Our Last Best Chance_ The Pursuit of Peace in a Time of Peril - King Abdullah II [122]
Around five o’clock in the afternoon I was relaxing with my wife and young children on deck, enjoying the beautiful scenery, when a call came from Amman. I went belowdecks to the communications center and picked up the telephone. On the other end was the head of intelligence. “We have received reports that a group of Al Qaeda assassins are planning to attack your boat when you arrive in Santorini,” he said. “You have to turn around immediately.”
He told me that the terrorists intended to strike our yacht with rocket-propelled grenades, and said they might be planning a suicide attack, which would involve drawing up alongside the yacht and blowing up their boat to destroy the one carrying me and my family. (This technique was used some four months later, on October 12, when suicide bombers attacked the destroyer USS Cole in the port of Aden, in Yemen, killing seventeen sailors.)
As a husband and father, I was furious that these terrorists had threatened my family. Although my first instinct was to fight back, I agreed with my brother Ali that it would be wisest to turn the boat around and get out of there as quickly as possible.
We did not want to cause a panic onboard, so we had to come up with a good reason for the sudden change of plan. As Rania was pregnant, we told the crew that she was having complications and that we would have to cancel the cruise and return to Rhodes. We alerted the airport, and our plane was waiting on the tarmac when we reached the harbor. Once we were airborne, I called the head of intelligence and told him to inform the Greek security services of what he knew. We never found out how Al Qaeda discovered I was in Greece; our best guess was that a local informant had passed on intelligence. Because of Jordan’s moderation and its active role in pursuing regional peace and promoting a culture of tolerance among members of different civilizations and faiths, I was viewed by Al Qaeda as a threat.
By this time we had been fighting Al Qaeda for several years, working with our allies to stop their plots across the region, and this may have led to their plot to kill me. It was not personal; they were trying to strike at a larger target. The Hashemite lineage has always commanded respect across the Arab and Muslim world, but our traditional moderation, coupled with our openness to the West, has often made us a target of extremists. By killing me they hoped to kill ninety years of Hashemite rule in Jordan, and more than a thousand years of leadership in Arabia. Part of Al Qaeda’s agenda is to overthrow all Arab regimes and replace them with its fanatic and unorthodox vision of government.
The seeds of Al Qaeda’s violent radicalism were planted in the region in the turbulent year of 1979, when three events took place that would echo through the decades. In January the shah of Iran fled the developing revolution and was replaced by Ayatollah Khomeini, who gave birth to the Islamic Republic of Iran. Iran’s Islamic Revolution inspired and energized radicals throughout the region. Then, on November 20, several hundred radicals seized control of the Grand Mosque in Mecca. The capture of Islam’s most holy site by a group of armed extremists stunned the Muslim world. Their leader, a Saudi named Juhayman al-Otaibi, claimed that the Saudi government was corrupt and un-Islamic, and that the Mahdi, a foretold and awaited Islamic leader and descendant of the Prophet Mohammad, had returned to take over the country. The rebels were eventually driven from the mosque and Juhayman and many of his coconspirators were publicly beheaded. The rebellion was over. But its implications lingered on.
One radical Islamist inspired by Juhayman’s actions was the Palestinian Isam Muhammad Taher Barqawi, better known