AMMAN, 24 August 2005 — Syrian militants linked to Al-Qaeda’s leader in Iraq, Abu Musab Al-Zarqawi, were behind last week’s rocket attack on US warships in the Red Sea port of Aqaba, Jordanian security officials said yesterday. Zarqawi’s Sunni Muslim group claimed responsibility for Friday’s attack, in which the rockets missed their targets, but hit a warehouse and a hospital, killing a Jordanian soldier, and struck the Israeli port of Eilat.
An Internet statement said those who had carried out the strikes had “withdrawn ... and returned safely to their base”. The Jordanian officials identified the suspects as an Iraqi named Mohammed Hameed Hassan, also known as Abu Mukhtar, and a Syrian named Mohammed Hassan Abdullah Al-Sahli and his two sons. The officials, who asked not to be named, said Sahli had been part of an Al-Qaeda sleeper cell in Amman. He was arrested shortly after his sons, Abdullah and Abdul-Rahman, fled across the border to Iraq with Hassan on Friday.
They said the Syrians had used forged Iraqi passports to enter Jordan, a tightly policed pro-Western kingdom where militant attacks are rare. Another security source said the four-member group had received direct orders from Zarqawi, a Jordanian who has led a campaign of bombings and kidnappings in postwar Iraq.
The attack was the most serious on US targets in Jordan since the 2002 killing of American diplomat Lawrence Foley in Amman. A Jordanian court has convicted Zarqawi in absentia for Foley’s shooting and sentenced him to death.
Amman has received several warnings in recent months that Al-Qaeda planned to attack the port of Aqaba, which handles many supplies for US forces in Iraq, security sources said. They said the three missiles fired in Friday’s attack were among seven Katyusha rockets smuggled into Jordan from Iraq by car two weeks earlier. The other four were found abandoned.
A Jordanian source said Amman was concerned about signs that Syria had become a conduit for anti-US fighters heading to Iraq - as US officials complain - but said there was no proof the Damascus government condoned such activities.
Al-Zarqawi’s terror group was the second to claim responsibility for the rocket attack, but the authenticity of the statement, signed by group spokesman Abu Maysara Al-Iraqi, could not be verified. The first claim was issued by the Abdullah Azzam Brigades shortly after the Katyusha rockets were fired from a hilltop warehouse, overlooking Aqaba and its port.
The Zarqawi group explained the delay in issuing its claim by saying it waited five days “so that the brothers could finish retreating.” “God has enabled your brothers in the military wing of the Al-Qaeda in Iraq to plan for the Aqaba invasion a while ago,” said the statement, which appeared on a militant Islamic Web site. “After finishing the preparations and deciding on the targets, your brothers launched the rockets.” Jordanian officials were not immediately available for comment on the claim, but investigators have said the rocket assault carried the hallmarks of Al-Qaeda.
Sahli was assisted by his two sons, who also hailed from the northern Syrian city of Hama, although the father was said to live in Amman. The fourth member of the team and its reputed leader was Mohammed Hamid Hussein, an Iraqi.
In the Friday attack, the most serious against the US Navy since the 2000 bombing of the USS Cole in Yemen, one rocket flew across the bow of a US amphibious assault ship and crashed into a warehouse, killing a Jordanian soldier. Another missile landed near a Jordanian hospital, and a third hit a taxi on the outskirts of an Israeli airport, but did not explode.
A Jordanian government official said the rocket launch was triggered by a timing device that allowed Sahli’s sons and the Iraqi to escape into Iraq hours before the attack. The official did not explain why Sahli did not also manage to flee.
