From DEBKA... Searching for some kind of corroboration...
The Jordanian gunman who cut down a group of Ecuadorian pilgrims with automatic gunfire at the border crossing from Jordan to Israel north of Eilat on Wednesday, November 19, did much more than shatter the calm of a border terminal normally bustling with goods, tourist and business traffic between the Jewish state and Hashemite kingdom. The assault dashed any illusions about Osama bin Laden holding off from drawing blood in Israel. Five of the pilgrims were injured â one later died of her wounds â as they prepared to cross into Jordan, victims of al Qaedaâs first direct strike inside Israel. The attack bore the fingerprints of Abu Musab Zarqawi, believed to be Al Qaedaâs top terror âcontractor.â A spokesman in Amman insisted the gunman acted on his own. His acknowledgement that the killer hailed from the Zarka area in the north of the kingdom let the cat out of the bag. According to DEBKAfileâs counter-terrorism sources, Zarqawi and Al Qaeda run a strong and well organized terrorist network out of the Zarqa area, Zarqawiâs home ground. It is hardly plausible that the gunman was not part of this setup.
| Proximity's grounds for attention, but it's not definitive. Got anything else? |
Jordanâs King Abdullah is beset with trouble â no matter which way he looks. In Saudi Arabia to the south, the government is reeling from a wave of Al Qaeda bombings. To the east in Iraq, Saddam Husseinâs guerrillas, aided by Arab fighters that include members of Al Qaeda, carry out daily attacks against US occupation forces. In Israel to the west, an Israeli-Palestinian war continues unabated. And Arab fighters continue to use Syria, to the north of Jordan, as their primary transit route into Iraq. Nonetheless, up until the Eilat attack, Jordan had looked like an oasis of calm â thanks to the effective blackout the Jordanians and Americans have imposed on news of terrorist activities in the country.
| Don't look at me. I didn't impose it. Paul, was that you? Dan? |
But something was seriously amiss in the kingdom of the Hashemites. DEBKAfileâs intelligence and counter-intelligence sources have learned that US forces found a list of 120 Jordanians who were either on their way to fight Americans in the Sunni Triangle or already in place. The lists were turned up in recently mounted raids in the Iraqi cities of Tikrit and Fallujah. Washington handed the roster to king Abdullah, who was profoundly shocked.
The Jordanians, whose military intelligence is usually excellent when it comes to Muslim subversive activities, hadnât a clue Al Qaeda had been running a recruitment network inside the kingdom through a small and relatively obscure organization called the Muslim Labor Party â a radical branch of the Jordanian Muslim Brotherhood. Before the list was dug up, no one in Amman had imagined Al Qaedaâs penetration of the country was so extensive. Jordan scrambled to declare a state of military emergency and is currently chasing party radicals and al Qaeda recruits who have not yet left for Iraq.
| Sometimes we pretend we don't see things that are there because they're so ugly... |
Zarqawi is a citizen of Jordan, escaped from a death sentence imposed for organizing a failed millennium terror campaign in December 1999. Jordanian Al Qaeda members were to strike the Mount Nevo pilgrimage site, the convents east of Jericho, the banks of the River Jordan that divides the West Bank from Jordan and Amman luxury hotels that were packed with Christian pilgrims and Israeli tourists. Later, he became Al Qaedaâs chemical and biological weapons expert and in 2003 was known to have been put in charge of attacks against Israeli and Jewish targets in Israel and overseas. |