Pilot slain, Jordan executes 2
Revenge is cry for fiery, caged death
AMMAN, Jordan — Jordan executed two al-Qaida prisoners before dawn today, a government spokesman said, hours after Islamic State militants released a video purportedly showing a captured Jordanian pilot being burned alive in a cage.
Jordan’s military confirmed the death of Lt. Muath al-Kaseasbeh, who was captured by the extremists in December when his F-16 crashed while on a mission as part of the U.S.led air campaign against the Islamic State extremist group. The government on Tuesday vowed a swift and lethal response.
“Our punishment and revenge will be as huge as the loss of the Jordanians,” said Mamdouh al-Ameri, a spokesman for the armed forces.
The Jordanian military issued a statement Tuesday saying the pilot was killed a month earlier — on Jan. 3 — without detailing how it determined the timing. In the past week, the militants had not responded to demands by Jordanian authorities to deliver proof the airman was alive so a prisoner swap could be made.
The killing of the 26-year-old pilot appeared aimed at pressuring the government of Jordan — a close U.S. ally — to leave the coalition that has car-
ried out months of airstrikes targeting Islamic State positions in Syria and Iraq.
Government spokesman Mohammed al-Momani identified the two prisoners executed by hanging early today as Sajida al-Rishawi and Ziad al-Karbouly.
Over the past week, Jordan had offered to trade al-Rishawi, a failed suicide bomber, for al-Kaseasbeh but froze any swap after saying it had received no proof that the pilot was still alive.
Al-Rishawi had been sentenced to death for her 2005 role in a triple hotel bombing in Amman that killed 60 people. Al-Karbouly was sent to death row in 2008 for plotting terror attacks on Jordanians in Iraq.
Al-Rishawi, an Iraqi, has close family ties to the Iraqi branch of al-Qaida, a precursor of the Islamic State.
The killing of the pilot angered Jordanians and drew worldwide condemnation.
Hours before the release of the video, Secretary of State John Kerry met with Jordan’s King Abdullah II and the country’s foreign minister, Nasser Judeh, as part of a visit to sign a deal for further U.S. aid to Jordan.
Abdullah, who has portrayed the campaign against the extremists as a battle over values, added a stop Tuesday at the White House to speak with President Barack Obama. The monarch broadcast a speech on Jordanian TV on Tuesday evening, confirming the pilot’s death “with sorrow and anger,” and urging his countrymen to unite.
“It’s the duty of all of us to stand united and show the real values of Jordanians in the face of these hardships,” Abdullah said. The official Petra news agency said he would be cutting short his Washington trip.
Obama said the Islamic State’s video, if authentic, showed “the viciousness and barbarity of this organization.”
“And it, I think, will redouble the vigilance and determination on the part of a global coalition to make sure that they are degraded and ultimately defeated,” he said during an event at the White House.
U.S. officials said Tuesday that Washington will expand its financial aid to Jordan from $660 million per year over the past five years to $1 billion per year over the next three, in part to combat the Islamic State.
Obama and Abdullah agreed in December to renew their memorandum of understanding for assistance for Jordan, State Department officials said, but the terms of the deal were not released until Tuesday.
Al-Momani made clear that the hostage crisis would not prompt Jordan to leave the coalition fighting the Islamic State.
“We now all know in Jordan, beyond any doubt, how barbaric ISIS is,” al-Momani said, using an acronym for the Islamic State. “Whoever doubted the unity of Jordan will now be proved wrong. Whoever doubts Jordan’s stern and lethal response will be proved wrong.”
Al-Kaseasbeh is the only coalition pilot to be captured to date. But on Tuesday, U.S. officials said the United Arab Emirates — another crucial Arab ally in the coalition — suspended airstrikes against the Sunni extremist group in December, citing fears for its pilots’ safety.
The United Arab Emirates is demanding that the Pentagon improve its search-andrescue efforts, including the use of V-22 Osprey tilt-rotor aircraft, in northern Iraq, closer to the battleground, instead of basing the missions in Kuwait, administration officials said.
