Our Last Best Chance: The Pursuit of Peace in a Time of Peril

by King Abdullah II

  We had our own problems with Uday. He was in charge of the Iraqi national football (soccer) team, and at times Jordan would play Iraq. If we defeated the Iraqi team, Uday would arrange to have the Iraqi players beaten on return. Although his brother, Qusay, was quieter and less flamboyant, he was the smarter and, I suspected, more dangerous of the two.

  After the U.S. invasion of Iraq, Saddam’s daughters asked if they could come and live in Jordan, to escape the chaos and danger of Baghdad. We agreed, and they came to live, for the second time, in Amman. One subsequently left Jordan and went to live in Qatar.

  Over time, as some senior officers began to retire, I found the army brass becoming more supportive of my drive to modernize, and I decided that I would make my life in the army. After almost a year as deputy commander of Special Forces, I was promoted to commander and immediately pushed the idea of restructuring our Special Forces along the lines of other leading nations. In November 1996 I created Special Operations Command (SOCOM), based on the model adopted by the French and the Americans. Reporting directly to the chief of staff of the armed forces, Field Marshal Abdul Hafez Kaabneh, SOCOM brought together under one roof Special Forces and a number of elite specialist brigades from throughout the army. We had a unit similar to the British Special Air Service (SAS) or the U.S. Delta Force, a dedicated counterterrorist unit, and two airborne battalions similar to the British paratroopers.

  That year we put our parachuting skills in the service of international diplomacy. I had been approached by a group of international Special Forces veterans who wanted to carry out a parachute jump in Jordan. There is an everlasting brotherhood among Special Forces soldiers, and I readily agreed. So in mid-June 1996, a C-130J transport aircraft took off from Zarqa filled with veterans of every war imaginable, including two German soldiers in their eighties who had parachuted into Crete during World War II. I acted as the jumpmaster. The men were lined up in rows of eight, and as they reached the rear door, I slapped each man on the back, sending him out of the plane.

  Colonel Shaul Dori, a retired Israeli Special Forces officer, stepped forward. “Go!” I shouted over the roar of the engines, and slapped him on the back. Smiling, he jumped out of the plane, and became the first Israeli soldier to jump with the Jordanian army.

  “If someone had told me back in 1973, while I was fighting along the Suez Canal, that one day Israeli paratroopers would be jumping with the Jordanians,” said another of the Israeli veterans who jumped with us that day, “I’d have told him to get his head examined.” The jump was a great success and reminded all the men, fierce fighters and veterans of countless wars, how much they shared in common. Although today the relationship between Jordan and Israel is strained, at that time there was a sense of a new beginning. We hoped that the peace treaty between the two countries would lead to a comprehensive regional peace and that we were entering a new phase in Middle Eastern politics. There was so much optimism that I can’t help but look back on those years with great fondness, as well as with some bitterness at the opportunities that have been squandered.

  I asked the French Special Forces and the British Parachute Regiment to come out and train my men. We made quite a few changes. One was to introduce live-fire exercises and to ban the use of blanks. I remembered from Sandhurst how using real bullets increases one’s concentration. We have been fortunate that only one soldier has been wounded in the years since we started live-ammunition exercises.

  We had a chance to demonstrate our capabilities to our neighbor in 1997, when the Israeli defense minister, Yitzhak Mordechai, visited Jordan. My father asked me to put on a demonstration exercise in Zarqa, and we happily obliged. We began with basic trench work, in which you assault a fortified position. The soldiers ran toward the trenches, firing as they went, using live ammunition. Then they threw grenades and blasted their way across the barriers. The second exercise involved fighting in built-up areas. My troops assaulted a series of buildings using flamethrowers and Bangalore torpedoes, long tubes with explosives inside that cut through barbed wire. The men cleared a path up to the buildings, tossed grenades through the windows, and then stormed inside.

  When they had finished, Mordechai turned to me and said, “I’m very glad your father decided to make peace with us!”

