Homemade missiles miss U.S. ships at Jordan port

WASHINGTON – Militants fired at least three homemade rockets from a warehouse hideout in the Jordanian port of Aqaba on Friday, narrowly missing two U.S. Navy ships and killing a Jordanian soldier.

As Jordanian forces cordoned off the port and scoured the desert and surrounding hills for suspects, a group loyal to al-Qaida issued an Internet statement claiming responsibility for the attack.

“A group of our holy warriors targeted a gathering of military ships docking in Aqaba port and also in Eilat port” in neighboring Israel, said the statement from the Abdullah Azzam Brigades. “The warriors returned safe to their headquarters.” The authenticity of the statement could not be verified; previously the group has claimed responsibility for terrorist attacks in Egypt’s Sharm el Sheik resort that killed at least 64.

About 2,000 members of the 26th Marine Expeditionary Unit were aboard the two ships, the Kearsarge and the Ashland. They are part of the Kearsarge Expeditionary Strike Group, which was sent to the Middle East in March. Navy officials said group members were performing a naval exercise in cooperation with Jordanian troops at the time of the attack. The group left the port soon after the rocket strikes.

Jordanian sources said four non-Jordanian Arabs, including Iraqis and at least one Egyptian, had rented a commercial warehouse in an isolated industrial zone in Aqaba earlier this week. Local news reports indicated that a Syrian also was involved. They are suspected of making Katyusha rockets in the warehouse and launching them from the building.

If they meant to hit the two U.S. vessels, the rockets veered off their mark. One slammed into a warehouse used to store goods for the Jordanian military, leaving an 8-foot hole in its roof. A soldier standing guard was killed, and another Jordanian was wounded. Another rocket landed near a hospital.

A third rocket struck near the airport in the resort city of Eilat, where it smashed into the roof of a taxi without exploding. Eilat, a popular Israeli beach resort, is about nine miles from Aqaba.

The rockets were “intended to hit the Israeli side and the Jordanian side as well,” said Israeli Defense Minister Shaul Mofaz.

The Kearsarge, launched in 1992, is an amphibious assault vessel and the strike group’s command ship. The Ashland is a dock landing ship. The strike group also includes a cruiser, a guided missile destroyer, a fast-attack submarine and aircraft.

Friday’s attack revived memories of the bombing of the Navy destroyer Cole in October 2000 off the coast of Yemen that killed 17 U.S. sailors.

The Cole attack alarmed Navy officials and led to sweeping security changes. Since then the Naval Criminal Investigative Service has hired at least 200 additional special agents, a senior NCIS official at the Pentagon said, on condition of anonymity.

Criminal investigators must now deliver threat assessment reports to ship commanders about two weeks ahead of any port visit, and are present at all ports deemed “high threat” zones, including all of those in the Middle East, the official said. The additional manpower and closer cooperation with allies such as Jordan has helped thwart attacks, he said.

Navy officials declined to address the specific protections taken by the ships at Aqaba, or the general security of that port, but it is routinely used to supply the U.S. war effort in neighboring Iraq.

President Bush, vacationing at his ranch in Crawford, Texas, was told about the attack as part of his regular briefings Friday, White House spokesman Trent Duffy said.

“We strongly condemn all attacks like these and are investigating in cooperation with Jordanian officials,” Duffy said.

In recent years, as the Iraq war raged to the east and the Israeli-Palestinian conflict ground along to the west, Jordan has often seemed like an oasis of stability.

But analysts have long warned that Jordan’s placid surface belies a more turbulent reality. The country has been roiled by the Palestinian uprising that began in September 2000 and the U.S.-led invasion of Iraq in 2003, analysts say. In Jordan, homeland of Iraqi insurgent leader Abu Musab Zarqawi and radical Islamist theorists such as Karim al Maqdisi, polls show heavy opposition to U.S. foreign policy.

The regional strife has complicated domestic politics for Jordan’s King Abdullah II, who has risked angering his people with his tight alliance with the United States and ties to Israel.

“An attack on Jordanian territory or from Jordanian territory was always a matter of time, despite the fact that Jordanian security agents are omnipotent and have a pervasive presence in society,” said Joost Hiltermann, an analyst with the International Crisis Group based in Amman, Jordan’s capital. “Sooner or later, somebody will get through as they did today.”

Hassan abu Nameh, a former Jordanian ambassador to the United Nations, said U.S. policy has destabilized the entire region, and contributed to a rise in Islamist violence.

“Unfortunately, the so-called war on terror is creating more terror and making everyone unsafe,” Abu Nameh said. “It’s all linked, and there’s a lot of frustration building up. Unless the whole political climate is improved, we must be prepared to see violence spread, and it has been spreading.”

The group that claimed responsibility for Friday’s rocket attacks, the Abdullah Azzam Brigades, has posted statements claiming credit for last year’s car bombing in the Egyptian resort of Taba, and the July bombings at Sharm el Sheik, another Egyptian town, in which at least 64 people died.