Jordanian fighter jets yesterday flew over the hometown of a pilot killed by Islamic State militants after ending a mission against militants in Syria, a security official said.
Jordan’s King Abdullah was visiting the pilot’s family at the time of the flyover.
The show of force came two days after the Islamic State, formerly known as the Islamic State of Iraq and the Levant, released a video showing a captured Jordanian pilot being burned alive in a cage.
Photo: AFP
State television had earlier said the fighter jets had completed a mission, without giving the location of their sortie.
However, a security official confirmed to reporters that the mission was in a location in Syria under Islamic State control and Arabiya TV said it was over Raqqa, the group’s de facto capital, in Syria.
The jets “rocked the cowardly terrorists in their holes and hideouts since the morning,” Jordanian Minister of Foreign Affairs Nasser Judeh said on Twitter.
Jordan’s military, which is part of the US-led coalition against the group, has vowed to avenge the killing of 26-year-old pilot Mouath al-Kasaesbeh.
State television showed a somber Abdullah sitting alongside the army chief of staff and senior officials visiting the Kasaesbeh tribal family in Aya, a village near Karak, 100km south of the capital.
The king pointed at the planes as he sat next to the pilot’s father.
Thousands of Jordanians flocked to pay their respects in traditional Arab Bedouin style in a part of the country where influential tribes form an important pillar of the Hashemite rule, supplying the army and security forces with its personnel.
“You are a wise monarch. These criminals violated the rules of war in Islam and they have no humanity. Even humanity disowns them,” Safi Kasaesbeh, the father of the pilot, told the king.
The king had earlier vowed to wage a “harsh” war against the militants, who control parts of Syria and Iraq, because “this terrorist organization is not only fighting us, but also fighting Islam and its pure values.’’
In a statement on Wednesday, he pledged to hit the militants “hard in the very center of their strongholds.”
Mouath al-Kasaesbeh was captured on Dec. 24 last year when his jet crashed over northern Syria on a mission that was part of the coalition air campaign against the Muslim militants.
In a show of support for the king’s decision to continue the strikes, more than 2,000 Jordanians from across the country gathered at a sit-in in Amman, waving flags and pictures of the dead pilot.
“This is our war more than before” and “Moath’s death made us stronger,” some of the banners read.
“After this barbarism, Jordan is directly threatened and we want our army to do its best to take revenge,” said Mohammad Judeh, a retired military officer. “We want our country to have a clear position that it is in an open war against” the Islamic State.
Additional reporting by AP and Bloomberg
AGING: As of last month, people aged 65 or older accounted for 20.06 percent of the total population and the number of couples who got married fell by 18,685 from 2024 Taiwan has surpassed South Korea as the country least willing to have children, with an annual crude birthrate of 4.62 per 1,000 people, Ministry of the Interior data showed yesterday. The nation was previously ranked the second-lowest country in terms of total fertility rate, or the average number of children a woman has in her lifetime. However, South Korea’s fertility rate began to recover from 2023, with total fertility rate rising from 0.72 and estimated to reach 0.82 to 0.85 by last year, and the crude birthrate projected at 6.7 per 1,000 people. Japan’s crude birthrate was projected to fall below six,
Conflict with Taiwan could leave China with “massive economic disruption, catastrophic military losses, significant social unrest, and devastating sanctions,” a US think tank said in a report released on Monday. The German Marshall Fund released a report titled If China Attacks Taiwan: The Consequences for China of “Minor Conflict” and “Major War” Scenarios. The report details the “massive” economic, military, social and international costs to China in the event of a minor conflict or major war with Taiwan, estimating that the Chinese People’s Liberation Army (PLA) could sustain losses of more than half of its active-duty ground forces, including 100,000 troops. Understanding Chinese
SELF-DEFENSE: Tokyo has accelerated its spending goal and its defense minister said the nation needs to discuss whether it should develop nuclear-powered submarines China is ramping up objections to what it sees as Japan’s desire to acquire nuclear weapons, despite Tokyo’s longstanding renunciation of such arms, deepening another fissure in the two neighbors’ increasingly tense ties. In what appears to be a concerted effort, China’s foreign and defense ministries issued statements on Thursday condemning alleged remilitarism efforts by Tokyo. The remarks came as two of the country’s top think tanks jointly issued a 29-page report framing actions by “right-wing forces” in Japan as posing a “serious threat” to world peace. While that report did not define “right-wing forces,” the Chinese Ministry of Foreign Affairs was
US President Donald Trump in an interview with the New York Times published on Thursday said that “it’s up to” Chinese President Xi Jinping (習近平) what China does on Taiwan, but that he would be “very unhappy” with a change in the “status quo.” “He [Xi] considers it to be a part of China, and that’s up to him what he’s going to be doing, but I’ve expressed to him that I would be very unhappy if he did that, and I don’t think he’ll do that. I hope he doesn’t do that,” Trump said. Trump made the comments in the context
RSS