AMMAN, 3 April 2003 — At a time when demonstrations have become an everyday occurrence, and on a day when the Muslim brotherhood issued a fatwa calling for jihad and on all Arab nations not to sit idly by while Iraq burns, Jordan’s King Abdallah yesterday described for the first time the US/UK attacks on neighboring Iraq as an “invasion” and said his country had persistently refused to open its airspace to the coalition.
Abdallah, in an interview with the official Petra news agency, also expressed his “pain and sadness” over civilian war casualties in Iraq, whom he described as “martyrs”.
“Frankly speaking, we were asked to open our airspace to military aircraft but we steadfastly refused,” the king told the director of Petra who was asking him to comment on reports that coalition planes used Jordan to attack Iraq.
“Jordan is not and will never be a launchpad for strikes on brethren in Iraq and if our airspace was being used for that purpose we would not have allowed civil aviation to use it and would have closed it like other countries have,” he said. Jordanian airspace has remained open since the start of the war on Iraq on March 20.
The king also strongly denied press reports alleging that US troops could deploy through Jordan to attack Iraq after Turkey denied them passage, saying: “This was never proposed to us and we would never allow it”. And he likewise dismissed as “shameful” reports suggesting that Israeli troops were deployed in Jordan as part of the war effort on Iraq.
Twice in the interview Abdallah referred to the “invasion” of Iraq by the coalition forces, insisting on his opposition to the war and to any new leadership imposed by external forces on Baghdad.
“We have used all our contacts with influential countries across the world in order to avert this day in which we see brethren Iraq facing an invasion and all the pain it carries for the innocents,” the king said.
“The Iraqi people have the right to choose their leadership and because we believe in democracy ... we cannot imagine that any people will agree to a leadership imposed on them from the outside, against their will,” he said.
Abdallah also said he shared his people’s anguish at seeing “on television screens the rise in the number of Iraqi civilian and innocent martyrs” killed in the war.
“We strongly denounce the killing of women and children ... and as a father I feel the pain of each Iraqi family, and each Iraqi child and father,” he said.
“We are one with our people who reject and condemn the invasion,” he said.
He also insisted that Jordan is determined on maintaining “strong historical and brotherly ties with the Iraqi people now and in the future”, even after it expelled late last month three Iraqi diplomats accused of harming state security.
Diplomatic sources told Arab News on Tuesday that the expelled diplomats had conspired to poison the water supply of several hundred US troops deployed in the kingdom. The Muslim brotherhood fatwa said: “Those that do (sit idly by) are mute devils who will be punished in this life and in the hereafter.”
Reacting to the king’s statement, Zaid Abdul-Hadi, 24, a financial analyst, said: “I agree with what the king has said. In the past couple of weeks, he said Jordan would not be used as a launching pad. Jordan and Iraq have had a close relationship in the past 20 years, and the late King Hussein tried his best to find a peaceful solution to the last Gulf War.”
Another Jordanian, who declined to give his name, said: “This is just a reaction to what’s going on in the Arab street, and I think it’s superficial. If that is the case, why is the Iraqi-Jordanian border a military zone? And why do we see F-16 planes flying around?”
Abdallah found many supporters. Emad Adham, 30, backed the king and said: “It was very timely that he made the statement. The whole of Jordan needed to hear it. The loose accusations of the Iraqi government should finally be put to rest.”
Meanwhile, a group of journalists who disappeared from a Baghdad hotel a week ago turned up safe but tired in Jordan on Tuesday saying they had been held in an Iraqi jail but were not physically harmed.
“We were in Abu Ghraib prison for seven or eight days. There were no specific charges. It wasn’t much fun but we were not physically hurt and we are very happy to be out,” said Matthew McAllester, 33, shortly after crossing the border.
McAllester, a reporter for the US newspaper Newsday, was speaking from a four-wheel drive in Jordan’s desert town of Ruweished, near the border.
