As we approached the harbor I saw a cluster of white houses huddled around the base of a massive rock, with an ancient acropolis perched at the top. A few people gathered as our yacht pulled up to the dock. We spent a peaceful evening in this small island town. In the morning we went back to pick up Rania.
We had a few hours to wait, so Ali and I left the children with their aunts, rented Harley-Davidson motorbikes, and set off to explore the island. We drove around the dusty roads and small villages and got back just as Rania arrived. We set sail again not long after that, heading for Halki, a small island with just three hundred inhabitants. We had planned to sail for two days through the Greek islands, stopping at Symi, Tilos, and Nisyros before arriving at Santorini, famous for its black volcanic beaches and dazzling white houses.
Around five o’clock in the afternoon I was relaxing with my wife and young children on deck, enjoying the beautiful scenery, when a call came from Amman. I went belowdecks to the communications center and picked up the telephone. On the other end was the head of intelligence. “We have received reports that a group of Al Qaeda assassins are planning to attack your boat when you arrive in Santorini,” he said. “You have to turn around immediately.”
He told me that the terrorists intended to strike our yacht with rocket-propelled grenades, and said they might be planning a suicide attack, which would involve drawing up alongside the yacht and blowing up their boat to destroy the one carrying me and my family. (This technique was used some four months later, on October 12, when suicide bombers attacked the destroyer USS Cole in the port of Aden, in Yemen, killing seventeen sailors.)
As a husband and father, I was furious that these terrorists had threatened my family. Although my first instinct was to fight back, I agreed with my brother Ali that it would be wisest to turn the boat around and get out of there as quickly as possible.
We did not want to cause a panic onboard, so we had to come up with a good reason for the sudden change of plan. As Rania was pregnant, we told the crew that she was having complications and that we would have to cancel the cruise and return to Rhodes. We alerted the airport, and our plane was waiting on the tarmac when we reached the harbor. Once we were airborne, I called the head of intelligence and told him to inform the Greek security services of what he knew. We never found out how Al Qaeda discovered I was in Greece; our best guess was that a local informant had passed on intelligence. Because of Jordan’s moderation and its active role in pursuing regional peace and promoting a culture of tolerance among members of different civilizations and faiths, I was viewed by Al Qaeda as a threat.
By this time we had been fighting Al Qaeda for several years, working with our allies to stop their plots across the region, and this may have led to their plot to kill me. It was not personal; they were trying to strike at a larger target. The Hashemite lineage has always commanded respect across the Arab and Muslim world, but our traditional moderation, coupled with our openness to the West, has often made us a target of extremists. By killing me they hoped to kill ninety years of Hashemite rule in Jordan, and more than a thousand years of leadership in Arabia. Part of Al Qaeda’s agenda is to overthrow all Arab regimes and replace them with its fanatic and unorthodox vision of government.
The seeds of Al Qaeda’s violent radicalism were planted in the region in the turbulent year of 1979, when three events took place that would echo through the decades. In January the shah of Iran fled the developing revolution and was replaced by Ayatollah Khomeini, who gave birth to the Islamic Republic of Iran. Iran’s Islamic Revolution inspired and energized radicals throughout the region. Then, on November 20, several hundred radicals seized control of the Grand Mosque in Mecca. The capture of Islam’s most holy site by a group of armed extremists stunned the Muslim world. Their leader, a Saudi named Juhayman al-Otaibi, claimed that the Saudi government was corrupt and un-Islamic, and that the Mahdi, a foretold and awaited Islamic leader and descendant of the Prophet Mohammad, had returned to take over the country. The rebels were eventually driven from the mosque and Juhayman and many of his coconspirators were publicly beheaded. The rebellion was over. But its implications lingered on.
One radical Islamist inspired by Juhayman’s actions was the Palestinian Isam Muhammad Taher Barqawi, better known as Abu Muhammad al-Maqdisi, who would later repeat many of Juhayman’s criticisms of the Saudi and other Arab governments. Born in the West Bank, Maqdisi spent time in Afghanistan in the late 1980s, and as a leading theorist he later would become a key figure in the jihadi Salafi movement in Jordan and would mentor Abu Musab al-Zarqawi, leading him on the path toward using brutal violence in the name of religion.
