that placed the Armenian cause alongside Palestinian, Kurdish, and Latin American revolutionary struggles. Its first attack, on 20 January 1975, targeted the World Council of Churches' offices in Beirut. Through 1975–80 it killed Turkish ambassadors and consular officers in Vienna (Daniş Tunalıgil, October 1975), Paris (İsmail Erez, October 1975), Beirut (Yılmaz Çolpan, December 1979), Athens, The Hague, Sydney, Madrid, Lisbon and elsewhere. It bombed airline offices, banks, and Turkish-related infrastructure in roughly twenty cities.

The campaign's defining episode was the 15 July 1983 bombing of the Turkish Airlines counter at Paris-Orly airport, which killed eight people, including French and other non-Turkish bystanders, and wounded more than fifty. Public opinion in the diaspora and in sympathetic French circles, which had previously conferred a degree of romantic legitimacy on the campaign, turned decisively against ASALA. The internal split that followed, between Hagopian's "ASALA-Mother" faction and the "ASALA-RM" (Revolutionary Movement) faction critical of attacks on civilians, accelerated the organisation's decline. Hagopian was assassinated in Athens on 28 April 1988, in circumstances never definitively clarified.

ASALA's relationship to the Dashnaktsutyun was hostile. The ARF rejected ASALA's Marxist-internationalist line and organised its own militant cadre, the Justice Commandos of the Armenian Genocide, which competed with ASALA in target selection while avoiding civilian casualties.

Across approximately 84 attacks (figures vary by source), ASALA killed approximately 46 people, including 36 Turkish nationals and 10 of other nationalities. (sourced opinion: Tölölyan reads the campaign as a generational diaspora response to the perceived stagnation of legal-political recognition channels; editorial the campaign succeeded in placing the genocide on the international agenda but at a moral cost that the diaspora has continued to debate.)