  Live-fire exercises were nothing compared to actual missions. Due to the nature of Special Operations, many of our activities remain confidential. One particular mission, however, stands out in my mind.

  Chapter 11

  Very Special Operations

  In 1997, Special Operations Command (SOCOM) was deployed to eastern Jordan to help the police combat drug smugglers on the Iraqi border. The smugglers were looking to transit Jordan to access lucrative markets in Saudi Arabia and Egypt. One of Saddam’s sons, Qusay, ran a drug-smuggling operation from Baghdad, but the problem was not all foreign—people on the Jordanian side were also known to be involved.

  The last Jordanian town before the Iraqi border, Rweished, was a small town with little industry. Most people made their money from trade across the border, both legal and illegal. From there to the Iraqi border was fifty miles of completely flat ground. The smugglers had souped-up General Motors trucks, with the exhausts pointed down so that they would kick up a dust cloud as they drove to prevent identification. They had secure communications, night-vision capabilities, and heavy machine guns mounted on the back of their trucks.

  The desert police patrolled at night in old jeeps and didn’t have anything like night-vision equipment. The smugglers would roar past at full speed and disappear into a network of tents and buildings on the outskirts of town. It was a bit like facing a wellequipped foreign army, and the police were outgunned. When a policeman was killed while trying to tackle the smugglers, my father asked army headquarters to send me in. Although they were directed from Qusay’s headquarters in Baghdad, the smugglers had a long reach. Just how long, I had discovered to my discomfort a few weeks earlier.

  Rania and I were living in the Hashemiyah district of Amman, and I would leave for work early in the morning. One day I noticed a pickup truck parked by the side of the road, with a man sitting in it. When I returned from work that evening, he was still there. I noticed him the next day, still sitting there, watching. Worried that he was carrying out surveillance for a terrorist attack, I alerted my guards. The next morning, as I pulled out of the driveway, the watcher gunned his engine and the truck screamed toward me. Thinking it was an ambush, we drew our guns and rushed out of the car, preparing to shoot.

  The man jumped out of his truck shouting, “No, no, no!” and brandishing a briefcase. When he reached me, he said, “I know you’re going to get the order to go out to the border. Here’s one hundred thousand dollars to look the other way.” My heart was pounding. I asked the fellow if he knew who he was talking to, and he replied that I was the commander of Special Operations.

  “But do you know I’m the son of the king?”

  The man, a Jordanian, said, “Yeah, here’s one hundred thousand dollars.”

  I was shocked by his audacity. My father was renowned for his transparency and open governance, and here was this fellow thinking he could just bribe the king’s son and have me look the other way. I had him arrested on the spot. The army can be a little isolated from wider society, and this was my first introduction to the scope of narcoterrorism and the corrupting influence of large sums of money. It is straightforward to guard the border and defend Jordan from our enemies, but this was a much more complex situation. This border operation had suddenly become personal.

  We had been there a year before with our regular equipment—pistols, rifles, and machine guns—and could do very little. I went back to my father and said, “Please untie my hands.” I asked him for permission to deploy heavier weapons from the Special Operations arsenal. He agreed, and now we were returning with the firepower we needed to tackle the smugglers head-on. I deployed my troops three days earlier than planned, because I was worried that the smuggl
ers would find out the timing of our operation. The troops were armed with artillery and some anti-aircraft weapons.

  That evening, my soldiers took up positions in trenches near the border and waited. It was quiet until about eleven at night, when they saw an Iraqi car at the border, flashing its headlights. About two miles away, inside Jordan, several cars flashed their lights back. The smugglers were using their headlights to communicate. Soldiers heard the roar of a truck engine and saw a convoy heading across the border. They opened fire. Then all hell broke loose. The smugglers began shooting back, using automatic weapons, and there were firefights up and down the border. The first few nights my battalion must have fired ten thousand rounds of amunition. The smugglers did not want to leave men or machinery behind for us to capture, so when we knocked out one of their trucks, others came with grappling hooks to drag the burning wreck across the Iraqi border.