As the siege of Mecca ended, in December 1979, the third momentous event of the year occurred: Soviet tanks rolled into Afghanistan. This attack on a Muslim country energized fighters across the entire Muslim world. Some wanted Jordan to get involved. An American friend who recently had retired from the armed forces came to see me, saying he had just returned from Afghanistan and wanted Jordan to train a group of mujahideen fighters. I told him it was not my decision to make; I was just a junior officer. But I would pass the request on to my father.
My father said, “Absolutely not.” He felt mixing religious zeal with cold war politics was a very dangerous thing to do. He also felt that getting involved in this conflict would set us up against Russia, something he did not believe would serve the interests of Jordan.
One Muslim group at the forefront of the war in Afghanistan was the Salafi movement. Mainstream Sunni and Shia believers base their interpretation of Islam on a deep historical tradition of scholarship and learning and a corpus of grammatical, linguistic, and etymological analysis. In this tradition, Muslim religious leaders, known as imams, spend years, even decades, studying over a thousand years of Muslim scholarship. When they issue religious edicts or judicial opinions, known as fatwas, they generally offer a nuanced interpretation of Islamic thought, based on the wisdom of those who have gone before. But Salafi leaders disregard this tradition of learning and do not accept a plurality of scholarship in Islamic thought. Instead, they insist that they have a privileged understanding of Islam based on their own interpretation of the Quran. One of the problems with this approach is that it does not contain the internal judicial checks and balances of the mainstream faith, and it is not accepting of other learned opinions. In the wrong hands, this can be very dangerous.
The takfiris take this exclusivism further and use it to justify their distorted version of Islam. They believe they have the right to kill heretics, and to denounce as such those who disagree with their doctrines. They would kill whenever and wherever they can.
Early in the morning of October 28, 2002, Laurence Foley, a senior official for the U.S. Agency for International Development (USAID), stepped out of his white limestone house in an Amman suburb, heading for work. As he walked toward his car a gunman jumped out from behind the car and shot him eight times with a 7mm pistol. The assassin fled to a waiting getaway car, leaving Foley’s wife to discover his body lying in a pool of blood.
The head of the intelligence service called me and said, “There’s just been an assassination of an American diplomat.” I was furious that such a terrible thing could happen to a guest in our country and ordered immediate action to find the culprits.
The next day I went to the U.S. embassy to pay my condolences to Foley’s widow, Virginia. I told her we would find her husband’s killer. Two months later, in December 2002, Jordanian security forces arrested the gunman, a Libyan, and the driver of the getaway car, a Jordanian.
As our security forces investigated further, we found that the plot had been directed from outside Jordan and that the mastermind was Abu Musab al-Zarqawi. Following a lengthy investigation and trial, in the spring of 2004 a Jordanian court sentenced eight men to death for the killing of Laurence Foley, six in absentia, including Zarqawi. The two men who were in Jordanian custody, the gunman and the driver, were subsequently executed.
Terrible as this act
was, it was simply the prelude to a much larger wave of violence that was soon to crash over the Middle East. In early April 2004 in Irbid, a town close to the Syrian border, Jordanian security forces intercepted three trucks filled with explosives. The intelligence services scrambled to uncover who was behind the shipment and what their intentions were. We were fortunate to discover that one of the plotters, a Jordanian named Azmi Jayousi, was still in the country, hiding out in a flat in the Marka neighborhood of downtown Amman with an unknown number of coconspirators. I ordered a Special Forces team to get Jayousi and, if possible, take him alive. We had to know if his cell was acting alone or if there were others waiting to strike.
Jayousi was holed up in a residential area next to a school. The team decided to operate at night to reduce the risk of civilians getting caught up in the fight. At two in the morning on April 20, 2004, a team from Battalion 71 assembled in the street below the flat. Highly trained counterterrorist soldiers, they were accompanied by regular police.
One of the policemen knocked on the door and was greeted with a volley of machine-gun fire. Six commandos stormed into the apartment, returning fire and killing the terrorist who was shooting at them. A second team rushed into the flat after that and captured the heavily armed Jayousi alive, along with his wife and three children. They found explosives, thousands of dollars and Jordanian dinars, and several fake passports.
