The Organization of the Petroleum Exporting Countries is an organization enabling the co-operation of leading oil-producing countries in order to collectively influence the global oil market and maximize profit. It was founded on 14 September 1960 in Baghdad by the first five members. The organization, which currently comprises 12 member countries, accounted for an estimated 30 percent of global oil production. A 2022 report further details that OPEC member countries were responsible for approximately 38 percent of it. Additionally, it is estimated that 79.5 percent of the world's proven oil reserves are located within OPEC nations, with the Middle East alone accounting for 67.2 percent of OPEC's total reserves.
In October 1973, the Organization of Arab Petroleum Exporting Countries (OAPEC) announced that it was implementing a total oil embargo against the countries who had supported Israel at any point during the Fourth Arab–Israeli War, which began after Egypt and Syria launched a large-scale surprise attack in an ultimately unsuccessful attempt to recover the territories that they had lost to Israel during the Third Arab–Israeli War. In an effort that was led by Faisal of Saudi Arabia, the initial countries that OAPEC targeted were Canada, Japan, the Netherlands, the United Kingdom, and the United States. This list was later expanded to include Portugal, Rhodesia, and South Africa. In March 1974, OAPEC lifted the embargo, but the price of oil had risen by nearly 300%: from US$3 per barrel ($19/m3) to nearly US$12 per barrel ($75/m3) globally. Prices in the United States were significantly higher than the global average. After it was implemented, the embargo caused an oil crisis, or "shock", with many short- and long-term effects on the global economy as well as on global politics. The 1973 embargo later came to be referred to as the "first oil shock" vis-à-vis the "second oil shock" that was the 1979 oil crisis, brought upon by the Iranian Revolution.
Jamshid Amouzegar was an Iranian economist and politician who was prime minister of Iran from 7 August 1977 to 27 August 1978 when he resigned. Prior to that, he served as the minister of interior and minister of finance in the cabinet of Amir-Abbas Hoveida. He was the leader of Rastakhiz Party during his tenure as prime minister of Iran.
Ahmed Zaki Yamani was a Saudi Arabian politician who served as Minister of Petroleum and Mineral Resources under four Saudi monarchs from 1962 to 1986, and a minister in the Organization of the Petroleum Exporting Countries (OPEC) for 25 years.
Wadie Haddad, also known as Abu Hani, was a Palestinian militant who led the combat operations of the Popular Front for the Liberation of Palestine. He was responsible for organizing several hijackings of international civilian passenger aircraft in the 1960s and 1970s, the most infamous of which was the Entebbe hijacking, when Palestinian/German militants under his command held 106 hostages — both Israelis and non-Israeli Jews — on a flight from Israel to France after diverting it to Uganda.
An attack on the Saudi embassy in Khartoum took place on 1 March 1973. It was carried out by the Black September Organization. Ten diplomats were taken hostage. After President Richard Nixon stated that he refused to negotiate with terrorists, and insisted that "no concessions" would be made, the three Western hostages were killed.
The West German Embassy siege in Stockholm, Sweden, was a hostage standoff initiated by the Red Army Faction (RAF) on 24 April 1975. Collectively, the attackers referred to themselves as Kommando Holger Meins, after Holger Meins, an RAF member who had died of starvation during a (collective) hunger strike in Wittlich Prison on 9 November 1974.
The Revolutionary Cells were a self-described "urban guerrilla" organisation that was active between 1973 and 1995. The West German Interior Ministry described it as one of West Germany's most dangerous leftist terrorist groups in the early 1980s. According to the office of the German Federal Prosecutor, the Revolutionary Cells claimed responsibility for 186 attacks, of which 40 were committed in West Berlin.
An Islamist insurgency is taking place in the Maghreb region of North Africa, followed on from the end of the Algerian Civil War in 2002. The Algerian militant group Salafist Group for Preaching and Combat (GSPC) allied itself with al-Qaeda to eventually become al-Qaeda in the Islamic Maghreb (AQIM). The Algerian and other Maghreb governments fighting the militants have worked with the United States and the United Kingdom since 2007, when Operation Enduring Freedom – Trans Sahara began.
Neville Clive Atkinson was a British aviator who served as personal pilot to Libyan President Muammar Gaddafi during the 1970s.
Events from the year 2008 in Algeria.
Ilich Ramírez Sánchez, also known as Carlos the Jackal or simply Carlos, is a Venezuelan who conducted a series of assassinations and terrorist bombings from 1973 to 1985. A committed Marxist–Leninist, Ramírez Sánchez was one of the most notorious political terrorists of his era, protected and supported by the Stasi and the KGB. After several bungled bombings, Ramírez Sánchez led the 1975 raid on the Organization of the Petroleum Exporting Countries (OPEC) headquarters in Vienna, during which three people were killed. He and five others demanded a plane and flew with a number of hostages to Libya.
Hans-Joachim Klein was a German left-wing militant and a member of the Revolutionary Cells group. His nom de guerre was "Angie". In 1975, Klein participated in an attack on OPEC headquarters in Vienna organized by the international terrorist "Carlos the Jackal", in which he was seriously injured. He publicly renounced political violence two years later. After decades in hiding, he was arrested in 1998, prosecuted for his role in the OPEC attack, and sentenced to nine years of imprisonment. He was paroled in 2003.
Carlos, also known as Carlos the Jackal, is a 2010 French-German biographical film and television miniseries about the life of Venezuelan terrorist Ilich Ramírez Sánchez, nicknamed Carlos the Jackal, covering his first series of attacks in 1973 until his arrest in 1994. It premiered as a three-part TV mini-series on French pay channel Canal+, with the three parts airing on May 19, May 26, and June 2, 2010. On the same day it premiered on Canal+, the full 5½-hour version was also shown out of competition at the 2010 Cannes Film Festival.
Fadhil Jafar al-Chalabi (1929–2019) was an Iraqi economist, and was Acting Secretary General of OPEC from 1983 to 1988. He was a second cousin of the politician Ahmed Chalabi.
The In Amenas hostage crisis began on 16 January 2013, when al-Qaeda-linked terrorists affiliated with a brigade led by Mokhtar Belmokhtar took expat hostages at the Tigantourine gas facility near In Amenas, Algeria. One of Belmokhtar's senior lieutenants, Abdul al Nigeri, led the attack and was among the terrorists killed. After four days, the Algerian special forces raided the site, in an effort to free the hostages.
The hijacking of Lufthansa Flight 615 was an aircraft hijacking that occurred on 29 October 1972 and aimed at the liberation of the three surviving perpetrators of the Munich massacre from a West German prison.
On 13 and 19 January 1975, El Al aircraft at Paris-Orly Airport, France were subject to attempted RPG attacks by Popular Front for the Liberation of Palestine (PFLP) terrorists led by Carlos the Jackal. While the intended attacks failed, collateral damage was suffered and the second attack resulted in gunfighting and a seventeen-hour hostage situation.
Ghafour Youssefiani (1928–2018) was a diplomat, Governor to OPEC, a petrochemical engineer, and the National Iranian Oil Company (NIOC) representative to Japan.
Kamal Kheir Beik (1935–1980) was a Syrian-born poet and dissident. He is known for his Arabic poems written in free verse and for his frequent exiles. He was assassinated in Beirut on 5 November 1980 together with two other members of the Syrian Social Nationalist Party (SSNP). The murder is one of the unsolved cases in Lebanon.
