Jordan PM defends overseas engagement in war on terror
AFP
AMMAN - Jordanian Prime Minister Samir Rifai on Monday defended his country's engagement overseas in the war against terror, saying deadly 2005 attacks in the capital had left the government with no alternative.
"Our war against terrorism is continuing and we are part of the world effort," the official Petra news agency quoted Rifai as saying, less than two weeks after the death of a senior Jordanian intelligence official in Afghanistan spotlighted his government's role in the US-led coalition there.
Jordanian Prime Minister Samir Rifai (AFP/File/Khalil Mazraawi)
"We will hunt down our enemy anywhere and we will defend our security, whatever the price."
The Jordanian premier said that after the December 2005 suicide bombings of luxury hotels in Amman, the government had "drawn up a security policy that prioritised preventive action and operating in the rear-bases from which terrorists are targeting us."
He said it was now necessary to "act beyond our borders and to make big and honourable sacrifices to attack the terrorists' safe havens and infiltrate them."
The 2005 bombings in Amman were claimed by Al-Qaeda in Iraq, then led by emigre Jordanian jihadist Abu Musab al-Zarqawi, who was later killed in a US air strike.
Last month, Jordanian intelligence officer Captain Ali bin Zeid, a member of the kingdom's royal family, was killed in a suicide bombing in Afghanistan along with seven US Central Intelligence Agency personnel.
He was there with a man who Jordanian intelligence services believed was their double agent but who turned on his handlers and killed them.
During a visit to Washington on Friday, Foreign Minister Nasser Judeh openly acknowledged for the first time that Jordan had a counterterrorism role in Afghanistan and planned to enhance it.
---------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------