Under questioning, Jayousi revealed that the ringleader was Abu Musab al-Zarqawi, whom he first met when they were fighting in Afghanistan. He revealed that there were two more cells still in Amman, planning more attacks. Jayousi did not know where the second cell was, but a quick-thinking Special Operations commander asked him to call its leader and set up a meeting. The Special Forces team set off to intercept the leader of the second cell. They grabbed him in broad daylight, and he led them to his safe house, where they captured the leader of the last cell.
A few days later, Jordanians watched in disbelief and horror as the terrorists revealed the details of their plot in a televised confession. They had planned to mix conventional explosives with deadly chemicals and attack the U.S. embassy, the prime minister’s office, and the headquarters of the General Intelligence Department (GID), the internal intelligence service. Trained in explosives in one of bin Laden’s camps in Afghanistan, Jayousi had developed a technique for mixing concentrated oxygen with ground-up black cumin seeds to create a substance with greater explosive power than TNT. He hoped to kill many thousands of people.
A few days later, on April 29, around one hundred thousand Jordanians, including my wife, Rania, marched on the streets of Amman to protest. Chanting, “No to terrorists in Jordan,” and beating drums, the demonstrators marched to the gates of Parliament, where they burned pictures of bin Laden, Zarqawi, and Jayousi and his accomplices.
The subsequent trial was chaotic, with the terrorists disrupting the proceedings and refusing to recognize the authority of the court. At one point Jayousi took off his slippers and threw them at the judge, yelling that Abu Musab al-Zarqawi would chop off his head and calling those assembled “God’s enemies.”
When the trial concluded, Jayousi and his fellow plotters were sentenced to death, and Zarqawi was once again sentenced to death in absentia. When the verdict was read aloud, one of the terrorists shouted out, “Bin Laden’s organization is rising, and we will be back!”
Chapter 22
Jordan’s 9/11
November 9, 2005, was supposed to be the happiest day of Nadia Alami’s life. That evening she was to marry her longtime sweetheart, Ashraf Da’as, at the Radisson SAS Hotel in Amman. The young couple had met three years before while working at a local hospital, and had quickly fallen in love. Their families and friends had come from around the globe and gathered at the hotel for the wedding. At around nine o’clock, the bride and groom walked through the lobby, past the cheering and clapping guests. Nadia wore a beautiful white dress with a flowing veil, and Ashraf a dark suit and red tie.
They had been married less than an hour and were about to celebrate the beginning of their life together. But Abu Musab al-Zarqawi had other plans.
Two Iraqi suicide bombers, a husband-and-wife team wearing explosive vests packed with ball bearings under their clothing, had infiltrated the wedding party and were mingling with the guests, each in a different corner of the room. As Nadia and Ashraf approached the door, the band struck up a tune.
Then the male bomber detonated his vest. The ball bearings shot across the ballroom with deadly force, killing the father of the bride outright and mortally wounding the father of the groom. The female bomber tried to detonate her vest, but it failed to go off, and she fled.
Twenty-seven guests were killed, including sixteen of Ashraf’s relatives. Both the bride and groom lost their fathers.
At exactly the same time, suicide bombers struck at two other nearby hotels, the Grand Hyatt and the Days Inn, killing thirty-three more people. In all, sixty people lost their lives that night, thirty-six of them Jordanian. Among those killed was Moustapha Akkad, a prominent Syrian-American filmmaker who produced the movie Mohammad: Messenger of God, depicting the early days of Islam, though he is probably better known to U.S. audiences for producing some of the Halloween horror movies.
When the attack took place I was in Kazakhstan on an official visit. We had just finished dinner when a call came in for me from Amman. As soon as I heard the news, I got a cold feeling in the pit of my stomach. In our battle against the takfiris I had always feared that, sooner or later, we would be attacked. But nothing could have prepared me for this.
I excused myself and immediately called for my plane. It was an agonizing trip home. We arrived in Jordan around five o’clock the next morning, and I went directly to the sites of the attacks. When I saw the chaos and devastation, my sadness turned to anger. “How could they do this to us?” I thought. I was furious. These murderers had killed innocent people at a wedding, and as the head of state it was my duty to protect them. I was determined to find those responsible. I paid my condolences to grieving family members and went to several hospitals to visit the wounded. One of the victims was the son of a close friend of mine.