  A few days later, the smugglers stopped trying to sneak goods past us and focused on killing my soldiers. Although they were unsuccessful, at that point I lost patience. I joined the troops and decided to deploy the heavy guns. I brought out the M61 Vulcan 20mm cannon, which is capable of firing six thousand rounds per minute. A company closer to the border was engaged in heavy fire with the smugglers. My brother Feisal, who at the time was in the air force, commanded a squadron of fighters in support of our operation. As F-5 fighters flew past dropping flares, I gave the order to fire. My men opened up with artillery and our Vulcan anti-aircraft guns. Originally designed for use against Soviet jets, these were also pretty devastating on the ground. You could hear a “brrrrrrrrrrrp, brrrrrrrrrrp” as a wall of bullets descended, and see the explosions up and down the border.

  After that we had few problems with the smugglers. But as we would soon find out, smugglers were not the only threats to Jordan.

  May 25, 1998, was a pleasant spring morning. As it was a public holiday—Jordanian Independence Day—I was at home, working out on the treadmill, when the telephone rang. It was my uncle, Prince Hassan, calling from the Police Crisis Management Center. “How good are you at taking terrorists alive?” he asked. “Not very,” I said. “My unit is trained to kill them.” “Well, we have a major problem in Sahab,” he said, referring to a small town outside Amman. “It’s either you or the police.” I threw on my uniform and headed for the door.

  Early that year, Jordan had been terrorized by a series of brutal murders in wealthy neighborhoods of Amman. In January, eight Iraqis had been killed at a villa in Rabia, and in April three Jordanians had been killed in Shmeisani. A prominent doctor had been killed simply because he showed up at the wrong house when one of these murders was taking place. Rumor varied as to whether the murders were the work of terrorists, drug gangs, or petty criminals. The police had tracked down two of the members of the gang they thought responsible, a hit man and his accomplice, and had them trapped in a house in Sahab. Senior officials thought it was important to capture these men alive. They wanted to know for certain whether the murders were inspired by foreign sources and to assure a frightened and skeptical public that they had caught the killers. The previous night the police had gone up to the house at 1 a.m. They knocked on the door, and the criminals opened fire, wounding a policeman. The police fired back, and in the exchange of bullets that followed, the hit man’s accomplice was killed. Since then the police had kept him trapped in the house.

  I activated the 71st Battalion, which was highly trained in counterterrorism operations, and within minutes they were suited up and ready to go. I was accompanied by my aide-de-camp, Nathem Rawashdeh, an officer from the town of Kerak, about ninety miles south of Amman. As the battalion did not have enough body armor, Nathem and I stopped by the office to pick up some newly arrived samples of Russian-made body armor, and then drove at full speed to rejoin our unit. We met up with the rest of the battalion at a roundabout on the outskirts of town and headed into the center. The tires of the jeep screeched as we skidded around the final corner and stopped in the town square, which was crowded with people.

  As my troops were piling out of their vans and assembling their guns and equipment, I asked who was in charge. A short policeman, who was quite aggressive, told me that this was his operation. “Look,” I said, “I’ve been sent by Prince Hassan with orders to take over this operation. He told me I’m to take the terrorist alive. So please stand down.” After a heated argument, he finally gave way, and I was now in charge.

  Standard operating procedure would have been for the police to clear the area and create a secure cordon even if we were in the middle of a town, surrounded by panicked people and curious onlookers. But this was not done, and I had no choice but to make the best of a messy situation.

