Jordan strike: an export from Al Qaeda in Iraq?
As in Afghanistan, experts say that Iraq is now a base to launch terrorist attacks beyond its borders.
By Dan Murphy | Staff writer of The Christian Science Monitor
CAIRO - Jordan's King Abdullah II warned this might happen. Prior to the start of the war in Iraq in 2003, the king expressed concern that the conflict there would spill across his borders.
If a claim of responsibility from Al Qaeda in Iraq and official Jordanian statements are true, terrorist bombings of three Amman hotels that killed 57 people on Wednesday may be the first sign that Iraq is no longer just a magnet for international jihaddis. Like Afghanistan under the Taliban, say counterterrorism experts, Iraq is becoming a base from which Al Qaeda can plan, train, and launch attacks against its designated enemies.
The Jordanians "run a very, very tight ship in terms of security so they have been able to foil a number of attacks," says Brian Jenkins, a terrorism expert at the RAND Corp. in Santa Monica, Calif.. "But particularly with the war in Iraq, there will be more spillover."
Mr. Jenkins says that as a result of the insurgency, Iraq has been a "net importer of jihadists" - --- drawing extremist sympathizers from other Muslim nations. But he worries the attacks in Jordan indicate Iraq will eventually become a net exporter of terrorists. That will have an impact on the jihadist movement worldwide, but particularly on countries like Jordan that are adjacent to Iraq and allied with the US, he says.
In other recent incidents involving Iraq-based militants, Kuwait briefly banned the import of prized watermelons from Iraq in June after bombs were found hidden inside a shipment trying to cross the border; Germany last year arrested members of Ansar al-Sunna, which operates out of Kurdish Iraq, that it alleged were planning attacks there; and in Syria, two shootouts in the past six months have taken place between government officers and militants said to have ties to Iraqi fighters.
In this case, Jordanian officials say their prime-suspect is Abu Musab al-Zarqawi, the Jordanian native whose claims of responsibility for lurid video-taped beheadings and massive car-bomb attacks on civilians in Iraq have made him one of the world's most-hunted terrorist figures.
In an Internet statement posted Thursday, Mr. Zarqawi's Al Qaeda in Iraq said it had struck "some hotels that the tyrant of Jordan has made the back garden for the enemies of religion - Jews and Crusaders." Zarqawi frequently calls the secular-leaning King Abdullah a "tyrant." Though Zarqawi has close ties to Al Qaeda and has publically pledged allegiance to Osama bin Laden, his organization appears to operate largely autonomously.
But long before he ever set foot in Iraq - Zarqawi was a noted and dangerous man in his native country, whose leaders he hates as much as he does the United States and the Shiite Iraqis his internet missives deride as "scorpions" and worse.
The Iraq war gave him a chance, metaphorically at least, to come home again, and it appears he helped pull off the biggest terrorist attack in the country's history. A sign of the impending tragedy in Jordan, says Evan Kohlmann, an Al Qaeda expert and author, was a failed attack claimed by Zarqawi's group on two US warships in the Gulf of Aqaba in August.
"The first attack in Jordan was the last warning sign," says Kohlmann. "Everyone knew that this was coming, it was just a matter of time."
Mr. Kohlmann says there's evidence the 39-year-old Zarqawi, born Ahmad Fadil al-Khalayleh in Jordan's industrial city of Zarqa, has long wanted to do damage inside the kingdom, but this appears to be the first time he has succeeded.
"Look at his success rate. He had succeeded in killing one US diplomat, just one, before the Iraq war," says Kohlmann referring to Lawrence Foley, who was murdered at his home in 2002. Zarqawi "was tied to the attempt to blow up the Radisson in [Dec.] 1999 - that failed. Why is he successful now? Because he has an entire team of suicide bombers ready and waiting, and according to his Internet statement the people who carried this out belong to the ... same unit that carries out his suicide attacks in Iraq."
The attacks were on the Grand Hyatt, Radisson SAS and Days Inn hotels; all managed by US chains. But the majority of victims were Jordanians, among them 13 guests at a wedding where one of the bombers walked into a reception hall. The fathers of both the bride and the groom were among the dead. A suicide bomber also walked into the Hyatt, while the Days Inn was struck by a suicide car bomb.