To a large country like the United States, sixty people may not sound like very many, but to Jordan it was a devastating blow, the equivalent of losing three thousand people in a single attack on America. The psychological impact on average Jordanians was dramatic. It turned the population decisively against Al Qaeda and their like. In Jordan, and across much of the rest of the world, when we write a date, we write the day before the month. So the date of the attack, November 9, was 9/11. And in many ways it was as much of a watershed for Jordan as 9/11 was for the United States.
The leader of Al Qaeda in Iraq, Abu Musab al-Zarqawi, issued a statement taking responsibility for the bombings. “After studying and observing the targets,” he said, “the places of execution were chosen to be hotels which the tyrant of Jordan has turned into a backyard for the enemies of Islam, such as the Jews and Crusaders.” But far from targeting the enemies of Islam, as the terrorists claimed, they had indiscriminately murdered dozens of innocent Jordanians and other innocent people of different nationalities.
The people of Jordan did not accept Zarqawi’s hateful attack. That afternoon, a group of angry protesters gathered outside the Radisson Hotel waving Jordanian flags and chanting, “Death to Zarqawi!” For nights on end young Jordanians held vigils and said prayers.
I was extremely angry and said in an address to the nation on November 10, “Let it be clear to everyone that we will pursue these terrorists and those who aid them. We will reach them wherever they are, pull them from their lairs, and submit them to justice.” We had a policy in Jordan of not interfering in the internal affairs of other countries, but that was about to change. I resolved that from now on, if we learned about a terrorist group that was planning to target us hiding in another country, we would hit them before they hit us. I gathered together our intelligence ser
vice, the military, and the political leadership and said, “We’re going on the offensive. What Zarqawi did was reprehensible. The gloves are off, and I want you to get him.” We reached out to the Iraqi tribes to see if we could get more information. If the Iraqi government was willing to help us, fine. But if not, we were prepared to act alone.
Iraq was a closed country under Saddam Hussein, and our intelligence services had not been able to operate easily there. After the U.S.-led invasion, when things started to fall apart, it took us a little while to get our people inside. We knew Zarqawi was in Iraq. But initially we did not have the capability to move against him. Now we began aggressively to move into Iraq. We began to attach teams of Jordanian officers to American Special Forces units. Jordanians had a better understanding of the mannerisms of takfiris and were thus able to identify suspects more efficiently. Many takfiris have a distinctive manner of dress and behavior, and we helped the Americans understand what to look for.
Zarqawi had said that this was an attack against the Jordanian regime. But it was not, and people in Jordan clearly saw that killing guests at a wedding was an act of savage barbarity, not a political gesture. What Zarqawi had done was to declare war on Jordan. Now we were coming for him.
Zarqawi was born Ahmed Fadil Nazzal Khalaylah and grew up in the town of Zarqa, seventeen miles northeast of Amman. He was a thug and petty criminal and drifted until his early twenties, when he headed to Afghanistan to join the war against the occupying Soviet troops. Arriving just as the Russians were leaving in 1989, he adopted the nom de guerre of “al-Zarqawi,” literally meaning “the one from Zarqa,” and met Osama bin Laden and other radicals. On returning to Jordan in the early 1990s he set up a local terrorist group called Bay’at al-Emam, but before he could carry out any attacks he was arrested and sentenced to life imprisonment.
In prison, Zarqawi met the leading thinker of the radical takfiri movement, Abu Muhammad al-Maqdisi, who encouraged his violent desires. But Maqdisi later started to criticize Zarqawi and the two men fell out. In what would prove to be a costly mistake, Zarqawi was released from prison in 1999, as part of a general amnesty declared shortly after I became king. It was not long before he headed back to Afghanistan, where he received further funding and encouragement from bin Laden. Following the U.S. invasion of Afghanistan in October 2001, he returned to the Middle East to continue his plotting.
Our Last Best Chance: The Pursuit of Peace in a Time of Peril Page 27
