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Amman, Jan 2 (Petra) — His Majesty King Abdullah II, the Supreme Commander of the Armed Forces, Her Majesty Queen Rania Al Abdullah and His Royal Highness Crown Prince Hussein bin Abdullah were at the Queen Alia International Airport on Saturday to receive the body of Captain Sharif Ali bin Zeid Al Aun who was killed in Afghanistan on Wednesday.
Sharif Ali fell as he performed his humanitarian duty with the Jordanian contingent of the U.N. peacekeeping forces in Afghanistan.
(Getty Images)
His body was flown home today on board a Royal Air Force plane.
Their Majesties and the Crown Prince expressed their heart-felt condolences to the martyr’s family.
Jordan emerges as key CIA counterterrorism ally …
The suicide bomber who killed seven CIA agents in Afghanistan was a Jordanian informant, US media reports say. He is said to have been a doctor recruited by Jordan’s intelligence service to infiltrate al-Qaeda.
He is believed to have been working undercover in eastern Afghanistan for weeks before detonating a bomb at Forward Operating Base Chapman.
The Washington Post quotes two former US government officials as saying that the alleged bomber lured the CIA officers into a meeting with a promise of new information on al-Qaeda’s top leadership.
The reports have named him as Humam Khalil Abu-Mulal al-Balawi, a 36-year-old al-Qaeda sympathiser from Zarqa, Jordan (hometown of Al-Zarqawi), arrested by Jordanian intelligence over a year ago.
The CIA has declined to comment on the reports.
Changing sides
Jordanian intelligence believed they had brought Humam al-Balawi over to their side and sent him to Afghanistan to infiltrate al-Qaeda, US network NBC says. His specific mission was thought to be tracking down al-Qaeda’s number two, Ayman al-Zawahiri.
Zawahiri has emerged as Al Qaeda's strategic and operational planner (NY Daily News)
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Once again the boogeyman strikes: Abu Musab al-Zarqawi. He himself was tortured in (CIA precursor) Jordanian jail, sentenced and found quilty of terror acts. Apparently fought with Afghan mujadeen against the Soviets.
In Zarqawi’s home town, family talk with pride about their heroic cousin
"But I will not let myself be reduced to silence.".
US army intelligence chiefs in Afghanistan find foreign newspaper articles about the country more useful than the information collected by their own soldiers in the field, a highly critical report by the top US intelligence officer said yesterday.
According to Maj Gen Michael Flynn and two other intelligence advisers, the huge intelligence apparatus in Afghanistan is “only marginally relevant” to Nato’s overall war plan because nearly all of its effort is spent finding Taliban fighters to kill rather than trying to understand the needs and grievances of ordinary Afghan civilians. Their support is now seen by military chiefs as key to beating the insurgency.
Bogged down producing detailed flow diagrams of rebel cells, intelligence officers are consequently “ignorant of local economics and landowners, hazy about who the powerbrokers are and how they might be influenced, incurious about the correlations between various development projects and the levels of co-operation among villagers”, the report says.
With the Taliban making ever increasing use of deadly roadside bombs intelligence analysts have focused even more on targeting the people responsible.
But Flynn argues that this misses the point that “merely killing insurgents usually serves to multiply enemies rather than subtract them”.
Fixing Intel: A Blueprint for Making Intelligence Relevant in Afghanistan
"But I will not let myself be reduced to silence.".
ISTANBUL – A Jordanian doctor-turned-suicide bomber who killed seven CIA employees at a base in Afghanistan is regarded by his family as a martyr in Islam’s holy war against the United States, his wife said Thursday.
Covered in a black Islamic chador, Defne Bayrak, the Turkish wife of bomber Humam Khalil Abu-Mulal al-Balawi, lauded her husband’s Dec. 30 attack to Turkish journalists in Istanbul.
“I am proud of him; my husband has carried out a great operation in such a war. May God accept his martyrdom,” Bayrak told the Dogan news agency.
Bayrak, an Arabic-language translator for some pro-Islamic Turkish media outlets, said it was not surprising that her husband joined the jihad, since he often wrote on jihad Web sites when they lived in Jordan.
Turkish media reported that Bayrak was the author of a book titled “Osama bin Laden the Che Guevera of the East,” and had translated into Turkish an anti-American book by Saddam Hussein titled “Begone, Demons.”
Bayrak said al-Balawi left for Pakistan on March 18, 2009, saying he would become a surgical specialist. This has been disputed by anti-terrorism experts in the Middle East, who say he went to Afghanistan.
To become a martyr by killing many Israelis
Al-Balawi was, in fact, a leading Internet Islamic militant writer known as Abu Dujana al-Khurasani, who prayed to God two days after Israel launched its offensive on Gaza to become a martyr by killing many Israelis.
An Islamic Web site Abu Dujana used republished an article he wrote Dec. 29, 2008, in which he declared his wish to join the holy war. With it, he posted a picture of two women in Islamic dress lying dead in a pool of blood.
Mother of ‘Jordan bomber’ says he was no extremist
AMMAN (AFP) – The mother of a man named as an Al-Qaeda double agent who blew himself up at a CIA base in Afghanistan said on Wednesday her son was not an extremist, while officials insisted that he was a useful intelligence agent.
Balawi’s mother said she has not heard from him in 10 months and has no idea if he is dead or alive, insisting that he “was never an extremist.”
“We hear the news about my son Humam Khalil Mohammed al-Balawi but I don’t know if he is dead or not,” Shanara Fadel al-Balawi, 64, told AFP by telephone interview from her Amman home.
“He prayed and read the Koran but was never an extremist. He never shared extremist views.”
"But I will not let myself be reduced to silence.".
CAIRO (AP) — The Jordanian doctor who killed seven CIA employees in a suicide attack in Afghanistan said all jihadists must attack U.S. targets to revenge the killing of the Pakistani Taliban leader, according to a video that appeared posthumously Saturday on an Arabic news channel.
Humam Khalil Abu Mulal al-Balawi appeared next to the new leader of the Pakistani Taliban, Hakimullah Mehsoud, and explained how the “emigrants” — Muslim jihadists from abroad — were given shelter by the Pakistani Taliban and so should exact revenge for U.S. attacks.
In August, Baitullah Mehsoud, the supreme commander of the Pakistani Taliban was killed by a CIA missile strike.
“We will never forget the blood of our emir Baitullah Mehsoud, We will always demand revenge for him inside America and outside,” he said, addressing the “enemies of God” and Jordanian
VIDEO Alleged suicide bomber
"But I will not let myself be reduced to silence."