Jordan has hanged a jailed Iraqi militant whose release had been demanded by the Islamic State group before it burned a captured Jordanian pilot to death.
Responding to the killing of the pilot, whose death was announced on Tuesday, the Jordanian authorities also executed another senior al-Qaida prisoner sentenced to death for plots to wage attacks against the pro-western kingdom in the last decade.
Sajida al-Rishawi, the Iraqi female militant, was sentenced to death for her role in a 2005 suicide bomb attack that killed 60 people.
Ziyad Karboli, an Iraqi al-Qaida operative who had been convicted in 2008 for killing a Jordanian, was also executed at dawn.
The executions were confirmed by government spokesman Mohammed al-Momani.
The prisoners were executed in Swaqa prison, a large facility 70km (45 miles) south of the capital, Amman, just before dawn, a security source who was familiar with the case told Reuters. The executions of three other convicted terrorists were also scheduled for Wednesday.
Jordan, which has been mounting air raids in Syria as part of the alliance against Islamic State insurgents, had said it would deliver a “strong, earth-shaking and decisive” response to the killing of pilot Muadh al-Kasasbeh.
The fate of Kasasbeh – a member of a large tribe that forms the backbone of support for the country’s Hashemite monarchy – has gripped Jordan for weeks and some Jordanians have criticised King Abdullah for embroiling them in the US-led alliance that they say will provoke a militant backlash.
Some analysts believe Amman could now escalate its involvement in the campaign against Islamic State, which has seized large areas of Iraq and Syria, Jordan’s neighbours to the north and east. US officials told Reuters on Tuesday the killing of Kasasbeh would likely harden Jordan’s position as a member of the coalition against Islamic State.
The king cut short a visit to the US to return home following word of Kasasbeh’s death. In a televised statement he said the pilot’s killing was an act of “cowardly terror” by a deviant group that had no relation to Islam, urged Jordanians to unite, and said the militants were “criminals” who had distorted the Islamic faith.
Over the past week Jordan had offered to trade Rishawi for Kasasbeh but froze any swap after saying it had received no proof that the pilot was still alive.
Rishawi, in her mid-forties, was sentenced to death for her role in the 2005 suicide attack at a luxury hotel in Amman. She had planned to die in the attack – the worst in Jordan’s history – but her suicide bomb belt did not go off.
Scores of Jordanians, infuriated by Kasasbeh’s killing, gathered at midnight in a main square in Amman calling for revenge and her quick execution.
Holding placards showing images of the pilot, several youths chanted “Death, Death to Daesh,” using a pejorative Arabic acronym for Islamic State.
The killing of the pilot drew worldwide condemnation, including from US president Barack Obama and the UN security council.
Kasasbeh had fallen into the hands of the militants in December when his F-16 fighter plane crashed near Raqqa, Syria, the de facto capital of the Islamic State group’s self-styled caliphate. He is the only coalition pilot to be captured to date.
The killing of the 26-year-old appeared aimed at pressuring the government of Jordan, a close US ally, to leave the coalition that has carried out months of airstrikes targeting Islamic State positions in Syria and Iraq. But the extremists’ brutality against a fellow Muslim could backfire and galvanise other Sunni Muslims in the region against them.
Abdullah has portrayed the campaign against the extremists as a battle over values.
Obama hosted the king at the White House on Tuesday for a hastily arranged meeting, hours after a video emerged online purportedly showing Kasasbeh being burned to death by the militant group.
Abdullah, who was on a previously scheduled trip to Washington, arrived after nightfall and made no remarks to reporters as he and Obama sat side by side in the Oval Office.
In the meeting, Obama offered “his deepest condolences” to the king over the pilot’s death, the White House said. “The president and King Abdullah reaffirmed that the vile murder of this brave Jordanian will only serve to steel the international community’s resolve to destroy ISIL,” said White House spokesman Alistair Baskey, using an acronym for Islamic State.
Before his death, Kasasbeh was forced to reveal the names and workplaces of many fellow pilots in the Royal Jordanian Air Force. Their photographs appeared at the end of a 23-minute video depicting his death, along with an offer of a bounty of 100 gold dinars (roughly $20,000) for each pilot killed.
In the video, which was widely circulated on Tuesday night, Kasasbeh, was walked through the ruins of a building, which appeared to have been destroyed by an air strike. He was then seen in a cage at the same site, with a line of flames, ignited by an Isis militant, creeping towards the cage, then engulfing him.
Earlier in the video, Kasasbeh, dressed in an orange jumpsuit, gave an account of his bombing run over Syria, which ended with his F-16 fighter jet crashing just outside the Isis stronghold of Raqqa.
Officials in Amman said Kasasbeh was killed on 3 January, around three weeks before Isis had offered to trade Japanese journalist Kenji Goto for Rishawi, who was sentenced to death for a 2005 bombing campaign in central Amman.
The jihadis had not offered Kasasbeh for Rishawi, but had suggested that his life would be spared if she was handed over.
Jordanian officials baulked at the deal, despite the pleadings of Japanese leaders, insisting that Isis provide proof that he was still alive. As five tense days of discussions wore on, government officials increasingly hinted that Kasasbeh may have been killed and that the swap would not proceed.
Goto was beheaded, apparently a short time after a deadline of sunset last Thursday that was set by his captors for Rishawi to be delivered to them.
Kasasbeh was the only pilot to have been shot down so far in the six-month air campaign, which has dropped more than 1,800 bombs on the terror group, slowing its momentum but not yet denying the group’s strategic goal of consolidating its hold over a swath of land the size of Jordan stretching from the eastern edge of Aleppo to central Iraq.
Jordan had played a prominent, though low key, role in supporting rebels for opposition groups fighting Bashar al-Assad - a policy which was primarily aimed at stopping the insurgency from spreading to its territory.
It later signed up to the US-led air coalition, to fight Isis, which had splintered the original opposition in northern and eastern Syria and had attempted to transform the war into a regional and global sectarian conflict.
The Jordanian air force had been flying regular missions over Syria and Iraq before Kasasbeh was shot down over Raqqa on 24 December.
Isis has suffered an estimated 4,000 casualties, 1,400 of them in the border town of Kobani, which fell last week to Kurdish fighters after a four-month battle. The air coalition dropped on Kobani more than one third of all the ordinance it has used throughout the campaign and proved decisive in the fight, which was a major setback for Isis.
The militant group released an “interview” with the fighter pilot in their English language publication Dabiq magazine at the end of December. In the article the pilot is claimed to have ejected from his aircraft, landing in the Euphrates river, where he was then said to be captured by Isis militants.
With an estimated 25,000 battle hardened fighters, and tens of thousands more people who have joined the group out of fear or coercion, Isis poses a formidable threat to stability in the region and the nation state boundaries that were carved out of the ruins of the Ottoman Empire.
Jordan and Saudi Arabia are both considered illegitimate states by the group, which has pledged to topple their respective monarchies and export its draconian reading of Islamic tradition across the Arab world.
