Amman, Jordan
A GROUP AFFILIATED with Jordan's own Abu Musab al Zarqawi has claimed responsibility for the August 19 missile attack in Aqaba that targeted two U.S. Navy ships and killed one Jordanian soldier and injured a taxi driver in the neighboring Israeli resort of Eilat. Other Zarqawi plots have been interrupted, including a major chemical attack on Amman last spring, making this the first successful terrorist operation in Jordan--one of the Arab world's most security-conscious states--since the beginning of the Iraq war. Though it exposed a level of cooperation between Jordan and the United States many Jordanians were apparently unaware of, reactions here have been surprisingly blasé.
The night of the attack, I was dining with a group of Jordanians in one of Amman's fashionable night-life areas, and people seemed more concerned about the imminent return of Abu Qatada, a Jordanian-born fundamentalist sheikh whom the Blair government is only too happy to disgorge after the July bombings in London. "I really thought Jordanians would be freaked out when we finally got hit," says Rana Sweis, a 25-year-old Jordanian journalist. "And if it had happened two or three years ago, people would've been shocked and afraid. Things are very stable here, and Jordanians are very cautious. But look around you, everyone's out tonight."
Perhaps the relative calm is due to the fact that everyone else in the region has been hit considerably harder. Or maybe, as Fares Braizat, a researcher at the University of Jordan's Center for Strategic Studies, explains, it's because "Jordan was
definitely not the target. If it was," he told me in his Amman office, "they would've gone after the capital here."
It's true that the missile attack, like the last successful terrorist operation in Jordan, which claimed the life of American diplomat Laurence Foley in October 2002, targeted Americans. However, as we saw when Western employees in the Saudi oil industry were killed, attacks in Muslim countries are often intended to bring attention to a government's relationship with Western concerns in order to embarrass the regime. As a recent Pew poll showed that 70 percent of Jordanians support attacks against Americans and other Westerners in Iraq, it's likely that much of that majority had not previously known that their government is a stalwart, albeit quiet, ally in the U.S.-led coalition's war. Now they know, and maybe the Royal Hashemite Court has some explaining to do.
However, targeting Aqaba suggests that the attack wasn't just a shot at the United States and its regional policies. It was also aimed at the Hashemite monarchy.
Aqaba is Jordan's only port and also its one Red Sea resort town. Throughout the region this summer the tourist industry has been repeatedly attacked, most spectacularly at Sharm al Sheikh, Egypt's Red Sea resort, where 88 people, mostly Egyptians, died. And in Lebanon, the series of bombs and assassinations that began with the February murder of a former Lebanese prime minister has virtually destroyed the summer tourism season, long a staple of the Lebanese economy. Perhaps Aqaba isn't yet as strong a tourist draw as Beirut or Egypt's numerous Sinai resorts, but the Jordanians are hoping to make good on the large investment they've poured into what they call the Red Sea Riviera, encompassing Taba in Egypt and Eilat in Israel.
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