Jordanian Salafi cleric: We planned attack in Israel

A Jordanian Salafist-jihadist cleric with ties to al-Qaida said on Saturday that jihadists from his country had planned to carry out a suicide attack in Israel.

Abu Muhammad al-Tahawi said that Jordanian Salafist-jihadists had wanted to carry out an attack but the plan had failed.

However, Tahawi said that Jordanian Salafists were “getting closer to Palestine via Jordan, Syria and Lebanon,” according to a report on Jordan’s Albawaba news website on Sunday.

“Our Palestinian brothers who are now in Aleppo [Syria] will then go to Israel to fight there,” he said, speaking at a funeral ceremony for a Salafist killed fighting against President Bashar Assad’s forces in Deraa, Syria. “Jihad requires patience.”

Tahawi’s remarks come after the Jordanian Salafist jihadist movement said that to date it has sent 250 fighters to Syria to join the fight against Assad, the Arabic-language Jordan Zad news site reported on Sunday.

According to the report, a source within the movement said that some of the Jordanian Salafists have assumed leading roles around Damascus, Aleppo, Deraa and Idlib.

According to the Long War Journal, an American news website, many foreign jihadists including from Egypt and Jordan are fighting in Syria in the al-Qaida-linked Jabhat al- Nusra terrorist group, which has carried out several suicide bombings at government and military installations. Jabhat al-Nusra is active across all Sunni areas of Syria, and has carried out most of its attacks in Damascus, according to Foreign Policy magazine.

In May, Tahawi published a written statement in support of Jabhat al-Nusra, calling on Muslims to go and fight in Syria against Assad.

In his statement, Tahawi praised suicide bombing attacks in Syria and elsewhere, saying that the “people who wrapped explosive belts around themselves” in Iraq and Afghanistan helped defeat the US, and that suicide bombers would also expel Israel and the US from Muslim lands in the Levant.

Last week, the Jordanian authorities arrested two Salafists, Zayed Sweiti and Firas Khalailah, as they returned to Jordan from Syria.

Both men are Jordanian cousins of Abu Musab al-Zarqawi, who founded al-Qaida in Iraq.

Jordan has an estimated 5,000 Salafist Jihadist supporters, according to United Press International.