Armenian Secret Army for the Liberation of Armenia

The Armenian Secret Army for the Liberation of Armenia (ASALA) is a defunct terrorist group. It also operated under the names The Orly Group and the 3rd October Organization.

Founded by Hagop Tarakchian and Hagop Hagopian and led by Hagopian. The Marxist-Leninist group formed in 1975. Its aim was to force the Turkish government to acknowledge its role in the so called "Armenian genocide" of 1915, compensate the survivors or their families and cede territory to Armenian SSR.

The group's activities began with bombing and assassination attacks on Turkish targets. The first bombing was an attack on the World Council of Churches (WCC) office in Beirut. Their first acknowledged killing was the assassination of the Turkish diplomat, Oktay Cerit, in Paris on February 16, 1976. The group's eight point manifesto was published in 1981.

The group's most destructive attack was on August 7, 1982 when nine people were killed and seventy wounded in an bombing at Ankara airport. Another bombing on July 15, 1983 at Orly Airport killed eight and wounded over fifty. The attack precipitated a split in the group over tactics, between the Nationalists (ASALA-Militant) and the 'Popular Movement' (ASALA-Mouvement Révolutionnaire).

The group received aid from Syria and Libya in the 1980s and possibly the Soviet Union and France. It had links to the PLO, PFLP and PFLP-GC. With the Israeli invasion of Lebanon in 1982 the group lost much of its organization and support. Transferred to Syria, it found itself distanced from the PLO, and it is reported that tensions between the two became such that the PLO passed materials to the French intelligence services in 1983, detailing Asala operatives.

Hagop Hagopian was assassinated in his Athens home on April 25, 1988 (Tarakchian died of cancer in 1980) and the group fell into inactivity and internal schisms, associating more closely with the PKK.

- Significant event:

• On 27 January 1973, the Armenians in the United States as well as around the world launched a brutal terrorism campaign against the Turks and the Turkish institutions to validate forcibly a mythical genocide believed only by themselves through blood-shed and violence. That day, an old Armenian man by the name Yanikian invited two Turkish diplomats from the Los Angeles Consulate to a luncheon in Santa Barbara. It turned out that the invitation was a dastardly ambush; he killed both diplomats brutally in the restaurant. For two decades this senseless terrorism claimed the lives of more than seventy Turkish diplomats (four in the U.S.) and their family members, and maimed and wounded several innocent by-standers in the carnage staged by the Armenians all over the world. The Armenian terrorists, mostly dropouts from Middle Eastern terrorism, recognize no boundary to their savage operations. They even carried the terror to the college campuses, ravishing the sanctified atmosphere of the higher-learning institutions. The American historians who refused to share the distorted Armenian version of history were targeted for harassment and threat. The Turkish History professor Stanford Shaw of U.C.L.A. was one of them, and on October 3, 1977, the Armenian bullies threw a bomb, and blew up the front portion of his house. He and his family had to leave the campus under a death threat.