The country’s pilots will not rejoin the fight until the Ospreys, which can take off and land like helicopters but fly like planes, are put in place in northern Iraq.
The Emirates notified U.S. Central Command that they were suspending flights, administration officials said, after al-Kaseasbeh was captured. A senior U.S. military official said Islamic State militants “grabbed” al-Kaseasbeh “within just a few minutes.” He added: “There was no time for us to engage.”
But Emirates officials questioned the U.S. military about whether rescue teams would have been able to reach al-Kaseasbeh even if there had been more time to do so, administration officials said.
The exchange followed a month of disputes between U.S. military officials and their counterparts in the Emirates, who have also expressed concern that the U.S. has allowed Iran to play a growing role in the fight against the Islamic State.
A spokesman with Central Command declined to comment.
‘WE WILL AVENGE’
In Amman, dozens of people chanting slogans against the Islamic State marched Tuesday toward the Jordanian royal palace to express their anger over al-Kaseasbeh’s killing.
Waving a Jordanian flag, they chanted, “Damn you, Daesh!” and “We will avenge, we will avenge our son’s blood.”
The Islamic State group is known variously by the acronyms ISIL, ISIS and, in Arabic, Daesh.
The 20-minute video purportedly showing the pilot’s killing was released on militant websites and bore the logo of the extremist group’s al-Furqan media service. The clip featured the slick production and graphics used in previous Islamic State videos.
The video shows media footage of Jordan’s involvement in the U.S.-led coalition against the Islamic State. Then the pilot is seen, showing signs of having been beaten, including a black eye. Toward the end of the video, he is shown in an outdoor cage as a masked militant ignites a line of fuel leading to it.
The pilot is engulfed in flames. He is shown collapsing to his knees then falling backward.
The video, which could not immediately be confirmed independently by The Associated Press, threatened other Jordanian pilots by name.
It emerged three days after Japanese journalist Kenji Goto was purportedly beheaded by the militants. The fate of the journalist and the pilot had been linked by their captors.
Al-Kaseasbeh is from a tribal area in southern Jordan’s Karak district. The tribes are considered a mainstay of support for the monarchy, but the pilot’s capture has strained that relationship.
Members of the pilot’s family have repeatedly accused the government of botching efforts to win his release and have criticized Jordan’s participation in the anti-Islamic State alliance.
In Amman, family members gathering at a tribal meeting place wept when receiving word of his death. His father, Safi Yousef al-Kaseasbeh, was seen being led from the session.
Late Tuesday, as word spread of Muath al-Kaseasbeh’s death, protesters marched in his home village of Ai and set a local government office on fire. Witnesses said the atmosphere was tense and that riot police were patrolling the streets.
The Islamic State, a mostly Sunni group which controls about a third of Syria and neighboring Iraq, has released a series of gruesome videos showing the killing of captives, including two American journalists, an American aid worker and two British aid workers. Tuesday’s was the first to show a captive being burned alive.
Members of the United Nations Security Council condemned the killing of the pilot, saying it demonstrated “the brutality of ISIL, which is responsible for thousands of crimes and abuses against people from all faiths, ethnicities and nationalities, and without regard to any basic value of humanity.”
David Phillips, a former State Department adviser on the Middle East, said he believes the pilot’s killing could backfire, antagonizing fellow Sunnis against the extremists, including Sunni tribes in Iraq.
“They need to have a welcome from Sunni Arabs in Anbar province [in Iraq] to maintain their operations,” said Phillips, director of the Program on Peace-building and Human Rights at Columbia University.
He said the extremist group’s recent military setbacks may have fueled the killings.
“They need to compensate for that with increasingly gruesome killings of prisoners,” he said.
Experts are divided over whether Jordan faces a greater threat from extremists outside its borders or from those within.
In recent months, there have been signs of greater support for the Islamic State’s ideas among Jordan’s young and poor. Last year, the government intensified a crackdown on Islamic State sympathizers and the al-Qaida branch in Syria.