Word: amman
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...last time Ashraf Daas and his new bride Nadia Alami saw their fathers alive was one of the happiest moments of their lives. They had just posed for wedding photos last Wednesday evening outside the Philadelphia ballroom of the Radisson SAS Hotel in the center of Amman, the capital of Jordan. Ashraf and Nadia were about to enter the ballroom, where 250 people waited to greet them. Mingling among the guests was a man who witnesses later said was in his 20s. A few minutes before 9 p.m., he detonated a suicide belt hidden under a jacket, turning the celebration...
They were not the only mourners burying their dead in Amman last week. At almost the exact time on Wednesday, another suicide bomber blew himself up in the lobby of the Grand Hyatt Hotel. A third bomber detonated just outside the entrance to a Days Inn; had he made it inside, he probably would have killed dozens of official visitors who were part of a delegation from China. The attacks left at least 57 people dead, making them the most devastating terrorist strikes in Jordan's history, and set off reverberations throughout the Middle East. Responsibility for the attacks...
While insurgent sources in Iraq told TIME they had no prior knowledge of the Amman attacks, the fact that al-Zarqawi would strike Jordan wasn't surprising. U.S. military officials have viewed Jordan as an inevitable target for al-Zarqawi in his effort to export jihad outside Iraq. Jordan's King Abdullah II has longstanding ties to the U.S. (he went to junior high at the Eaglebrook School in Massachusetts and prep school at Deerfield Academy) and has quietly supported the U.S. war effort, despite its deep unpopularity with the Jordanian public. Jordan is a staging ground for the private...
...also announced Friday that she would make another detour from her planned itinerary. On Monday, after meetings with Israeli Prime Minister Sharon and Palestinian leader Mahmoud Abbas, and a memorial service marking the tenth anniversary of the assassination of Israeli Prime Minister Yitzhak Rabin, Rice plans to stop in Amman, Jordan, to offer King Abdullah her condolences for Wednesday's suicide bombings, and also counter-terror assistance...
...Zarqawi had his sights on Jordan long before the Iraq war. Jordanian officials accuse him of directing the so-called Millennium Plot to hit tourist sites, including the Radisson Hotel in Amman, on New Year's Eve 1999. Last year, a Jordanian court sentenced Zarqawi to death for instigating the assassination of an American diplomat in 2002. In 2004, Jordanian officials said they foiled a chemical bomb attack directed by Zarqawi that could have killed up to 20,000 people; he is currently standing trial in absentia for the plot...