Fatima Mughniyeh, the young and secret wife of Qasem Soleimani

In the mid-1970s, Mughniyah organized the “Student Brigade,” a unit of 100 young men which became part of Yasser Arafat‘s elite Force 17 which was an armed branch of the Fatah movement charged with providing security for Yasser Arafat and other prominent PLO officials. Mughniyah was a student in the engineering department at the American University of Beirut in 1981 when Israel invaded Lebanon in 1982. Mughniyah was linked to many terrorist attacks in the 1980s and 1990s, primarily against American and Israeli targets.​​​​​​