Six Iraqis, two Bahrainis, two Chinese, one Saudi, one American and one Indonesian were also killed, according to Jordanian officials.
President George Bush condemned the attack as carried out "by killers who defiled a great religion," while King Abdullah described the men as "deviant and misled" and the Britain's foreign minister Jack Straw said "Jordan's determination to fight this terrorism is our determination too."
In Amman, Jordan, the Associated Press reports that hundreds of protesters marched through the streets Thursday shouting "Death to al Zarqawi, the villain and the traitor!" Honking vehicles were decorated with Jordanian flags and posters of the king.
Zarqawi left home in the late 1980s to move to the Pakistan-Afghanistan border, and drifted around militant circles for a few years, receiving preliminary training as a jihadi, but failing to get involved in any action. In 1992, he returned home, and was soon after jailed for a plot to attack Israel from Jordan.
After his release in an amnesty in 1998, the close tabs state security kept on him made it difficult to find work - or to reengage with militant circles - and he fled the country once more to Afghanistan, where he started a militant training camp of his own, and developed relationships with senior Al Qaeda leaders such as Ayman al-Zawahiri and Abu Zubaydah.
When Zubaydah hatched the millennium bomb plot - a failed attempt to attack tourist sites in Jordan and the Los Angeles airport on December 31, 1999 - Zarqawi helped recruit Jordanian militants, Jordanian officials alleged in court documents.
After the US invasion of Afghanistan, Zarqawi, like many other militants, was flushed out of the country, and briefly operated from Iraq's semi-independent Kurdistan region in cooperation with Ansar al-Sunna, according to US officials.
But soon after the US invasion of Iraq, US officials believe he moved into the country proper, achieving what has long been Al Qaeda's dream: A battleground for jihad in the heart of the Middle East. The ultimate objective for Al Qaeda and its allies is to create a hard-line caliphate throughout the Middle East, starting with Saudi Arabia, the birthplace of Islam.
Kohlmann points out, it's useful to be close to your strongest recruiting pool. "What's been effective for Zarqawi has been recruiting Sunni Arabs - Iraqi, Saudi, Jordanian, North African. These are the people who have been proven to be the most destructive, capable and driven fighters," he says.
"It's all about a secure base and a good location. This is the reason that bin Laden and Zawahiri have so many problems - they're up in the mountains away from modern technology and ways of getting around. Zarqawi didn't come into his own until the jihad moved into an urban battleground, in Iraq."
Though Jordan is not thought of as harboring as many militant-leaning citizens as Saudi Arabia, Islamist movements have long threatened the monarchy there, and analysts say sympathy for their goals is high in some parts of the country. Hundreds of Jordanian militants have entered Iraq across the country's desert border since the war began, say counterterrorism experts.
M.J. Gohel, the president of the Asia Pacific Foundation, a think tank that tracks militant groups, says that while the war in Iraq "certainly hasn't helped," the long-term presence of militant sympathizers inside Jordan should not be discounted.
"It really was only a matter of time, given that terrorists have a support base inside the country, the entire network can be recruited locally, he says. "King Abdullah is a reformist, tolerant ruler and... while he has a lot of support among the educated and well-to-do, the unfortunate fact is that a large portion of Jordanians are fundamentalist and don't want a secular, modern Jordan. They'd like to destabilize Jordan."
Mr. Gohel worries that Al Qaeda's style of terrorism is now spreading. "Within recent months we've seen brutal terrorist attacks in Bali, New Delhi, London, and Egypt, as well as major arrests taking place in Australia [this week]," he says. "So this shows that four years after 9/11 we are witnessing more attacks in more countries than ever before, and there's no indication the terrorist are on the run or being rolled back."
He says that there's no magic bullet to the problem, but says that counterterrorist efforts "need to be completely reassessed," with a focus on trying to stem the spread of the ideology.
• Staff writer Alexandra Marks contributed to this report from New York.
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