Al-Qaida bomber of Afghanistan CIA calls for Jihad on Jordan

An al-Qaida double agent that killed seven CIA operatives and a Jordanian spy called for jihad in Jordan and attacks on its intelligence agency in a new video message posted on extremist Web sites Sunday.

The Jordanian national attacked a U.S. military base in Afghanistan last December, killing 7 CIA agent as well as a Jordanian intelligence officer.

Humam Khalil Abu Mulal al-Balawi also described Sunday in the 43-minute video his recruitment by Jordanian intelligence and how he double crossed them after they sent him to Afghanistan to spy on Al-Qaida.

The video was apparently filmed shortly before the 32-year-old al-Balawi blew himself up at a CIA facility on Dec. 30 in Afghanistan's eastern province of Khost where he'd been invited to reveal information on Al-Qaida.

Al-Balawi said he had only expected to kill his Jordanian handler, Ali bin Zeid, but the addition of the CIA members was a windfall.

"We planned for something but got a bigger gift, a gift from Allah, who brought us, through His accompaniment, a valuable prey: Americans, and from the CIA. That's when I became certain that the best way to teach Jordanian intelligence and the CIA a lesson is with the martyrdom belt," he said in the video.

The Arabic-language video came with an English transcript and a second version dubbed into English, part of the extremist group's continued outreach to non-Arabic speaking jihadists, such as in Pakistan.

Al-Balawi, who appeared in a military fatigues cradling an assault rifle and what appears to be C4 explosives, described the successes of Jordanian intelligence against extremists over the years and their close working relationship with the CIA.

He said Jordan had provided information for the killing of Al-Qaida in Iraq chief Abu Musab al-Zarqawi in 2006 as well as that of top Hezbollah commander Imad Mughniyeh, who died in a car bomb in Damascus in 2008.

"The Jordanian intelligence apparatus has a record which emboldens them to such behavior, but with Allah's permission, after this operation, they will never stand on their feet again," he said.

Late last year the London-based Arabic daily Al-Quds Al-Arabi quotes relatives of Balawi as saying that the militant had been furious over Israel's Gaza offensive.

The report quotes the brother of Humam Khalil Abu-Mulal al-Balawi as saying that his brother, a physician, had even made numerous attempts to join Jordan's doctor's association as way of reaching the Gaza Strip and aiding the local population.

The attack was carried out by a Jordanian, Humam Khalil Abu-Mulal al-Balawi, who had been recruited by the CIA as a counterterrorism intelligence source.

Al- Balawi's brother added that his brother had notified their family that he intended to travel to Turkey to meet up with his wife, but she said he never arrived.

"We thought that he was in Gaza the whole time," the brother told Al-Quds Al-Arabi.

He added that the family received an anonymous phone call in which they were told that Al- Balawi had perpetrated the Afghanistan attack.

Family members said that Jordan security forces had sealed off the area of Amman in which they live, blocking media representatives from entering.

Family members said Balawi, a doctor, was a member of a large Bedouin Palestinian clan that settled in Zarqa, a hotbed of Islamic radicalism in Jordan where many dispossessed Palestinians moved after Israel's creation in 1948. He ran a clinic in an impoverished refugee camp, they said.

Also in December, the Al-Qaida terror network said that the attack was in retribution for the deaths of several Pakistani Taliban leaders last year.

According to a statement posted on Islamist websites, the attack avenged the deaths of Baitullah Mehsud, the Pakistani Taliban leader killed by a US missile strike in August, as well as the deaths of Abi Saleh el-Somali and Abdullah el-Libi.

The two other Taliban commanders were killed in a drone attack in Pakistan's North Waziristan region in December.

Al-Qaida immediately claimed responsibility for the December 30 blast at a U.S. base in Khost, south-eastern Afghanistan.