AMMAN // The ISIL extremist group claimed responsibility on Monday for one of the deadliest attacks in Jordan in years, posting a video online that it said showed a car bomb exploding near a Jordanian border post.
Last week's suicide attack on the Syrian border killed seven Jordanian security forces, wounded 13 and exposed the pro-western kingdom's vulnerability to attacks by the militants who control large areas of neighbouring Syria and Iraq.
Jordan has vowed a harsh response.
After the June 21 attack, it sealed the border, cutting off tens of thousands of Syrian refugees stranded in the area from international aid delivery. Aid officials have said no food and little water have reached two border tent camps, known as Ruqban and Hadalat, since last week.
The purported attack video shows a vehicle kicking up dust as it speeds across flat desert toward what appears to be the Jordanian base. An orange ball of fire rises in the air, followed by a cloud of thick black smoke and the sound of an explosion. The video was posted Monday on the Facebook page of the ISIL news agency Amaq.
The website Hala Akhbar, affiliated with the Jordanian military, said: "Jordanians need to know they are being targeted by these dark criminals, and the means used by this terrorist organisation show its criminality and brutality."
“It will not affect Jordan’s determination to eliminate it,” it said.
“The fate of this gang is either Jordanian jail or being killed,” the website also said.
The border attack came less than three weeks after an assailant killed five people in a shooting attack on a local branch of the Jordanian intelligence agency in a Palestinian refugee camp.
Jordanian analyst Saad Hattar said the two attacks laid bare Jordan’s vulnerability.
They “constitute a wake-up call to the government to stand up and not to underestimate the threat of this dangerous organisation”, he said.
A precursor of ISIL, the Al Qaeda terror network, carried out the last previous major attack on Jordanian soil — a triple hotel bombing in the capital Amman in 2005 that killed 60 people and wounded dozens.
* Associated Press