  “So,” I said at last, “how far up the street is this man?” The policeman pointed to a house no more than ten yards away on the other side of the street. There is no way we should have been standing unprotected this close to a known killer. We all scrambled for cover in a sewing shop across the street. It had a large glass window looking out over the square that made us quite vulnerable. One of my men, Jamal Shawabkeh, who later headed Special Operations Command, was leading the assault team. He lived in Sahab and had been one of the first on the scene. After briefing me on the situation, Jamal said, “Now that we’re in charge, let’s storm the building and kill him. It will take five minutes.” I told him no, that we had to take the man alive. I explained that those were my orders, so that he could stand trial for his crimes. We would have to try to capture him alive, even if it meant some of us getting killed. This was a very difficult order to give, but Jamal accepted it without missing a beat. “Well then,” he said, “I’ll be the first man through the door.”

  One policeman, overhearing our planning session, came up to me and said, “I don’t think you should use explosives to blow the side wall or windows out. He’s got explosives in there.” At that moment, looking out the window of the sewing shop, I saw that there were policemen standing all over the roof of the house and, exasperated, I said, “Then bloody well get those men off the roof!”

  We resumed planning the assault. A middle-aged man in civilian clothes stood next to me. I thought he was a plainclothes intelligence officer. When I caught his eye he said, “Would anybody like tea?” It turned out he was an enterprising falafel seller who had left his cart out in the street and come in to see what was going on. It was a surreal moment. Here we were in a life-and-death situation—with bystanders taking it all in like a soccer match. Although it seemed comic, we knew that at any moment the situation could turn into a tragedy.

  The police were failing to keep a secure area around the building. “We’ve got to get some order here! Throw this guy out and cordon off the street,” I told Nathem, but the general chaos continued.

  Once we had blocked off the area, I told Jamal to lead the assault. He readied his team of crack operatives, including a huge Special Forces officer by the name of Abu Khasheb, who was a real character. Special Forces used to test new equipment like Tasers and pepper spray on him to make sure they worked. Neither one could stop him, so he was the ideal man to assault a hardened killer. Onlookers held their breath as Jamal walked through the square and made his way to the house. He pushed the door open and poked his head through.

  “Keep out!” shouted the hit man. “If you come in, I’ll take as many of you with me as I can.”

  “Listen,” said Jamal in a low voice, “we’re not the police. We’re Special Forces. You know what that means. Either you give up or I’m going to roll a grenade into the room and that will be the end of you.” Then Jamal sprinted back across the square to brief me. “If we’re going in, it has to be now,” he said.

  I gave the order for Jamal to lead the assault. He went back to the front door at the same time as an assault team crept around the side of the house. Then he stepped inside and confronted the terrorist one-on-one without raising his weapon, distracting him while the rest of the team stormed into the house through a side win
dow.

  Seven minutes later, there was a commotion inside the house. Jamal came back out the door, followed by Abu Khasheb, who was carrying the hit man. Running over, I said, “What happened?”

  “I walked through the door slowly,” Jamal said, “so he could see I was dressed in civilian clothes. He pointed his gun straight between my eyes. I told him not to be stupid and said we weren’t going to kill him, he would get a fair trial.” Breathing heavily, Jamal continued, “Then the team burst into the rooms and rushed him.” He looked sheepish and apologized for the blood running down the man’s face. Considering the fact that Jamal had stared this vicious killer down, I felt that a few scrapes were more than acceptable!

  When the crowd understood what had happened it rushed into the square—policemen, civilians, falafel sellers—and everyone began to shout, “Special Forces! God is great!” Many tried to attack our man, so we had to get him into a van and out of there quickly. Not wanting to take credit, I asked the officials on the scene to tell everybody it was a police operation, and that they should receive the plaudits.

  The police later rounded up four other accomplices, but one escaped and fled to Europe. In total, there were seven members of this gang. They turned out to be criminals who were targeting wealthy businessmen for extortion.

  The next morning, as I walked into my office, I saw a couple of my men shaking their heads and smiling. I had not realized it at the time, but television cameras had captured the whole thing. The story had made headlines on the next morning’s news, and my team and I found our names plastered across the front page of the newspapers. So much for my attempts to keep the whole thing quiet.